“Everything is connected”
We’d like to mark the start of a new year in the life of Musicology Today by quoting from Daniel Barenboim, recently proclaimed Doctor honoris causa of the National University of Music in Bucharest. As I was saying in the Laudatio, now published under Thoughts, at the beginning of his book Everything is connected, published in 2008, Daniel Barenboim underlines the privilege of expressing oneself through music over expressing oneself through words. What else does musicology do, nowadays as much as ever, than to search for ways to say/write words about music?
Paraphrasing the quote from Daniel Barenboim, we are moving on to see the connections – be they obvious or subtle – between the three studies that make up the body of this issue of our journal. Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was the towering personality celebrated by world musical institutions in festivals and thematic symposia throughout 2011. Musicians evoked him ceaselessly, as we have done ourselves, through a study signed by Alice Tacu in issue 8. Piano professor and musicologist Lavinia Coman dedicated a monograph to him (published by Editura Didactică și Pedagogică) and now returns to Liszt’s piano creation with the same passion. Less important anniversaries from the date point of view interested some musicians in 2011. We chose to be part of this “minority” and find out news about Belá Bartók (1881-1945) and George Enescu (1881-1955) from a semiotic perspective, in Antigona Rădulescu’s study; or to learn previously unpublicised details about Mihail Jora (1891-1971), which lead to a rewriting of the history of Romanian music through research in the Securitate archives – an endeavour responsibly taken over by Raluca Voicu. Even our traditional review section, signed by Florinela Popa, puts Enescu in the foreground. Other paths that might unite the four composers can be discovered by reading the respective studies. I would only point out the interest in a concept of “national music” as viewed in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries…
In other news, our female-dominated editorial office is being enriched by a male colleague, Nicolae Gheorghiță, whose contribution throughout 2012 will be a new surprise journal heading.
Valentina Sandu-Dediu
(English translation by Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru)