The Triple Concerto The Fever by Dan Dediu: A Story with Musical Characters
Olguţa Lupu
The Triple Concerto for flute, clarinet, cello and orchestra, Op.138 Febra [The Fever] by Dan Dediu was conceived as an answer to the challenge of timbral heterogeneity raised by a concerto with multiple soloists. The solution found by the composer was to break through the borders of the concerto as genre, to bring it into the realm of the narrativity and create an “instrumental opera”, with main and secondary characters, both heroes and villains, with tensions, intrigues, and connivances, with twists and surprising endings. The result was a musical adventure whose interpretation calls for an approach inspired by musical narratology, especially as Dediu’s own approach to music is highly compatible, since the composer defines his own method of composition as “fictionist”.
The Performer’s Strategies in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suites
Răzvan Suma
The experience of repeated performances of Bach’s solo Cello Suites, on different occasions and in different contexts, has persuaded me to begin this endeavor to theorize a performing style. Particular problems are discussed in this essay, having to do with bow technique, fingering, preparing the cello from a luthiery perspective, and the sensations felt while performing Bach. I refer especially at considering the six Suites from a global perspective, as it happens in a recital. I propose therefore a series of questions that I attempt to answer based on my own practice as a performer.
Beyond the Music of Words: From the “Sound of Loneliness” to the “Resonance of Love” in Haruki Murakami’s Literature
Maria Grăjdian
This paper analyzes musical elements in Murakami’s novels as a means to construct a late-modern form of “artistic syncretism”, while taking into account the stress ratio between the popular reception of Murakami’s literature and the critical rejection it faces coming from the literary establishment in Japan, on the one hand, and the subtle tension between the contents and the formal tackling of that very contents, on the other hand. A detailed analysis of the intrinsic entanglements between literature and music in Murakami’s novels reveals a latent progression from the employment of musical elements as a formal decorum in his early works (e.g., Norwegian Wood or South of the Border, West of the Sun) to the gradually organic integration of musical structures in the polyphonic design of his novels (e.g., The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore), with the climactic 1Q84 attaining symphonic dimensions both in the discursive practice and in the architectural construction.
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