Authors

Ana Diaconu¹;  ¹ National University of Music Bucharest, Romania

Discussion

While researching several archives for my PhD thesis, I retraced the short Romanian careers of several composers born between 1935 and 1945, who settled in France in the early 1970s. Some of the first names I focused on were Mihai Mitrea-Celarianu, Costin Miereanu, and Horațiu Rădulescu. I gathered data about their studies at the Bucharest Conservatory, about recordings and public radio broadcasts, and I discovered the most revealing information pursuing the thread of the entries about the composers in the minutes of the Symphonic and Chamber Music Section’s Bureau of the Union of Composers. The debate on aleatorism and experimentalism in composition that took off at the Union in 1970, following the analysis of a work by Costin Miereanu, which had powerful echoes in Bucharest musical life, is representative. The constant struggles not only with conservative artistic visions, but also with the communist persecution that targeted “unhealthy family origins”, together with the changing attitudes in the press, offer us a starting reflection point on the mentality of Romanian musicians in the 1960s and 1970s: stages of openness to the new coinciding with the cultural liberalisation at the beginning of the Ceaușescu regime are interspersed with discourses in favour of conservative musical language. This paper aims to present some realities of a professional path that preceded the decision of an avant-garde generation of musicians to redirect towards the French musical landscape.