VASILE PETRAȘCU. THE TRANSYLVANIAN RELIGIOUS MUSIC BETWEEN STABILITY AND CONTINUITY
VASILE PETRAȘCU. THE TRANSYLVANIAN RELIGIOUS MUSIC BETWEEN STABILITY AND CONTINUITY

Summary/Abstract: From a diachronic perspective, the Transylvanian Religious Orthodox music can be defined by two specific and complementary characteristics: stability and dynamics. The stability of religious music is given by the continuity, in time, of some unitary melodic matrixes, and the dynamic is determined by the development of specific melodic patterns under the action of many historical and cultural factors. In the core of the Transylvanian religious music tradition, in a both conservatory and innovative composition process, we could include Professor Vasile Petrașcu’s musical creation. By assimilating both ways of religious music, oral and written, he engages in a wide composition and publication process, writing an entire series of religious creations destined to cult performance. Combining in a personal manner the melodic matrixes present in the first musical document by Dimitrie Cunțanu, in 1890, with new melodic patterns which had appeared because of the folk music’s interaction, with the cult music and the music of the other co-living cults, manages to enrich the Transylvanian musical religious repertoire with an entire series of musical collection. All his works have multiple purposes: firstly, they have an instructive-educational purpose, being composed as a teaching material for the Theological Academy and the Theological Seminary’s students; secondly, they have a practical purpose, many of them being destined for the religious celebrations that were taking place in the ecclesiastic and community space and, moreover, they were composed to enrich the new choirs’ repertoire; and last, but not least, we can determine a patrimonial purpose, that of preserving and continuing in an authentic and steady spirit, the Transylvanian religious music tradition.

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