Interviewed  by  JÉRÔME NOETINGER

« Revue et Corrigée » n°29, Grenoble, 1996 &   «Bananafish» n°12, San  Francisco, 1997
 

Nearly 10 years ago I discovered the music of Iancu Dumitrescu through the music of P16.D4. There are no links between these two names or their music, only that P16.D4's label Selektion co-released Dumitrescu's « Medium Il » / « Cogito » LP with RZ Editions in Berlin. In this way I found the raw, cut-up assemblages of the former and the long, intimate movements in detailed sound works of the latter. Much later I heard about spectral music and learned that Dumitrescu was Romanian, born in 1944, the same generation as Horatio Radulescu. The shadow-like influence of Scelsi's work is also undeniable.* After listening to more of his records, released by Editions Modern, I started to dive more seriously into his mu-sic and found that the synthesized delirium of serialism seemed to shift more toward the sound and tools of electroacoustics.

 *[Mr. Dumitrescu adds: «Regarding Scelsi's phenomenon and its supposed relationship with my music, what can I say?  Until today,  I knew of Scelsi's music only through records and a few concerts. As a matter of fact, remember that he got famous spontaneously a few years before his death in the '80s. The majority of his scores were published only three or four years later, around 1987 or '88, by which time I had already pursued my most significant adventures. « Apogeum », « Mo-vemur » and « Medium III» were conceived between 1970 and 1976; «Cogito/Trompe L'oeil» and «La Grande Ourse»,  «Harryphonies alpha, beta, gamma » are from 1978 and  '81, published by Editions Salabert in 1986, and recorded by Electrecord, and Edition RZ,  Berlin between 1978 and 1985, time when very few peo-ple knew about Scelsi.  Iíd start from the conclusion that between my mu-sic and that of Scelsiís the difference is striking. He who does not notice this does not understand either of them. In the present I feel a strong at-traction to his music, but at the same time the opposite is true. He has a great spirit. His experiences, mostly meta-musical, are close to me  but also limited. It is evident that Scelsi's work is a contemplation of sound as an exterior phenomenon, an object, an immutable reality; his intervention in my works is therefore an impossibility, as opposed to my interest in the interiority of sound. Observation is made under a magnifying glass. Con-sequently, the inner structure and infinitesimal changes are hyperbolically enlarged, which of course implies a large dose of idealism and whimsical imagination. The contemplation of Scelsi's sound remains static and op-posed to mine: a sound, a thought essentially transformational, evolutive, occultly dynamic. Consequently, "Scelsi's shadow" can float inside the imagination of the listener who tends to reduce phenomena (to understand, to be able to situate them). But that can also happen to me, when ten years before Scelsi's apparition, I had recorded and composed a major part of my music on record. ]

JEROME NOETINGER: Tell me about your musical history.

