Octavian Nemescu: A Music Anticipation

"Imaginary music is anti-spectacle: taking refuge in yourself, with yourself, behind closed doors, and playing your own music that nobody hears, no listener, no critic to disapprove of you. You compose your own melody. And where do these sounds make themselves heard? Most of the times, inside your own body: in your arm, brain, aura, heart. And if your hand hurts, let's say you try to soothe that pain through sounds to anaesthetize the discomfort through the inward vibration hence the healing quality of this musical practice."

Octavian Nemescu was born in Paşcani in 1940. He is one of the leading figures of the Romanian avant-garde composition school, his musical vision and grammar operating at a deeper level centered on retrieving the primordiality present in the spine of all musical traditions, with the aim of reaching a new artistic universality.
Together with other colleagues from his generation, he is responsible for the emergence and development of the Romanian spectral music movement (Illuminations for Orchestra, 1967), of the isonic spectralism and, especially, the archetypal spectralism (Concentric, 1969), based on an aesthetic of essentialisation.
Octavian Nemescu theoretises the archetypal conceptions, which he also puts into practice in his music (alongside Corneliu Dan Georgescu). He cultivates sonic discourses around cadenzas, incipits, finales and intervals and further becomes engaged with the ambient music. of ecological expression, with the processual or transformational music (together with Lucian Mețianu), with the ritualistic music (Combinations in Circles, 1965; Suggestions, 1968).

Octavian Nemescu has carried out a number of projects with ritualic features which entail extensive unfoldings in space and time, aspiring to liberate the performing act of the spectacular context of the concert hall and to replace it in a natural setting, in the energetic entourage of the Nature and Cosmos. He takes part in the development of the artistic movement interested in the issues of the open work, practicing the diagrammatic conceptualism.

The Parkour series introduces themes, concepts and seminal encounters for the activity of outstanding artists in the field of visual and performative arts in Romania, which enabled them to produce an unparalleled body of work. The series looks at a limited array of artistic projects and experiences, through the use of interview as an unmediated recording instrument. The interview format accommodates the reader with the particular spatial and material conditions of their practice, with the personal beliefs and the ongoing process of conceptualising their work. Parkour thereby distill significant aspects of the recent cultural history, bringing back to the fore the role of memory in capturing the kernel of an artistic time, of an artwork, of a conceptual turn. Publication concept and editors: Alina Şerban & Ştefania Ferchedău.

Institute of the Present, 2017
English, Romanian
Softcover 
156mm x 229mm