Work programme of the 11th ZwischenZeiten Symposium 28 to 30 October 2016,

Delmenhorst Carl von Ossietzky University/Institute of Music in co-operation with the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Delmenhorst (HWK);

Organisers: Violeta Dinescu and Roberto Reale

Conversation concert with works by Aurel Stroe:

Sonata nr. 2 pentru pian, Deux épitaphes. Verse: Ion Caraion (d'après Ezra Pound), Cântec din fluier (1977) 3ème Sonate pour piano (en palimpseste): Scherzando, Colinda (1947), Hommage à Pierre de la Rue (Canon) quasi Colinda (1957), Colinda (1947, rev. 1991), Allegro con gioia (développement sur deux accords et un cluster) Sorin Petrescu, piano

The tragic dimension in the music of Aurel Stroe - Exposé

Since 2006, the symposia "ZwischenZeiten", organised by the Institute of Music at the University of Oldenburg in co-operation with the BKGE (Bundesinstitut für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen in Osteuropa) and the HWK (Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Delmenhorst), have provided a forum for musicians and academics from Central and South Eastern Europe to meet and discuss issues of intercultural exchange. The music of Romania has mostly taken centre stage, as it combines ancient traditions from the Balkans and the Middle East with new compositional approaches. The reception of this extraordinarily complex music in Central and Western Europe is another central theme of these symposia, as the relevance of autochthonous compositional patterns gains particular significance in the self-reflection of compositional means in musical postmodernism.

The conference planned for November 2016 will focus on the work of Aurel Stroe, who was born in Bucharest in 1932, took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses in the 1960s and gained experience with electro-acoustic, electronic and computer music in the USA. He moved to Mannheim in 1985, but was one of the first to push for an opening up of the music culture of his home country after the "fall of communism". Stroe died in Mannheim in 2008.

Stroe was primarily interested in conveying thoughts and thought processes through his music. He was not interested in expressing emotions, which does not mean that music composed in this way cannot still evoke strong emotions. As early as the 1970s, he developed a system that he called 'clase de compozitie' (composition classes), which he used to determine and control the process of composing. In these procedures, he integrated non-musical influences that he had gained through his involvement with various sciences, in particular the theories of thermodynamics and dissipative structures by Ilya Prigogine as well as the theories of the mathematicians René Thom (catastrophe theory) and Alexander Grothendieck (topology). He also worked intensively with Parmenides and Martin Heidegger.

In works by Beethoven, Mahler, Bruckner, Berg, Cage and Kagel, Stroe discovered the aspect of irreversible transformation processes that are relevant to the shape of musical structures on both the micro and macro levels and cannot be explained by conventional methods of music analysis. Stroe proposed the term morphogenetic music for works that can be analysed in this way, about which he said the following: "nu se mai ştie cu precizie ce este frumos şi ce este urât, ce este sau nu bine echilibrat, ce este unitar şi ce este disparat, ce sună adecvat şi ce sună fals" (One no longer knows exactly what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is well balanced or unbalanced, what is uniform and what is inconsistent, what sounds appropriate and what sounds wrong.)

It was this approach that led Stroe to his "composition classes", in which he integrated thought processes that went beyond music.

These biographical parameters alone indicate that Stroe saw himself as a mediator of the most diverse musical cultures - an approach that is also reflected in his compositions. Orestia - Trilogie der geschlossenen Festung (1973-1988, libretto after Aeschylus), which can be regarded as his main compositional work, is exemplary of this attitude. It consists of the parts Agamemnon/Orestia I (1973), Choephoren/Orestia II (1983) and Die Eumeniden / Orestia III (1988). In this work, Stroe simultaneously uses different intonation systems that are incompatible. Stroe speaks of an "incommensurability" in which the tragic dimension in the music crystallises. The moment of the "tragic" that characterises this work is symptomatic of Stroe's oeuvre and will form the starting point for reflection in this symposium. The precise analysis of selected compositions will be at the centre, but a music-theoretical approach is only the prerequisite for a multi-perspective interpretation in terms of aesthetics, cultural history and the history of ideas. The aim is a "dense description" of Stroe's music, also against the background of Romania's contemporary historical situation and the country's cultural traditions.

The complexity of Stroe's music requires a transdisciplinary approach. Therefore, not only musicologists and cultural scientists are invited to the symposium, but also representatives of philosophy, theology, contemporary history and Romance studies.

As in the symposia of previous years, it should once again become clear how music is able to show ways and possibilities of rapprochement and communication and thus become an indicator of social processes.

This conference will focus on the music of Stroe, but it will also enable a further attempt to "decipher" musical thought in Romania at a time when communication between musical cultures was hampered or prevented by political obstacles. As in other parts of Europe, Stroe and his colleagues (Myriam Marbe, Ştefan Niculescu, Tiberiu Olah and Pascal Bentoiu) tried to find new compositional strategies and developed their own methods at that time. Identifying similarities and contrasts between musical works in different contexts is a task that we set ourselves in our ZwischenZeiten symposia. Defining a meaningful method for this can make it possible to describe, name and interpret musical phenomena in Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries (non-European perspectives are not excluded) with hindsight and foresight.

You can find the programmehere.