IANCU DUMITRESCU: It's not that easy to summarize. From age 7 to 22, I went through the conventional steps of musical studies. I have a mas-ter's degree in composition from the Academy of Music in Bucharest. My biggest break was meeting one of my teach-ers, Alfred Mendelsohn, in the last years of his life. He used to be seri-ously involved in the ridiculous extremes of Stalinian realism. When we met he was trying to come clean by getting rid of an unnecessary, heavy burden - the « language of  wood » - in music. [Alfred Mendelsohn, once, in a very particular and official context, during a reunion of Romanian professors with a professor at the Academy of Music in Moscow who was paying a visit in Bucharest, char-acterized me as being "the only one of his students for whom music meant life". This assertion shocked and marked me. After some time I began to realize, in surprise, the value of this idea of his, of this vision of his. And I also realized that not only this was important, but also that "music must be life." Music as life...- completed 2002, ID] Before the war Mendelsohn had finished his studies in Vienna and was involved, clandestinely, of course, with alternative "mod-ernists," and shared his knowledge with young peo-ple. With only a few chosen disciples, he took the risk of secretly intro-ducing them to the modern writing techniques of the Schönberg or Webern heritage. Had news of what he was doing gotten around, he would have been severe-ly punished. Of course, to those with a nature similar to my own, the things that matter the most are sup-pressed and controversial. Be-cause that's where we find hid-ing the essence, the freedom of creation: the truth. The adventure went on for sev-eral years, followed by many musical scores, recordings and books. Every bit of it was subversive and clandestine. Official art was stuck in the real socialism frame. Between 1968 and 1970 there was a period of ideological thawing that gave me and some of my teachers -  Niculescu, Stroe, Vieru, Olah - the opportunity to follow up on more personal paths of creation. Concurrently, I was strongly interest-ed in philosophy. My meeting in 1973 with Sergiu Celibidache opened me up to Husserl's phenomenology movement; I found the answers to musical applications and creation in the same way as in Zen or yoga. Obviously, I arrived at a point where I couldn't accept anything that was given to me, especially composition recipes. I started on a series of personal adventures. Did you know that Diogenes the Cynic, when questioned about the impossibility of the movement, would answer quite naturally by standing up and going for a walk? In the same way, I got out of the dead end of serial thought by radically assuming the risk of a deeper re-search in the unique direction that still seemed possible.

JN: Could you elaborate on the contribution of phenomenology to your work?

ID: Toward 1973, a crucial time in my spiritual and artistic evolution,  I met  Celibidache and became his disciple. Philosophy already was one of my deep interests but he made me understand the value of the phenomenological conception of music, an abstract art without any natural models or matter, where all is only to become. I might be the only one of his disci-ples to apply the conse-quences of his teachings in my cre-ation. Hoes does one approach the creative act? How does music "become"? What is the validity and authenticity of one's work? How can we free ourselves from the false? I lis-ten meditatively to an acoustic phe-nomenon. I want to sur-prise its nat-ural direction, its noematic tendencies, the sense of its sonic matter. I contemplate matter for a long time, a little detail; to see, under-stand where it is going to evolve, what its natural tendencies are... The intuition has to liberate itself from factitious things. You have to leave it to operate in its original purity. So, you have to enter an absolute game where there is no comparative. Nothing is purer, more real, more alive. There is the truth or the untruth. The Husserlian sense that I'm indicating here has become, thanks to Celibidache, a support hardly replaceable, a cardinal sup-port. Celibidache is an important reformer of the artistic conception in this century and to have had the chance to be near him for an instant gave me a high lesson in art and at the same time, in philosophic and phenomenological thought. I've said it many times: Celibidache is my spiritual fa-ther.

JN: How would you define "being"?

ID: Theoretical speculations alone cannot result in anything important anymore. Even at the beginning of my personal development in composition, I was intimately linked to the processes of interpreta-tion. That's why I al-ways pursued my research in the manner of found realities as I shared them with the instru-mentalists. In 1976, rejecting the already done and already seen, I founded the Hyperion Ensemble, a multimedia group dedi-cated to experimental music. To-gether we achieved a great part of my experiences and creations, as well as those of my contemporaries- C. Miereanu, H. Radulescu, C. Cazaban, O. Nemescu, and oth-ers such as St. Niculescu, Ana-Maria Avram... At the same time, I was always very active in criti-cism and musicology.

JN: Do you work more in Romania or abroad?

