"Behind every great electronic music composition there is a sound engineer" (Octav Avramescu)
From Unearthing The Music
At Bucharest's Week of Sound event on March the 3rd 2019 Octavian and Erica Nemescu presented their 35 year old LP "Gradeatia/Natural", one of the rare electroacoustic compositions to be published by the communist Romanian state label. Octav Avramescu, Week of Sound's organizer, gives us his take on these pieces, the circumstances it arose from (the state of Romanian electronic music prior to 1989) and the audience reception at the event.
Behind every great electronic music composition there is a sound engineer
Consider that we have before us the first large electroacoustic compositions from Romania to be promoted in the '80s by the state music industry to a record format. You might actually have that record or you can listen to it online. Because the music from that obscure record somehow quietly changed format and made its inroads as a delicacy in the digital domain, which ensured its actual survival. It has recently resurfaced as an LP and made the news on more official platforms. Many more can now appreciate this genre of electronic-conceptual-environmental art that their composer had been working on that time for already more than 10 years and would continue doing so for a total of 5 pieces between 1973-90. And this is already some much needed context for this music. Though we have to ask: wouldn't too much context detract from what you could have imagined about the author on the cover? An event around its re-release allowed us to get a better idea about how the music was made.
Erica Nemescu should figure center stage in a retrospective look at the lives and times of those involved in the creation of Romanian avant-garde electronic music. Don’t take it as an axiom that it is so; and you can’t really take it as a hypothesis to demonstrate either, as there isn’t much information available about her contribution. This database entry on the topic of Romanian new music before '89 wants to expand on the uncertainty implied in the opening statement [1]. It is dedicated to her because she gave this talk in the video almost against her will.
On the 3rd of March 2019, UNEARTHING THE MUSIC partnered with the Week of Sound in Bucharest and invited Octavian and Erica Nemescu to present a 35 year old release by the former that is a landmark record featuring only electronic music (academic tape music in the conceptual electroacoustic genre, to be precise), produced then by Electrecord - the country’s monopolistic music label under communist rule. Then and now, listening to this restored recording will make you understand that it has the kind of appeal which can help it break out of the academic ivory tower, and the bleak times it was created in [2].
For a bit of local timeline, imagine that in ’63 Romanian artists experienced an ideological thaw, and the system seemed to decriminalize the echoes western ideas had in eastern minds. So much so, that by ’65 an electronic music studio was allowed to be set up by a group of students at the Bucharest Conservatory, albeit not supported far enough to acquire a synth. Somewhat counterintuitively for further developments in Romanian new music, the electronic music studio's short-lived energy burst helped create the "first electronic Romanian song”, AUM, by Corneliu Cezar [3]. Its author is often referenced as an opener of the spectral music trend because of ideas expressed in a conference he gave in the same year. It called for overcoming serialism as a “totalitarian system for sound” (sic!), which alienated music from the profound nature of sound. All this was happening some 8 years before spectral music even got developed in France by the group Itineraire - they used the name first, but not the method.
Bucharest was clearly then not the most connected city to the outside world, so this first spectral “hit”, alongside other landmarks on these spectral inroads, like Nemescu’s Iluminatii (Illuminations) or Combinatii in Cercuri (Combinations in Circles) from 1969, were only known in close circles. In fact, the bulk of the Romanian new music to follow what we can loosely call spectralism now isn’t overtly electronic, using often fixed tape music alongside sheet music for an overall mysterious, acousmatic effect. The whole experience is based on a special drone theory (called Ison in another conference, by Stefan Niculescu) and references archaic, archetypal, untempered scale systems [4].
Nevertheless, for electronic music this meant more loose ends. Things could have been different if the national radio station would have had a plan to create a better equipped studio for electronic experiments, showed some interest to broadcast or otherwise record such music. It was then the only institution that had the studios to record ensemble music, including for the Electrecord releases. Rumours of other studio initiatives in that direction existed, but never materialized. In any case, by the early 80s, many cultural freedoms were again swept under the rug of totalitarian nationalist … realism, if one may call it like that.
Maybe authorities intuited from the start that such abstract intellectual music would later lose its advance to the dastardly capitalist entertainment industry and decided not to invest in this kind of future. So, it is a bit of a miracle that the recording in question here came out in 1983, followed by a few other gems of electroacoustic music, in the same “Romanian Contemporary Music” record collection (released with this English name rather than in Romanian), from the one and only Electrecord. Well, maybe not quite a miracle. Hint: like many other consumer goods produced then, such records were intended for export and return foreign currency to the socialist state coffers. And a more thorough discursive analysis of the condition of possibility for the existence of the RCM collection would likely uncover some (un)orthodox ideologically soldering of one half matured postmodernist rejection of western modernism (think serialism), with one half special local ingredient, protochronism [5].
