Volume X-XI (2005-2006)

The paper discusses the political message of Bartók’s work, asserting that Bartók was a pioneer of a new kind of patriotism and “europeanness”. A patriotism which is essential in the building of Europe, and in the process of European integration where the harmony of the neighboring countries is based on mutual knowledge and acknowledgment. Bartok’s example for patriotism is unique and it manifests in his music, as he never accepted any kind of political role…

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The author describes a yet unexplored music-manuscript from the sixteenth century which is to be found in the mixed stock of the Teleki-Bolyai Library in Târgu-Mureş. The manuscript is located in a colligate containing works from eight differerent scientifical areas – some printed, others written by hand. The twenty pages of the musical manuscript contain thirteen unique works of different letter styles. The pieces are motets on 3-5 voices in Latin on specific renaissance vocal style. No.6 and No.9 are predominantly instrumental. The mansucript was assembled between 1520–1540, and in 1579 it was bound into the colligate.

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The paper attempts to sketch a picture of avatars of the platonic god Eros in a collage of accidentally chosen texts and interpretations. The pieces of the puzzle could be loosely called musical theories of platonic inspiration and are held together by the same basic philosophical intuition. In the works of Boethius and then in the Renaissance, Eros is manifested as an answer to the classical question quid est musica. The collage of the presented texts displays the presence in the platonic intuition of the hidden congruence of the various dispersed modes of our existence, concluding that each fragment of human existence (philosophy, science, music) constitutes nothing else than the avatar of universal Love. Hence this paper acts as a shield against the ever-growing forces of rationalistic, thought, which also under the influence of early seventeenth-century scientific revolution were to reshape the reasoned discourse that induced a disciplined and professionalized fragmentation in man’s existence.

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The majority of the Romanian intellectual society considered music a valuable and useful instrument for education and acknowledged it as favorable for the development and improvement of the individual. Music stopped being a mere auxiliary to religion, and musical education began to cut off from moral education, acquiring a strictly esthetic basis. The instruments (violas, violins, wire strings for these, fine bows, “claviers”, “fortepianos”, guitars) were acquired from abroad, brought by merchants from Vienna, Leipzig, Pest, Neukirchen. Though somewhat delayed in comparison with the West, the progressively “enlightening” Romanian society gradually integrated into the pace of the European development. Boyars and merchants were concerned with, and engaged in the new innovating flux, which gave rise not only to social homogenization in terms of wealth, but also a spiritual one of those who shared the same cultural aspirations and musical tastes.

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The main issue of the paper is the question of the contemporaneous chances of metaphysics. This question arises through a special analysis of Ian Patocka’s ideas, which by validating the principle of opennes delineates the possibility of a new metaphysics, the essential feature of which is the openness that does not allow any kind of dogmatic finality, or any kind of final answers, conclusions. On the contrary, its main principle is to continuously maintain the state of quest and questioning. Open metaphysics does not inspire to transcend being, but it attempts to question beyond the actual, to take on that authentic openness that in fact could mean the validation of man’s freedom. That is the freedom of the endless questions through which man would always aspire beyond his boundaries. This interpretation of Patocka’s philosophy also elucidates the fact that open metaphysics represents that productive mental environment from which the Czech philosopher’s subjective phenomenology and ontology of movement spring. Moreover, beyond its theoretical significance it leads from the openness of existence through the openness of spirit to the openness of life itself, – to such a practical philosophy that is the foundation of responsible actions as well as of a rich, versatile and active life.

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The paper discusses the possible relations between music and literature and it explores the existence of musical language as such. Roman Jakobson asserts that music has its syntax and morphology, but it has lost its vocabulary, thus music turned into a universal language. Ferdinand de Saussure claims that musical language should have the same dichotomic structure as any language: the signifier always refers to the signified. But in music the signified is mainly emotional, and only to a lesser degree notional. Similarly, in literature the constitutive element is also dichotomy. These are the traces in which the author entwines his impressions and notes.

