Music, Culture and Society: Joel Crotty
7 March 2008
Marketing Romanian Music Abroad (1948-1964): The Use of Totalitarian Language in Various Guises
Joel Crotty
This paper uses two sources that were marketed in the “West” – one was an official party propaganda newspaper, For a lasting peace, for a people’s democracy and the other an academic journal, Rumanian review, that on the surface appeared to be above the direct approach of a communist communiqué. A source from the West that represented a communist mouthpiece, the British-Rumanian Friendship Association’s British-Rumanian Bulletin,_ _has also been included to highlight the extent to which the Romanian authorities went to project its propaganda.
What was the language used? How was “socialist realism”, “cosmopolitanism”, “internationalism” expressed in musical terms? And how did the marketing of music change with the fluctuation of ideology? The period under review reflects an era in which communism had rapidly engulfed every aspect of Romanian life and the Party’s self-justification for societal domination needed both its own people and those abroad to be “educated” in the utopian vision. In terms of theoretical ballast the paper will use the work of Monika Kroupova and Victor Klemperer both of who have studied the totalitarian language from respectively the communist and Nazi “persuasions”.
Joel Crotty is currently the Associate Dean (Graduate Research) in the Faculty of Arts, Monash University. His research interests cover both 20th and 21st century art music of Australia and Romania. The Romanian focus at the current time is on the impact of the mid-20th century communist takeover in Romania on classical music. Aspects of this research were published last year in the Journal of Musicological Research. The projected Romanian investigations include ‘Composing Communism: the prismatic dimensions of memory in the post-communist era’ and a larger project tentatively entitled ‘Romancing culture in the borderlands, 1900-1965: The use of travel writings as a way of re-contextualising Romanian music’.