Abstract
Pioneer of experimental and avant-garde music, Costin Miereanu is appreciated for the boldness of combining radically different musical substances. Trained by Algirdas Julius Greimas and following a solid musical education in Bucharest, Darmstadt and Paris, Miereanu used semiotic analytical tools to lay the foundations for his compositional attitude. Beginning with early ’80s, he has created works in which direct conceptual correspondences with the theory of sign and signification represent the premise of the musical narrative. Consequently, the musical material becomes secondary, Miereanu being primarily concerned with the temporal evolution of the musical form he labels accidentée: examined à la loupe, it reveals complex labyrinthine structures, sound worlds inhabited by “characters”, tensions, battles, coups de théâtre, and poly-stylistic antagonisms. This article examines the composer’s preference for the archetype of the labyrinth, which inspired him to create works dominated by the aesthetics of the irregular, of the opposition between continuity and discontinuity.
This work was supported by CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-RU-PD-2012-3-0238.
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Notes
- 1.
In August 1967, two weeks prior to the Ferienkurse, Stockhausen ran his first composition studio in Darmstadt, called Ensemble, at the end of which the students performed a group composition based on the use of various forms of graphic notation, a technique Stockhausen himself had employed in his works. The experiment was repeated one year later, when Stockhausen organized the second composition studio, focusing this time on a different approach, which he termed Textkomposition. Any form of traditional or graphic notation was abandoned in favour of scores containing exclusively texts, short and usually meditative. The task of completing the piece was transferred to the performers. Then, the idea of the Haus was related to the performance itself: all of the fourteen participants’ works were to be played simultaneously, in separate rooms of the Georg-Moller-Haus, linked through a network of microphones. The participants were Gregory Biss, John McGuire, Jorge Peixinho, Mesias Maiguashca, Rolf Gehlhaar, Fred van der Kooy, Jaroslav J. Wolf, Costin Miereanu, Thomas Wells, Boudewijn Buckinx, Junsang Bahk, Clare Franco, David Ahern and Jens-Peter Ostendorf. Among the performers, there were the trombonist Vinko Globokar, the trumpet player Pierre Thibaud, the oboist Heinz Holliger and the horn player Georges Barboteu. Miereanu’s Zeitfarben, his contribution to the project, was set for six players (flute, horn, trumpet, trombone, cello and double bass).
- 2.
Understood in its much broader sense than that assigned by epistemology, for which reason is an exclusive attribute of sciences. As Miches Serres points out:
There is reason in mythologies, in religions – domains to which popular opinion today relegates only the irrational. In a certain way reason is, of all things in the world, the most equally distributed (Serres and Latour 1995: 128).
- 3.
In his book Statues (1987), Serres draws one of his most controversial parallels, between the ancient ritual of sacrifice performed by the Carthaginians (during which humans were incinerated inside the brass statue representing the god Baal) and the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Other examples of his zigzagging way of reading history link, for instance, Lucretius’s poem De rerum natura to the modern mechanics of fluids, to the turbulence and the chaos, or a sonnet of Verlaine’s Sagesse to the twentieth century theory of background noise.
- 4.
A central figure in Serres’s philosophy, his alter ego, according to his own words. Hermes is for Serres a free mediator (just as Serres declares himself to be an intermediary between sciences and the humanities) who travels through a folded time to establish connections and traverses the spaces between objects, thus creating a network of complex relations between messages and people.
- 5.
This theme is most extensively treated in the 1985 book Les cinq sens, chapter Boîtes.
- 6.
Scored for soprano, three flutes, clarinet, horn, percussion, piano, two electric organs, two ondes Martenot, three synthesizers, two electric guitars and cello.
- 7.
A title that Miereanu later attributed to another orchestral piece, completed in 1983.
- 8.
Scored for two trumpets, horn, trombone, tuba, two percussions and strings.
- 9.
It is Miereanu’s preference for explosive beginnings, which carry an immense propulsive potential.
- 10.
Present in vocal music and based on the alternation of long and short values (usually crotchets and quavers), this prosodic system finds its origins in primitive musical cultures. Specific to Romanian traditional music, it is also used in other cultures, like Hungarian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish or Balkan countries. The principles that organize this type of rhythm are the following: the two values are indivisible, they are grouped in binary and ternary formulas, and the accent falls on the first value of each combination.
- 11.
Tapis volants is a metaphor of which Miereanu makes extensive use when talking about the musical language of the labyrinth.
- 12.
This piece belongs to a series of electroacoustic works based on a minimal musical material, with long stops on consonant harmonies, which convey an impression of frozen time.
- 13.
This coda will later form the material for Sept minutes autour de moi (1981), a music of a particularly hesitant and non-evolutionary character.
References
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Serres, Michel. 1985. Les cinq sens. Philosophie des corps mêlés I. Paris: Grasset. Romanian edition: Serres, Michel. 2003. Cele cinci simţuri. Filosofia corpurilor amestecate (I) (trans: Marie-Jeanne Vasiloiu), Târgovişte: Pandora-M.
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Andreica, O. (2017). Labyrinthes d’Adrien by Costin Miereanu or the Topology of Ruptures and Junctions. In: Povilionienė, R. (eds) Sounds, Societies, Significations. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47060-3_1
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