With the creation of the electronic music studio in ’65, it could be said that we have a first group picture of the Romanian electronic music. A real image of it is in fact harder to compose. Those that wanted to experiment in this academic field had to find a residency, summer classes, go to Darmstadt, Paris, Utrecht or Ghent, the electronic Meccas. It was sometimes harder to get approval to travel there. And of those that left, quite a few did not come back. A list of some of those that left their mark includes Adrian Enescu, Anatol Vieru, Aurel Stroe, Calin Ioachimescu, Costin Cazaban, Fred Popovici, Liana Alexandra, Liviu Dandara, Lucian Metianu, Maia Ciobanu, Mihaela Vosganian, Nicolae Brandus, Sorin Vulcu, Serban Nichifor, Ulpiu Vlad. From the ones that were there when the studio was founded, only Iancu Dumitrescu continued in this field. As a sound engineer and not a musician, Erica Nemescu was much better off working in a related field, and having access to some equipment at the Animafilm studios [6]. Her technical skills were thus highly transferrable to the electronic music Octavian Nemescu composed. She’s even said to have built a DIY synth to use when none was available, but the project appears to have been dismantled before much use and the diagram lost.
Returning to what the video says or almost says, it is important to note here the bitter-sweet modesty of the speech that Erica Nemescu is addressing to a mostly young audience, welcoming but not over-concerned with so many details about how artists fought for their concepts, the means to produce art or how to make it public before that final thaw of ’89. As she mentions, it is normally her composer husband that would do the talking at such an event. In his position as a theoretician, and after '89, professor of Electronic Music and coordinator of PhDs in composition at the Conservatory, Octavian Nemescu is known to be a surprisingly charismatic, inspiring professor. With a body of works on the subject of avant-gardist music, he is even more surprising and humbling as a practitioner, having carried out numerous compositional and performative experiments, not only electronic but also taking on his interests in semiology, installation, ecology, rituals, anti-spectacular, inner music and other conceptualist stances. You can have a look at his bio (also in English) posted on the website of the Union of Romanian Composers and see that in this respect, there might not be much left to discover for composers-to-come, Octavian Nemescu describing himself as belonging to the 2nd (and last) generation of Romanian composers [7]. And he might have a point, as his generation from the 70s has not yet been eclipsed in Romanian new music. Suffice to say here that for the event Erica introduced, he suggested the online text should say that after postmodern times comes a postcultural age, an idea he has debated on many occasions [8]. Unfortunately, only on some rare previous occasions could the public hear Octavian Nemescu outside a contemporary music event in a dedicated setting, where the public is usually formed from other professionals. The venue in the video is Control Club, arguably this decade’s coolest stage in Bucharest for live music and plenty of DJs. And while a speech impediment due to a stroke some months earlier left Octavian Nemescu uneasy with public speaking at the time, it has not stopped him from being active.
But on the night of this event UNEARTHING THE MUSIC co-produced there were about 100 people sitting on folding chairs and more standing, and the venue felt packed. And it must have felt for the Nemescus like an unexpected, awkward setting for their music. Things would have been much different if the interest in those involved in the creation of Romanian avant-garde electronic music were not so late, ephemeral. This seems a symptom in a culture that forgot its origins [9]. When Erica Nemescu says in the beginning of the video that she no longer is used to larger audiences like this, knowing that Octavian still presents somewhat regularly, at contemporary music events organized by the Composer’s Union, stunning new creations at the height of his 79 years, and that she is there to take care of the electronic tape music that goes along with instrumental music on stage, she means of course that contemporary music audiences were once not as small as we think of them today. As an aside, Octavian Nemescu did signal discretely that night at Control that he wants to stop the performance midway, due to what he must have felt as not enough concentration from the public. Insufficient sitting capacity and free doors policy meant a bit of annoying coming and going, yet there was no big disturbance, and he convened to let the full programme unfold: most of those present listened for the first time closely to his fascinating works, not typical for this location. For the present day independent organizer, this unexpected implication that highbrow concerts, before the 80s, could have once had audiences like the crowd at Control is an amazing experimental result of applied research for UNEARTHING THE MUSIC. No illustrated history or archive of electronic music in Romania exists, yet it becomes clearer and clearer that this field, as it was allowed to develop, thrived on aerophobic conditions: too much exposure and it could disappear.
At the end, there were flowers for Erica and Octavian, autographs, heartfelt acclaim. The event's advertising had mostly taken place online, the organizers sharing it on social networks with their friends, and one post included a mention about bringing flowers, not something I have seen before on #experimentalmusic invites. It could be said thus that the performance must have drawn in a public motivated by the curatorial appeal: come discover local pioneers of electronic music played for the first time (still, after 35 years!) on a set-up supervised by the author and technically coherent with the initial plan (8 audio channels for one of the two pieces that was played). Even with the 8 original tracks that Erica miraculously found and digitized, it was hard to find among electronic musician friends in Bucharest the proper soundcard to play them, Erica taking her position at the mixer, as in any other concert of Octavian Nemescu that has electronic sound - almost all of them happened in Bucharest.
