Book Review: CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT A FUNDAMENTAL BOOK OF ROMANIAN MUSICOLOGY

Abstract

Written on commission and published in 1997, awarded with the prize for musicology by the Romanian Union of Composers and Musicologists in 1999, this book, entitled Orientări, direcții, curente ale muzicii românești din a doua jumătate a secolului XX [Orientations, Directions, Currents in Late Twentieth Century Romanian Music] (Bucharest: Editura Muzicală) by Irinel Anghel, passed almost unnoticed by the public at the end of the last century. It was only in the first decade of this century that this text started to gradually, albeit firmly reveal its force and pertinence as a necessary musicological conceptual model, even despite the totally absent promotion, group partisanship, or any “maternal” involvement on the part of its author. And the text is gaining even more visibility despite being conceived as a mini-encyclopaedia (see the Table of Contents) or as a quasi-dictionary (see the Index of this edition), both based on a detailed and compelling analytical interpretation, attuned to the realities of the Romanian cultural and compositional landscape. The book's quiet success is largely due to the community of undergraduates, master students, Ph.D. students and many others, and can be measured by the number of citations and by its inclusion as a mandatory title in an impressive number of bibliographies. Moreover, the book has already long become an important source of information and a sough-after bibliographic rarity, which confirms its growing value. In other words, for over two decades, this text has already created its own image and personality, its own cultural and analytical habitat, an ever-growing interested public, and more importantly, has led to a sustained increase in demand, which is a rare, if not almost impossible situation for a book in the niche area of musicology. “One of the fundamental books dedicated to Romanian musicology”, as composer Diana Rotaru characterised it.