[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Iancu Dumitrescu: Monades (Gamma) for 6 monochords, crystals, and metallic objects
From the album Edition Modern 1002 (1991)
As a young composer in Romania in the 1960s, Iancu Dumitrescu heard the distant siren-call of the European avant-garde: “The music of Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Messiaen, Berio, circulated clandestinely, being prohibited, from one hand to another, by copies of tapes which had become almost unlistenable. But imagination continues to hear what, in fact, did not exist any more. The spirit of modernism, of new worlds being beyond these deformed sounds, raucous, grating…”
In the 1970s, Dumitrescu studied with the the brilliant and eccentric conductor Sergiu Celibidache, whose metaphysically-tinged musical philosophy, fed by such diverse intellectual sources as phenomenology and Zen Buddhism, had a powerful influence on the young composer. Dumitrescu would later refer to Celibidache as his “spiritual father.”
Dumitrescu’s mature compositional work has been tightly organized around two institutions: the Hyperion Ensemble, which he founded in 1976 with his wife, the composer Ana-Maria Avram, and the record label Edition Modern, started in 1990, on which many of Dumitrecu’s and Avram’s recordings have been released.
While his music can be broadly grouped with the spectralist movement, Dumitrescu distances his work from that of the French spectralists (Grisey, Murail, Dufourt). He views his music as an attempt, through modern techniques, to reanimate the primal Orphic power of music:
My approach implies many ancestral, primitive sources. All that is archaic, elementary, magic, today finds the value of an acute modernism… What remains [beyond logic] is the field of the mystic. I believe that music has an enormous proportion of this mysterious remainder. It would not have any value if it were different. Its value lies only in the fact of bringing to consciousness something not otherwise able to be thought. It brings nuances to us, modulations of thought which do not have an equivalent.
Played 72 time(s).
February 09, 2011, 11:25am
