Marching the Nation. Military Bands and the Construction of a National March in Communist Romania
Marching the Nation. Military Bands and the Construction of a National March in Communist Romania

Summary/Abstract: Folkloric themes have been a major source of constant inspiration for Romanian brass band compositions since their foundation in 1831. However, with the establishment of the communist regime in Romania, the transformation of the Society of Romanian Composers into the Union of Composers and Musicologists of the Romanian People’s Republic (1949) and the establishment of the Military Music Subsection (1957), following the Soviet model, a body that would manage and guide, at the level of the whole country, the entire creation for brass bands, folkloric music became dominant and obligatory in all compositions for brass bands, both military and amateur. All the compositions produced during the Romanian Monarchy will be rejected and taken out of use, being replaced by “new” repertoires, accessible and standardized at the Army level, repertoires based on an exclusively folk and Romanian melody. The study investigates the musical production of the best-known cazon genre, inseparably linked to the existence of brass bands – the march, the ways in which nationalist ideas and themes were assimilated, metamorphosed and expressed by the genre in question during the communist period in Romania, in relation to the political transformations of the state and the “cultural” policies of the Military Music Bureau.

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