ASPECTS OF THE ROMANIAN MUSICAL LIFE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Abstract

T At the initiative of some prestigious musicians, new institutions and societies appear on the stage of artistic life at the beginning of the 20th century, the setting being foreshadowed by the forerunners of the previous century. In the Romanian space, vast fields of research in the field of musicology, folklore and music criticism, musical aesthetics and philosophy are opened, the pages published in specialized magazines having the purpose of educating the public in order to appreciate in a fair way the true artistic values. The compositional activity intensifies, being stimulated the effervescence of creativity. Romanian music evolves in the sense of achieving a harmonious coexistence between the specifics of the local folklore and the classical Western European forms, tailored on a new pattern of modal harmonization, an innovative one. The activity of the new personalities of the local music leads to the shaping of the Romanian composition school. Such a school will be set up around Alfonso Castaldi, active in the Bucharest Conservatory. Castaldi becomes a promoter of symphonism, establishing a model for his disciples. A true mentor, he will imprint on the Romanian music from the first decades of the 20th century the directions of the neoclassicism passed through the prism of its Latin origin. In parallel with the symphonic creation, the choral works will be in line with the old Italian masters of the madrigal. The consolidation of the national school of composition takes place in the first decades of the twentieth century, the traditional element penetrating even more into the thinking of composers, in a note of universality. The penetration of the expressionism of the second Viennese school will put the Romanian composers in front of some compositional systems considered avant-garde at that time, imposing in the music the widening of the tonal sphere through the acute chromatization and the approach of polytonalism. The alignment and integration of Romanian art in the generalized process of cultural emancipation specific to the twentieth century in the European space has a very gratifying solution, as a result of which the local music has acquired an extra note of originality.