Valentina Sandu-Dediu
Romanian Music up to 1944:
Prof. Dr. Valentina Sandu-Dediu
Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Romanian musical culture in the Principalities (Wallachia and Moldavia) mainly consisted of Byzantine and folk layers, with Oriental/Turkish accents and the beginnings of secular music in the late-eighteenth century (worldly songs, courtly songs composed by boyars). Greek and Turkish influence (via the courts of the Greek Phanariot rulers) was therefore predominant up to 1820, and native music was mainly represented by the lăutari (folk musicians) and church choirs.
The transition from the Greco-Oriental to the Western typology made itself felt through the success of foreign travelling opera companies, but Western music spread due also to other factors: increased commercial ties with the West, the fact that from 1829 numerous young people (the sons of boyars and bookmen) went to university in the major European capitals and brought back with them a new mindset and new models. Such models were likewise encouraged by the foreign artists who settled in the Principalities.
The first manifestations of native “cultivation” were initially bound up with the theatre: works for the stage, political couplets, and potpourris on national themes, displaying the patriotic, historical spirit characteristic of early Romanticism in general.
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Romanian Music 1944-2000:
Ideology, Politics and Musical History
Prof. Dr. Valentina Sandu-Dediu
Post-war history for many East European countries meant a brutal rupture with previous traditions of all kinds – cultural, political, social and economic – following the installation of communist regimes with the support of the Soviet Red Army. It should be noted that there were no genuine revolutions within any of the Soviet Union’s neighbouring countries such as Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. Rather, a new social-political structure was imposed upon them under conditions that are now well known – international treaties and the beginning of the ‘Cold War’. For half a century the powerful neighbour to the east was to hold all its bordering states within its sphere of influence.
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Short Biography
Prof. Dr. Valentina Sandu-Dediu graduated 1990 musicology and piano at the National University of Music Bucharest (NUMB). She benefited from scholarships granted by Alban Berg Stiftung (Vienna, 1991), New Europe College (1996-7), and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2000). Her career is linked mainly with the NUMB, where she started to teach in 1993, earned her PhD in 1995; at present she is professor for musicology, stylistics and theories of performance. In the mean time, she has been involved in the existence of New Europe College, Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest, first as a permanent fellow (since 2010), than as Rector (since 2014).
Sandu-Dediu wrote over 30 studies and 300 articles, published in Romania, Poland, Serbia, Albania, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Great Britain, U.S.A. (worth mentioning are the contributions to MGG – Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Bärenreiter, and Grove Online). She is also the author of 10 volumes, edited in Romania, Bucharest (Wozzeck, Propechy and Fulfilment, Editura Muzicală, 1991; Stylistic and Symbolic Hypostases of Mannerism in Music, Editura Muzicală, 1997; Choices, Affects, Attitudes. About Style and Rhetoric in Music, Editura Didactică și Pedagogică, 2010/2013; Parallel Octaves, Humanitas, 2014; Searching for Consonances, Humanitas, 2017) and Germany (Rumänische Musik nach 1944, Pfau Verlag Saarbrücken).
For her activities, Sandu-Dediu received the Prize of Musical Critique in Romania (1992), the Prize of the Romanian Academy (1997), the Prize of the Romanian Composers and Musicologists Union (1998, 2010, 2014, 2017), Förderpreise of Siemens Musikstiftung (München, 1998, 2000, 2004). In 2008, The Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie für Wissenschaften awarded her the Prize of the Peregrinus Stiftung (Rudolf Meimberg).
As a pianist in chamber music, Sandu-Dediu recorded, together with Ray Jackendoff, a CD with Romanian music for clarinet and piano, edited by “Albany” – Boston, 2003. Other CDs with music by Dan Dediu were released in 2007, by „Cavalli Records”, Bamberg (Valentina Sandu-Dediu, Ion-Bogdan Ştefănescu, Dan Dediu) and by NEOS, Germany (Valentina Sandu-Dediu, Dan Dediu).