Paul Constantinescu and Modernity of interwar Romanian Music
Paul Constantinescu and Modernity of interwar Romanian Music

Summary/Abstract: Through some of his works from the 1930s, Paul Constantinescu (1909- 63) appears today as one of a large part of Romanian composers who, during the interwar period, engaged in an explicit move toward the European artistic modernity of the early twentieth century, a modernity understood in its broadest sense, as a complex of attitudes and artistic practices dominated by the key- concepts of the new and the changing. For the majority of those who followed this orientation, aiming toward modernist coordinates of musical language did not imply abandoning the expression of national identity. The apparently paradoxical merging of traditional ethnic values with those diverging from tradition and imposed by the Western modernism, was a solution already proved as viable by Stravinsky and Bartók in the first two decades of the century. The desire for modernity, however, implied in equal measure a change of attitude vis-à-vis the question of “national specificity:” the Romanian musical works of the interwar period displayed not only new, updated techniques of composition, but also a nonconformist, lucid and detached way of expressing the “national style.” Among the features that illustrate the modernity of P. Constantinescu’s interwar works, the significant ones are: (1) the tendency to elude the tonal through polymodal or chromatic-modal structures and mechanisms; (2) an “aggressive,” quasi-arbitrary multivocal treatment of folk-quoted or folk-inspired material; (3) the use in a parodic manner of quotations from or allusions to various popular idioms.

• Details
• Contents