Modelling the Public’s Taste: Local Habits, Ethnic Pluralism and European Music in Bucharest (1821–1862)
01 Dec 2017-Nineteenth-century music review (Cambridge University Press (CUP))-Vol. 14, Iss: 3, pp 391-416
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe the shift in the Romanian public's musical taste brought about by musical borrowings and imports from the West, focusing on the period between the end of Phanariot rule (1821) and the establishment of Romania's capital in Bucharest (1862).
Abstract: 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.
Citations
More filters
Dissertation•
28 Apr 2019
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the contexts in which political agency was negotiated in nineteenth-century Romania (1830-1907), the concepts through which it was articulated, and how it was perceived as being distributed across time, class and state borders.
Abstract: 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.
46 citations
TL;DR: For instance, this paper published a collection of essays from the Middle Ages to the present, focusing on music criticism from the classical to the modern period, and the Journal of Music Criticism was launched in 2017.
Abstract: 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
1 citations
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors analyse the spread of Western music in the Romanian Principalities in terms of the power relations between the European core and a newly integrated periphery at the Eastern border of the continent.
Abstract: 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.
References
More filters
Book•
01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: In this paper, Imagining the Balkans covers the Balkan's most formative years, from the down fall of the Ottoman Empire through the turbulent nationalist years of the nineteenth century, up to World War I, the idea of the Balkans was fiercely, often violently, contested.
Abstract: Starting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continuing up to the present, Imagining the Balkans covers the Balkan's most formative years. From the down fall of the Ottoman Empire, through the turbulent nationalist years of the nineteenth century, up to World War I, the idea of the Balkans was fiercely, often violently, contested. In the wake of WWI, the beginnings of a tradition, largely enforced by academics, emerged stigmatizing the Balkans. Since then, the region has suffered from the neglect, abuse, and scant regard of both western Europe and the world. The result has been in many direct ways to compound the Balkan's poverty, internal violence, and lack of national self-image. A startling history of ideas, Imagining the Balkans provides a much needed exploration into a region too long neglected.
1,136 citations
Book•
14 May 2012
57 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1854
16 citations