About the Authors

Thomas Beimel, composer, musicologist, violist was born in 1967 in Essen, Germany. Starting as a viola player, he finalized music studies and instrumental pedagogics at Hochschule für Musik im Rheinland. In 1989 he founded together with other musicians the ensemble Partita Radicale, specializing in the field between improvisation and composition. Since 1993, the ensemble worked with outstanding Romanian composers (there are two CDs with contemporary Romanian music released by sonoton, Munich).
Since 1991, Thomas Beimel has made several musicological researches resulting in book publications on the music of the Belgium composer Jacqueline Fontyn, and of the Romanian composer Myriam Marbe. Since 1998, he conceived many broadcasts on topics like contemporary music in Romania and Latin America, classical modern music in Eastern Europe, music and rhetoric.
Since 1994 Thomas Beimel works also as composer. In the summer of 1997 he studied privately composition with Myriam Marbe, Bucharest. In 1999, his first opera was premiered at Stadttheater Mönchengladbach, Germany. Stage activities were continued in June 2001 by the theatre music for the first integral drama adaption of Franz Kafka’s novel In der Strafkolonie, opera house, Wuppertal. In 2002, faltenbalg, a stereophonic composition for five orchestras of accordions, was premiered.
Thomas Beimel received a special award for composition, Impulse, 2004. He was 2005-2006 composer-in-residence, Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia, Bamberg.


Grigore Cudalbu is a composer, associate professor at the National University of Music Bucharest. He is also a member of the vocal music department of the Union of Composers and Musicologists of Romania and vice-president of the Romanian National Association of Choral Music. He defended his doctoral thesis in 2006: Fundamental elements of musical language used by Romanian composers in a cappella music or in choral works with instrumental accompaniment after the Second World War. He composed numerous choral works and wrote the book Romanian miniatures, madrigals and choral poems after 1945 (2014). He was invited to the International New Music Week (Bucharest, 2013, 2014, 2015) to promote his own creations with Prelude Chamber Choir, as guest conductor.


Smiljka Kitanović, PhD, is a freelance writer and family history researcher, with a focus on the Balkans, including Danube German genealogy. She was awarded second place for published article category in the 2013 Excellence-in-Writing-Competition, offered by the International Society of Family History Writers and Editors. In 2000 she received a doctoral degree in Biomedical Sciences from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, New York, and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in microbiology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. She writes articles on genealogy, history, and science topics for magazines such as Family Chronicle, Internet Genealogy, and Dig.


After graduating in piano and musicology from the National Music University of Bucharest in 1990, Professor Valentina Sandu-Dediu turned to two main areas of research in the following decades: one interdisciplinary, in which she studied aspects of musical stylistics and rhetoric and proposed a definition of mannerism in musical culture (Stylistic and Symbolic Hypostases of Mannerism in Music, Bucharest, 1997), and another in which she studied the history of post-war music in communist Romania and the ideologies that determined it. The other direction in which Sandu-Dediu is active involves reassessing and reformulating the history of post-war Romanian music: Romanian Music between 1944-2000, printed in Bucharest in 2002, with a German version in 2006 (Pfau, Saarbrücken); New Histories of Romanian Musics (Bucharest, 2020), edited by Sandu-Dediu and Nicolae Gheorghiță, and Histories and Ideologies: the Bucharest Philharmonic (1868-2018), edited by Sandu-Dediu (Bucharest, 2023). Since 2014 she is rector of New Europe College Bucharest, Institute of Advanced Study.