Music & Sound Art

A Sound without a Past - Lucian Meţianu

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.

Born in 1937 in Cluj, Lucian Meţianu belongs to the Romanian Neo‑avant‑garde music of the late 1960s. Preoccupied with the mathematical translation of sound, Meţianu develops a componis‑ tic thinking nurtured by the gravity of the referential centre, bringing back into discussion, together with other colleagues of his generation (Octavian Nemescu, Corneliu Cezar), the spectre of natural harmonics, the universal and the oscillation as a fundament of the world. In regards to the musical structure, he works with numerical ratios, particularly with the Fibonacci string and Lorentz equation with respect to the study of chaos and of unpredictability. Employing the idea of transformation as a composition principle, he conceives a minimalistic music, in the sense of maximum economy, defined as non‑repetitive and transformational, which constitutes the ground of his works, including Ergodica (1967), Conexe (1967–1968), String Quartet No. 2 (1968), Pythagoreis (1971), Evolution (1973). Having a passion for electronics, he specialises at the Studio for Electronic Music of the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, where he completes his pioneering work, Pythagoreis. Living in Lausanne since 1984, he established an acoustic and electronic music laboratory at the Conservatory, where he taught from 1990 to 1998.

Publication concept and editors: Alina Şerban & Ştefania Ferchedău
Translation: Laura Ionică
Proofreading: Alina Ioan
Design: Radu Manelici
Image processing: Aurelian Ardeleanu

Institute of the Present, 2019
English, Romanian
Softcover
156mm x 229mm



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AUD 24.00
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