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The present study is an investigation about the main stylistic and esthetic characteristics of musical impressionism. The controversial presence of impressionism in music (it has only one – or a few – recognized representative, Claude Debussy; possibly Ravel and Respighi) determined us to examine the esthetic specifics of the modern tendencies in the mirror of the esthetic-stylistic sense of the concepts of way of depicting, tendency and style. The specificity of the system structure and configuration of the esthetic values reflected in modern musical creations, appears nuanced in the creation of the two main personalities of modern tendencies: Debussy and Ravel. We defined as the base of comparison the following stylistical-esthetical specifics: doubling, hexaphony, relation solo-texture, ostinato, leading-elements, contrasts etc. Beside the presence of a few stylistical-esthetical similarities between the creation of the two composers, and the other artistic branches (above all pictorial art) we also observed some major differences.

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This study is devoted to the commemorative practices and the sites of memory of the 1989 Romanian revolution. It has resulted from a multi-sited fieldwork experience through Timişoara, Bucharest, and Cluj occasioned by the fifteenth public celebration of the founding event of the Romanian post communist democracy. We hereby propose an oral history and cultural anthropology analysis which is methodologically based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with participants at the commemoration. We have closely followed the itinerary and the pace of this public celebration attempting to a thick description, in order to scrutinize the world of meanings that the commemorative gestures and the memory sites of Timişoara spread out. The historical events of December 1989 are seen through the lenses of the current stakes of the end of 2004; a year marked by the particular political context of the recent parliamentary and presidential elections held in November in Romania, by the judicial context of prescription which was going to be applied to some crimes of the revolution, and by the perennial religious context of Christmas Eve. The theoretical hypothesis we subscribe to is, that spaces of remembering – which are often traumatic in the case of the Romanian revolution – are converted into sites of memories only if there is a political will of memory to erect them, as well as recurrent cultural practices to ritually reactivate their meanings. The paper outlines the manner in which a tensional proximity of these different contexts, political, cultural, social, interfere with the commemorative practices, and with the socially (re)organizing modalities of the collective memories of the revolution. By the fact of “having been there”, in the very tradition of cultural anthropology, we aim at an inner, intimate knowledge of a social reality which would challenge the master narratives on the revolution as simplifying politically charged versions of the past. We also wish, in the very tradition of oral history, to give voice to those narratives that would yield different untold or less told histories of the revolution, or would reveal hardly visible discourses on the political scene.

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This paper is part of my doctoral thesis now in progress, and its subject is the evaluation of the basic musical aptitudes, sense of rhythm, hearing, and musical memory of a special category of subjects, the inaccurate singers (who have no musical ear), as well as the elaboration of an educational program based on a new method in the correction of vocal production, the “staccato method”.

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The article reviews an exhibition of manuscripts and books entitled "„Light From Light": Paschal SpringExhibition" at the Central University Library in Romania from April 7, 2005 to May 3, 2005.

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The purpose of this survey is to analyze – scientometrically and bibliometrically – the Romanian literature of librarianship and information science, published between 1945-2003 in book format, in order to reveal the degree of the de facto contribution of this literature to the acknowledgement, affirmation and strengthening - or perhaps, weakening - of the librarian profession in Romania. Our study represents, in fact, a hermeneutic incursion into the historical and internal resorts of the profession and its literature, attempting to reveal the manner in which the Romanian authors have approached the issues, that is, through the genre descriptors - precisely conferred to each of the 430 bibliographic references - on the one hand, and the main subject fields of the decades, that are fixed in the survey by subject descriptors, on the other. The stages of this survey – investigation for documents retrieval, compilation of the analytic bibliography as basis for the survey, the bibliometrical calculation and result data analysis – outline a social and professional approach, by means of critical analysis and evaluation of the Romanian literature of librarianship - considered also as result of a social-cultural factors complex, and through a thourough research of its dynamics, its values system, and the social position that it is associated with.

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The article profiles the late librarian Váczy Leona from the University Library in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. It states that Leona had worked for twenty-nine years at the university library until the age of eighty. It mentions that she dedicated herself to bibliographies in most of her free time as reinforced by published works.

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The article presents an obituary for the late journalist Tiberiu Iancu.

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