ID: Today it's impossible to be stuck somewhere without having to deal with a certain provincialism of thought. We live in a time of re-searches, experiments and rediscov-ery. It's difficult to find solutions in only one place. It can be Paris, London or New York. It's only with circulation, con-frontation and contact with other cultures, sometimes believed peripheral, that you can transcend present limitations. As for myself, I try to travel wherever possible. With the fervour of new contacts. With Ana-Maria Avram, it's in Austria, Italy, France, Holland, Germany and England, where we know our music generates a certain level of interest. With the Hyperion Ensemble, we performed at Radio France in Paris, Vienna, Rome, Alicante, as well as in Bucharest and in small provincial towns. I already said this but will say it again: to tell you the truth, "the provinces" are not necessarily a notion, geographically speaking. If you aren't con-nected to the rhythm of a wonderful Swiss city in the center of Europe, it's simply more apparent than if you are dis-connected in a secluded village in Eastern Europe. This is not where the problem is. The situation is not location-specific and neither region is responsible. The answer is only an op-tion of choice, having the courage to live authentically in the center of one's life wherever that may be. Therefore, what I find fundamental is liv-ing in time, the joy of living perpetually in the present.

JN: What is the situation of contemporary music in your country?

ID: There is a generation currently around the age of 65 -I already named Niculescu, Stroe, Vieru, Olah - who had the opportunity to directly create an alternative way of thinking, particularly in the peda-gogical opinion. A new way of looking at things, although already dated today. Because of that generation, we witnessed in the '70s a change that was quite unex-pected. A new school of composition developed almost instantaneously, filled with spon-taneity, innovation, ambition, as well as indignation and arrogance, all in a considerable  variety.  Within a younger generation, whose age today would be 45 to 50, Radulescu, Cazaban, Nemescu are the most interesting. They found new synergic solutions together with their European and Japanese colleagues. The use of elec-troacoustic origins, spectral influ-ences, utilization of "factures arche-typales" from primitive folklore... all of that formed a modern type of music always with consider-able freshness, complemented by good work and remarkable energy with-out superfluous speculation. In the young generation, Avram has a singular position due to her refusal of dogma. She possesses a well fed, exceptional gift that has allowed her to discover remarkable personal solutions. She is quite a force! Generally, contemporary music is infested with retro-this or neo-that, which to me doesn't say anything good.

JN: You often employ the term "acousmatique" to describe your music, which has been used since the '70s by some composers of music on tape to separate their work from its source, "to listen without seeing." What inter-est do you have in electro-acoustics and more particularly in music on tape? You have on occasion used both in your compositions.

ID: I use "acousmatique" in a very differ-ent way from the GRM in France. In fact, "acousmatique" is from the pre-Socratic Greek and has a deep philo-sophic meaning, signifying the occul-tation of a source, thus rendering it inaccessible to profanity. If electro-acoustics is an art form, to which one listens without seeing, that indicates to me the possibility of a metaphori-cal sound.  Even if you can see its source on-stage, you still cannot rec-ognize the results. I think of acous-matique as a technique of ecstasy. It's rather difficult to explain. It's abstract and concrete at the same time. For example, « Movemur et Sumus » or « Aulodie Mioritica » and even « Cogito / Trompe L'oeil » are all linked to the acousmatic principle. They rebuild da capo the marvelous road of music, the genesis of sound. The Pythagorean principles of the sound system's rediscovery, even if they bring together the imagination of the electroacoustic listener, at the same time leave the music far away from its artificial point. What others produce with electric instruments I find cold, impersonal, without mys-tery. I attempt in a natural way, using classical instruments, to rediscover the incantatory, Orphic spirit. Not only with the help of these instru-ments but also with the souls of artists who accompany me in my sound adventures.

JN: What are your principle reasons for using electroacoustics or mag-netic tape? Is it to extend the instruments or is it more to reach sounds that are otherwise impossible to create?

