CREATING THE ROMANIAN NATIONAL MUSICAL STYLE – A PROBLEM OF MUSICAL OR NATIONAL IDENTITY?

Otilia CONSTANTINIU

Authors

Otilia CONSTANTINIU Historical Anthropology Seminar. E-mail: otilia.constantiniu@yahoo.com

Keywords:

ideology, nationalism, identity, musical style, Romanian composers

Abstract

My communication analyses the relationship of interdependency between ideology and music in Romania. My intention is to discover this relationship in the discourses of the composers’ and music critics through what they understood by national style. We will see how this discourse has been influenced by the political context and modified in relationship with the shifts of the political regimes. Therefore, I will emphasize the discursive forms of the national specificity in music shaped by the apparently contradictory political ideologies. These range from the nationalist ideology that reached its peak in the interwar period to the communist ideology with its specific forms of nationalism. The temporal setting covers a period of almost one century which will allow us to observe the apparition, development and intersection of political ideologies, especially of the nationalism, and their reflection in understating the national style. The national specific discourse is, after all, one of identity perceived in relation to the otherness. The identity discourse fits into the process of the construction of the national identity, which assumes a definition and delimitation from the otherness. Therefore, we will have the national – universal dichotomy, based on the East-West or the Centrum-Periphery relation, and its metamorphoses. Thus, in the pre and the interwar period the emphasis is put on the ethnical element; in the communist period, with the first internationalist phase, the class solidarity replaced the ethnical one and, finally, in the nationalist phase the political strategies appealed to older sensibilities of the autochthonous collective imaginary.

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