The present dissertation explores the contexts in which political agency was negotiated in nineteenth-century Romania (1830-1907), the concepts through which it was articulated, and the ways in which it was perceived as being distributed across time, class and state borders. Whatever may be understood by ‘agency’ is necessarily projected onto others as a way of making sense of their actions and justifying our power relationships with them, and situated in time, insofar as we tend to assume that projects in the present and the future are informed by past intentions and conditions. Guided by these assumptions, our research focuses on two key questions: how did historical actors ascribe agency to other actors and to themselves, and per which criteria? And, secondly, how did specific ways of thinking about agency in turn influence historical actors’ own perceptions of history and temporality? In order to make sense of this, we use “agency” – a socio-culturally mediated capacity to act,1 inherently temporally-situated – in order to historicise perspectives on human action, taking Romania as a case-study, covering a period from the preliminaries of establishing a nation-state and the abolition of serfdom, to the last great European peasant uprising. The project exhaustively examines more than a half-century of parliamentary debates, periodicals, literary texts and pamphlets in Romania and beyond. Surveying socio-political discourse in an age of rapid modernization, it highlights how often-surprising concepts articulated preconditions for – or loci of – agency, recovering the historically-situated meanings of terms as diverse as “feudalism”, “colonisation” and “proletariat”, how their supposed (in)applicability to Romania as a European periphery was negotiated, and how they became key concepts for thinking about both individual and collective action, its preconditions, and its limitations.

Visions of Agency: Imagining Individual and Collective Action in Nineteenth-Century Romania

Music criticism research is burgeoning. For instance, Nineteenth-Century Music Criticism, a collection edited by Teresa Cascudo and published in 2017, presents 22 essays in four languages. The Journal of Music Criticism, also launched in 2017, provides even more evidence of sustained and widespread interest. The Cambridge History of Music Criticism (2019), edited by Christopher Dingle, profiles its subject from the Middle Ages to the present. And Nineteenth-Century Music

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Critical Responses to Nineteenth-Century French Music

This article aims to explain the rise of Western art forms in the musical creation of the Romanian Principalities in the first half of the nineteenth century, as dictated by a particular European political and economic dynamic. I analyse the spread of Western music – usually described as a consequence of the gradual modernization of Romanian society – in terms of the power relations between the European core and a newly integrated periphery at the Eastern border of the continent. To illustrate this change, I discuss Edward Said's concept of orientalism which helps describe the early interactions between Western musicians and professionals and the local music traditions and customs. I then show how these interactions gave the former access to a distinctive musical material used in compositions targeting an expanding European music market. In an age of national struggle in the Romanian Principalities, national music was both a concept and a practice in demand by the local intelligentsia and fostered by composers. However, in addition to this agreement, the concept of national music signalled some significant societal changes that I elucidate by looking at class stratification and the evolution of musical taste. In the final part of the analysis, I draw on dependency theory authors such as Samir Amin and Daniel Chirot to argue that musical life in the first half of the nineteenth century in Wallachia and Moldavia was closely mirroring the economic development of these countries. Thus, I demonstrate that the emergence of the Romanian school of composition must be understood not only at a national level but also within a broader political, economic and social context, defined by the gradual transition to capitalist modes of production and consumption that happened in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

The Emergence of the Romanian National School of Composition in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: Between the Western Canon and the Resources of the Local Music

This article attempts to describe the shift in the Romanian public’s musical taste brought about by musical borrowings and imports from the West. It focuses on the period between the end of Phanariot rule (1821) and the establishment of Romania’s capital in Bucharest (1862). These decades of change yielded rich intercultural encounters and fusions, whereas the years that followed – from the 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War – show a more unified phase of assimilation of Western music. After looking at the boyar class and the bourgeoisie of Bucharest (the social segment from which an opera- and concert-going public emerged in the last quarter of the century), I move on to the everyday musical practices of the population of Bucharest, using musical examples and travellers’ accounts as a descriptive means. Finally, I analyse the shifts in musical tastes that took place in the upper layers of society as a complicated process of exclusion, inclusion and assimilation of various musical influences; as we shall see, the mixing and hybridization of musical practices not only shaped the tastes of music lovers, but also influenced the creation of Romanian music, which entered a new phase.

Haiganuş Preda-Schimek

Papers

Modelling the Public’s Taste: Local Habits, Ethnic Pluralism and European Music in Bucharest (1821–1862)