9 - 11 October 2019
Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Delmenhorst

University of Oldenburg in co-operation with the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) Delmenhorst

For 13 years, we have been exploring different paths and observing musical processes in the symposia organised in between. We have repeatedly discovered new contexts in which Romanian music crystallises models and methods for understanding and defining sound phenomena between times and between musical worlds.

The more one tries to decipher the complexity of a musical language, the more one needs to look back to the original sources of its creation. The cultural history of music in the East was cut off from the music of the world for decades during the communist era. There were nuances ranging from total isolation (Albania) to more permeable regions (parts of the USSR, Poland, Hungary). Despite the marks, strategies were cultivated with which the fascination of the foreign and the unauthorised could penetrate these differently permeable walls. Composing in the East was controlled, but the way of thinking, the desire to connect to the universal, could not be prevented. Despite strict and persistent prohibitions, new compositional techniques were utilised: Serialism, dodecaphony as well as composing with extended playing techniques and methods etc. In subtle harmony with the music of the world, trends from the Western European West and the Far East were recognised.
For the 14th ZwischenZeiten Symposium we look back to the origin of music in general: the melody. In the search for organisational principles, works (different epochs and styles) will be analysed with regard to the interplay between organisation and inspiration as well as comprehensible decisions on how to deal with a definable material. In the process, visible and audible correspondences with the original sources of traditional music and Orthodox liturgy in Romania or with traditions of other musical cultures come to light. From the perspective of music psychology, this offers approaches for analysing the interplay between conscious and unconscious processes. Active communication with living composers offers an important starting point in our search for answers to these questions.
Finally, this approach offers the possibility of extending the field of investigation to the natural manifestations of the multidimensionality of a melody, which are based on fluctuating contours and are specific to different musical cultures.