THIRD STREAM GENRE IN ROMANIAN MUSIC. RICHARD OCHANITZKY-VARIATIONEN

Abstract

At a time when European academic music, as well as long-established jazz on the continent, were in the advanced stages of experimenting with avant-garde languages (integral serialism, Musique concrete, electronic music, mathematical organization, stochastic music, aleatoricism, minimalism etc., respectively free jazz, cool), the Romanian musical culture had come under the influence of a totalitarian ideology, which imposed aesthetic guidelines centered on the principle of accessibility, thus preventing the alignment of the language of the creators of the time to the multiple modern and postmodern directions offered by the universal context. However, the young generation of composers proved receptive to the principles and techniques of avant-garde currents, looking for original means to experiment with new styles, either by adapting them to the sources offered by national music culture or by combining different types of languages. Richard Oschanitzky manages to define himself as a complex creator, with a deep capacity for synthesis, with a permanent openness both to European musical postmodernism with everything it offered as a means of sound expression and to the jazz style in its modern stance, free and fusion. Oschanitzky offers in Variationen an original version of the confluence of the two seemingly antagonistic creative directions, academic / jazz, in which freedom is combined with rigorous organization, dodecaphonic serialism with modalism, improvisation and ostinato, sound elements of Western orientation, local melodic sources and modern jazz.