20.10. - 22.10.2017

Romanian music in context

Under the title Romanian Music in Context, the musicologists at this year's conference will address questions of intercultural exchange. This posed great challenges for composers, especially during the period of political separation between worlds. On the one hand, there was a political control authority that operated to varying degrees in different countries of the Eastern Bloc (from a total ban to relative freedom in countries without common borders with the USSR). On the other hand, artists wanted the opportunity to harmonise with the musical world of the West. For decades, they lived between Scylla and Charybdis. Some found creative processes from which musical signatures emerged. These signatures are characterised by a strong connection to their own musical sources on the one hand (Byzantine music, traditional music, classical music) and the use of contemporary compositional methods and even cross-border techniques on the other.

By deepening the understanding of such thought processes, which can also be achieved through comparative analyses, research methods and observation models emerge with which today's musical phenomena can also be assessed. Political boundaries are replaced by other types of boundaries, which may not be so obvious, but which could be no less effective on closer inspection. Defining one's own musical language is more important today than ever before and presents artists with major challenges. The analyses and investigations are intended to develop criteria with which such processes can be described and interpreted. Among other things, aspects of craftsmanship, the handling of the material used and the connection with different musical and non-musical sources will be analysed.