ID: As with the classical instruments, I often use electroacoustics to fulfill the sonic metaphor, the search for the new lease on life, the unwanted. This gives the impression of electro-acoustics and also obscures the iden-tity of the electronic sources. I create a sound alchemy where different sources are intermingled. I felt the exigency imposed upon my music's originality early on. A step forward, further toward something deeply new, unpublished. A radical defini-tion and a different modality in music - simultaneously differ-ent from the present, enigmatic and, if possible, without connotations. A mysterious genre, personal, but also with deep foundations in objectivity. In this way, I chased my research not only in the direction of modernism, but towards ancestral resources, towards the noetic, the seed of significa-tion, the essence of music. Musical instruments from India, Japan, Tibet and Africa interested me. I went to concerts, watched films; progressively and with intuition, I found Orphism, which, similar to my thoughts and experiences, represent-ed the highest, most enigmatic, immanent, impon-derable and some-times cryptic degree of sound art! It's a high solicitation of art, it has a tran-scendent degree, it is the performance of an abyssal ini-tiation with the use of sound. It's the magic of music. To me, Orphism isn't only a question of legend; it created for us Romanians, Heirs of Thrace, a particular way of listening to the sound. It's hard to define: between ecstatic and dynam-ic. The sound is « adored », visualized, lived in a plurality of superim-posed planes. Super-exposed. Therefore, concretely, the search of a sound alchemy. The savant and refined combination of dissimilar origins. In a word, Iachieve this through phenome-nological concentration and yoga

JN: Would you say you 're part of the spectral trend of music?

ID: Yes, I think of myself as a spectralist, but in a completely different way from the French. The spectral dimension of my music is in synergy with Orphism and acousmatique. I will repeat myself: I created a modern novelty in music, like a return to archaic origins, to a prima verba of mu-sic, through the Jungian search for archetypes. Taking the experiences of Pythagoras, reinventing the multiple aspects that hold traditional musical together, my music uses harmon-ics and resonance in a natural way, alive and intuitive. Sonorous and refined, I believe. Though  abstract, symbolic and in search of archetypes, its complex acoustic origins come from ar-chaic sources, which one can quickly assimilate. Also, I think that a new music that utilizes new materi-als, in this case the spectre, needs new in-strumental techniques, new principles in the organization of the sound source, a new dialectic of the form, a new aesthetic and other conceptual criteria, none of which I find in other spectralists. They use the spectre with principles and tech-niques linked to the serial system. I don't believe they take it to the extreme.

JN: Will Editions Modern release works by composers other than yourself, Avram or Cazaban?

ID: From the artistic point of view, Avram and myself are the most deeply involved. There is a little "club" that helps us with distribution as well, especially in Romania. It's an adventurous label, private and sectarian. It's difficult to predict what the future holds. We are open to those with similar impulses.

JN: Do you agree with the affirmation in the booklet of the CD EDMM 1OO7, "Sound is a go-between, music is a different thing"?

ID: Completely! It's in the spirit of phe-nomenology as I understand it. Even though extremely attached to the way sound lives, if the root of my work at first aims at the carnal enve-lope of sound (that is the timbre and the structure), I'm aware that music never begins nor finishes with sound. It uses the sound but it is not it. It is only a state of grace that suddenly ap-pears through the sound. It's the tran-scendence of the object, by means of pure intuition. My theory is exactly like Husserlís. And, paradoxically, when it comes to music, according to Bergsonís. Well, Husserl is not in the actual-ity of philosophy anymore. The prob-lems haunting the spirits are different today. But in music there is not another way that can explain mu-sical phenomena. Besides, I complete, I nuance my phenomenological vision in music by interfering it with  Yoga or Zen.

JN: Is there a certain liberty left in your scores to the player?

ID: The player has no freedom! When listening to my music, you might believe otherwise, you could see a certain degree of improvisation. In fact it is not the case. The phenomenological concept determines the evolution of the sound, the bow's movement, the change in harmonics... The musi-cian finds himself chained inside an obligatory role, always well-proportioned, always logical. If something suddenly intervenes, you can feel it immediately. I perceive free-dom to be synonymous with error. Para-doxically, the way inside is the discovery of a true,  superior freedom. It's the intrinsic spirit of my music. The adventure, the scorching and frenetic research. It has in its core the primor-dial mystery of sound. The interest in my music is created by a fresh open-ing that doesn't belong to freedom in the first degree. It's a directed free-dom going towards one goal: mys-tery, the life of music.