The Journey of a Carol: A Compositional Metaphor
This article aims to present the structural and compositional particularities of the work Noi umblăm să colindăm..., written în 2008, for mixed chorus and soloists. The composition is intended to be an audio metaphor of the carol’s journey from the beginning of its documentation to the present, determined by a complex of factors that facilitated the penetration of Western cultural models and fashions in Romania. For musical as well as textual reasons, I chose as the central element of this study the carol Pă cel plai de munte (1913), from the Béla Bartók collection, which I reinterpreted in three stylistic aspects: folkloric, to illustrate the local audio universe; tonal-functional, to represent the impact of the West-European influences, which dominated the period of formation of the Romanian school of composition; jazzy, to draw attention to the danger of the recent “Americanization” of the musical repertoire of the winter holidays.
DAN VARIU
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