Horaţiu Rădulescu. (German)

Aesthetically speaking, the composer Horaţiu Rădulescu was a musical citoyen. On the other hand, as a Romanian who later chose to become French, he was very strongly rooted in traditional Romanian folk music. This was the source of his profound religiosity, which -- as a consequence of his multicultural background -- should only be understood in a pan-religious sense (this is shown by his lifelong engagement with Lao Tzu). This wide area of tension between a strong Romanian identity and his cosmopolitanism formed the basis of his compositional life. The radical denial of Romanian cultural identity by the totalitarian Ceaucescu regime initially forced Rădulescu into inner emigration; he became a reluctant oppositionist. He left his country for France early on, in 1969, and assumed French citizenship in 1974. Both his pan- or meta-religiosity and eternità in the shape of the universe are represented by his spectral approach to music, which brought him more or less intuitively to his elective homeland of France. Rădulescu was an antipode to Gérard Grisey, and together they were the most important exponents of the spectral aesthetic, which, though both are dead, is far from exhausted in its compositional possibilities. Rădulescu's spectral approach manifests itself in pillars of sound, embedded in a protracted overarching rhythm that listens to sound itself, and seems - very much in keeping with Lao Tzu -- to flow from time. Using various examples from Rădulescu's music, this essay attempts to show and describe how it positions itself in the extreme tension between these opposing individual elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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