Iancu Dumitrescu (Ro)

1 November 2019 City Sonic

Rumanian spectral music

Transcultures (and its festival City Sonic), Espace Senghor, and Semaine du Son, join forces to offer a multi-faceted event revolving around Romanian spectral music with its historical representative Iancu Dumitrescu, who is also a pioneer of electronic music and Romanian experimental contemporaries.

This program presents new creations of hybrid music (electronics and acoustic instruments) of the composer. There will also be a piece by the late composer Ana-Maria Avram (1961- 2017), Romanian musicologist, member of the ensemble Hyperion, and co-director with Iancu Dumitrescu. Also representing Romanian spectral music with another creation is a young collaborator of Iancu Dumitrescu, Octav Avramescu.

Taking its source from Romanian popular music, spectral music is based on the discovery of the nature of timbre in music and ‘spectral decomposition’ of musical sounds, at the origin of the perception of this timbre. With composer, Horatiu Radulescu, whom Iancu Dumitrescu is a precursor, and whom he defended ardently, they worked closely with late companion Ana-Maria Avram and the whole Hyperion, in Romania and internationally.

This unique concert will be accompanied by a meeting with the composer (moderated by Philippe Franck, director of Transcultures and the City Sonic festival) and the screening of a documentary film by Alexandru Badea revolving around Iancu Dumitrescu.

Production: Transcultures, Espace Senghor, Semaine du Son

Iancu Dumitrescu: portrait of a spectralist (Belgian premiere)

The young Romanian director Alexandru Badea takes us on a dive inside the work of a lifetime, that of the spectralist composer Iancu Dumitrescu. The form of this intimate documentary adapts to the perpetual creative research of its main characters, Iancu Dumitrescu and his wife, also composer, Ana-Maria Avram. On the way, a musical work is created at the same time that the film finds its bearings. Even if finally there is only the testimony of the camera to find the incandescence of a memorable concert, we discover a music created both to reflect a cosmogonic philosophy, and to lend itself admirably to improvisation, liberating the musician in a sound universe where the composer allows it to express fully himself.

Conversation with Iancu Dumitrescu

This conversation with the composer and conductor Iancu Dumitrescu (moderated by Philippe Franck / art historian and music critic) will address the major issues that guided his musical writing and his exploratory approach: the phenomenological principle, the cosmological approach and Orphic sound, the hyper spectralist aesthetic and its origins in Romania, the mystical exploitation of the acoustic phenomenon as ‘cryptic alchemy of the sound source’.

Rumanian spectral music concert

Interpreted works:

Iancu Dumitrescu: Sound images (I) (world creation)
Octav Avramescu: New natural harmonics (world creation)
Iancu Dumitrescu: Sound images (II) (world creation)
Iancu Dumitrescu: Sound images (III) (world creation)
Ana-Maria Avram: Nouvelle Arche (III) (1999 – Belgian premiere)

Biography

After studying composition at the University of Music of Bucharest, having studied with Alfred Mendelsohn, Iancu Dumitrescu takes courses in phenomenology and conducting with Sergiu Celibidache, whose lessons he applies to musical composition. In 1976, he founded the Ensemble Hyperion, proposing a new aesthetic in today’s music. Hyper-spectral aesthetics is centered on the radiating force of sound, with its micro-cosmic complexity – which is questioned, analyzed, and re-composed from the spectral point of view. The music of Iancu Dumitrescu is hyper-spectral, acousmatic, transformational and phenomenological. He has, among other things, developed a new non-metric rhythmic project based on Number, on vital rhythms in nature, and on a relationship between action and relaxation. He bases his creation on the phenomenological principle – that made him discover Sergiu Celibdache, which Dumitrescu applies to creation itself – and the idea of acousmatic – which in his vision is not only “the art of disguise a sound source “in the concrete sense”, but that of the “metaphor of sound, in its infinite cryptic alchemy of materials “. Iancu Dumitrescu is considered one of the leaders of the global spectralist current. He is also the founder and artistic director of the Acousmania International Music Festivals, Musica Nova, Musica Viva and Spectrum XXI (with Ana-Maria Avram). His vast work, comprising some 300 pieces, includes music for solo instruments, chamber music, electroacoustic and mixed music, computer-assisted music, orchestral music and soloists.