Subjectivity, Memory and Time in Costin Miereanu’s Music
One of the most important representatives of the Romanian musical diaspora in France, Costin Miereanu (b. 1943) is the author of a music which displays a high degree of subjectivity due to its intensely expressive qualities. Miereanu’s mature works are, above all, lyric and nostalgic. His success as a composer went hand in hand with the remarkable diversity of musical styles and approaches: Textkomposition, modalism, post-serialism, aleatoric music, multimedia, spectral music, minimalism, electroacoustic, etc. Trained by Greimas and concerned with the contemporary musical landscape, Miereanu also stood out as a writer on semiotics and musical narrativity.
His polyglot personality led him to compose works in which modernist idioms overlap with historical materials. Traits of different times and spaces, reminiscences, wandering, non-teleological lyricism seem to be the common link for works that show once more how nostalgia, in its constant turn to memory, occupies a central place in the experience of modernity in the 20th century. Strongly influenced by Ricoeur’s idea of narrativity and storytelling and Serres’s philosophy of the crumpled, non-linear time, Miereanu constantly manipulates the distance between the historical model and its modern treatment: references to Rameau, Mozart, Schubert, Strauss, Wagner, Ravel, Debussy, but also medieval echoes, jazz improvisations, natural sounds, electroacoustic timbres mingle in works whose reading might point to an alternate reading of their original references. In other words, as so often with intertextuality, a reading of a later text can have a remarkable impact on the understanding and analysis of an earlier one.
This zigzagged type of relationships Miereanu develops with history has a double origin: on the one hand, he appeals to his own past, through numerous allusions to earlier pieces, at which he looks with a sense of loss and longing; on the other hand, he recovers past musical styles, turning them into the actants of his musical tales and creating a different kind of nostalgia in this process. This paper examines how Miereanu engages with memory in his creative process, how the nostalgic subjectivities are constructed, as well as the language used to translate them into his music. To illustrate how these traits of Miereanu’s style function, the work DO-MI-SI-LA-DO-RÉ for saxophones and tape will be examined from the standpoint of the intertextual references to Brahms, Schubert, Mozart, Enescu and Miereanu himself, alongside the novelty of electronic sounds, everything in an interplay of various meanings.
Keywords: intertextuality, modernism, nostalgia, lyricism
Biography
Oana Andreica is an assistant professor of Musicology and Musical Semiotics at the “Gheorghe Dima” National Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She regularly participates in national and international musicology conferences and her list of publications comprises studies, articles, and interviews, as well as edited collective volumes, the most recent being Music as Cultural Heritage and Novelty, released by Springer in September 2022. She published the monograph Artă şi abis. Cazul Mahler (Art and Abyss. The Mahler Case) in 2012 and Ghid (incomplet) de concert [(Incomplete) Concert Guide] in 2021. Currently she focuses on topic theory in the Classical and Romantic repertoire, as well as on Romanian contemporary composers.
The Gheorghe Dima National Academy of Music, Romania – oana.andreica@amgd.ro