Just to say that the whole field of (dispassionate, non-partisan,
non-nationalist) musicology in Romania awaits post-communist scholarly
attention on a big scale. It's a job for more than one person, team-work
preferably. There are plenty of informative, sometimes technically heavy
and theoretically compromised monographs from the long authoritarian
half-century--they should not be ignored but, caveat emptor, don't believe
all you read! Few local musicologists from the 1930s/40s era were able to
embrace the challenges of unbiased intellectual analysis between 1948 and
1990. They were usually obliged to 'know' their Party-Line conclusions
before reaching them. One book which merits wider attention was prepared
(privately, clandestinely) by the late Romeo Ghircoiasiu before the big
changes of 1989. He was inspired by Warren Dwight Allen's masterly
_Philosophies of Music History_ , a pre-War US gem which Ghircoiasiu nursed
himself on in his home in Cluj, and extended as best he could, synthesising
Central and E.European aspects of the notated heritage of the
late-18th-19th-centuries with documentation of vernacular musics in
Romanian language territories, all in an open-minded,
non-compartmentalising way which runs against institutional fixations in
our time.


His book is of course limited--how could it not be? -- he was the first to
admit its shortcomings when I discussed it with him prior to publication in
1992. It merits English/French/German translations, in my view. It's a
useful model, an important contribution. For those who can get it:


Romeo Ghircoiasiu (there should be a ',' under the 's'):

_Cultura Muzicala Romaneasca in Secolele XVIII-XIX_, Bucuresti, 1992
(Sorry, there's a pile of accents unavailable on this screen--they do make
a difference to pronunciation and meaning).


Hope this helps a little bit -


Good Wishes -


Paul Nixon