But there was one more thing that made the encounter with the public and the concert possible: I am afraid it could also be said that the high attendance was celebrating the feat that seminal Brussels SubRosa label had recently reissued the LP in question, a clear sign that the western public praises this music. The professional world had its chance in '85, when Natural from the LP won the Prize of the International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music (CIME). But now, the story ran full circle online: the music for one side of the LP was produced in a residency at the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music in Ghent using modular synthesis, was released slightly truncated in a small print run by the Electrecord, achieved some cult status with its obscure online presence and, out of all places, Romanian origin, returned to Belgium to be rereleased under more auspicious consequences and full length, came back as a hi-fi consumer product which can no longer be produced in Romania, with more fidelity than what’s available online but in a format that’s used for fetishizing more than for listening, bonus the aura of being available for signing from the author after the free launch event. Beat that.
References
1. Since this is the internet, the information in this article wants to help present Erica Nemescu, about whom for now there isn't too much information online. There is only one other very short clip of her on Youtube, filmed just a week before this one, introducing her as video editor (for a film on whose credits she appears as sound engineer).
2. The LP Gradeatia/Natural was never easy to find, and Andrei Tanasescu deserves credit here for proposing a reissue. The author of this article is glad to have been instrumental in making the connection between him the SubRosa label, which has included this reissue in its Early Electronic Series. 3. The observations concerning the Romanian spectral precedent belong to Octavian Nemescu and can be found in several articles online. The “song”, as he calls it, is “Aum” and was released only in 2000 on a very rare CD, the only recording with Corneliu Cezar's music, published after his death. "Well known in academic circles, Corneliu Cezar was the first one in the Electronic Music Studio, he was a fascinating, complex and universal personality. He was a composer, poet, painter, astrologer, a kind of Romanian Jean Cocteau. He was one of the pioneers of the music avant-garde from Romania.” On a soundcloud associated with the Romanian Contemporary Music Information Center, Cristina Uruc adds, “he was a fore runner of post-modernism in Romanian context. He is now considered rather a visionary of music than a producer of acoustic masterpieces. In the ‘60 he sustained and prophesied a new musical direction rediscovering the natural resonance of the sound within a different historical context – the idea of spectral music was going to materialize itself in Romanian tradition. After 1980 the artistic phenomena no longer interested him. He took more distance of the ideal of skill, originality and aesthetic refinement or accomplishment. After 1970 Cezar fought for the cause of recovering “the state of rendition” in music (musical expressiveness) and the composing manner he called “the organ of styles” – polistylism. Cezar imposed the theory of sonology (as means of applying music therapy)." https://soundcloud.com/romaniannewmusic/corneliu-cezar-aum
4. Irinel Anghel in Contribuţii estetice originale ale muzicii româneşti din a doua jumătate a secolului XX [Original Romanian Aesthetic Contributions form the second half of the XXth century] calls it the recuperation of the natural sound resonance. For example, in AUM appears the whole acoustic spectrum of the 1st - 16th harmonics of C, in a homophonous variant.
5. Protochronism (anglicised from the Romanian: Protocronism, from the Ancient Greek terms for "first in time") is a Romanian term describing the tendency to ascribe, largely relying on questionable data and subjective interpretations, an idealized past […] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protochronism
6. Erica Nemescu’s name appears in the credits for some important animation films like the later Gopo’s Little Man, some real works of art not primarily intended for children. The best example, three conceptual shorts by Zoltan Szilagyi Varga, on which she must have worked alongside husband Octavian Nemescu, who signs the original music. Monologue, the last of these 3 films only played abroad because of censorship, forcing its author to leave the country. This did not stop Animafilm to sell them to Moma.
7. “[…] from his youth, he contributed decisively to the development of the avant-garde in Romanian music. He is representing the second and last generation of its kind (the generation of the 70's), which launched a NEW AVANT-GARDE, who has as main goal not the negation of the tradition (as previous generation did) but THE RECOVERY OF THE ORIGINS, of the PRIMORDIALITY existent at the fundament of all musical traditions, in the spirit of an INNOVATIVE RECOVERY and with the desire of coming to a new artistic universality. This generation may be considered also as the first one to have an aspiration of POSTMODERN character.” Bio posted on the website of the Union of Romanian Composers http://www.ucmr.org.ro/listMembri.asp?CodP=135&TipPag=comp
8. http://www.ucmr.org.ro/Texte/RV-1-2016-1-Interviuri-AFratila.pdf In English at the end of the article
9. More of an underground figure and without the status given by academic palms, another rather singular example exists in Romania of an electronic musician, GA Rodion, rediscovered from dire oblivion. His only album from before '89 never got released, appearing only in 2014 on a UK label named Barely Breaking Even specialised in hip-hop. His music is somewhere in between New Wave and Krautrock. And he insists being called the Father of Electronic music for his tape montages.