LUCIAN MEŢIANU
- A SOUND WITHOUT A PAST

Editors: Alina Şerban,
Ştefania Ferchedău
Published by
Institute of the Present
2019
36 pages
15 x 23 cm
Romanian/English
Softcover
ISBN 978‑606‑94536‑6‑7

Price: 28 lei

Born in 1937 in Cluj, Lucian Meţianu belongs to the Romanian Neo‑avant‑garde music of the late 1960s. Preoccupied with the mathematical translation of sound, Meţianu develops a componis‑ tic thinking nurtured by the gravity of the referential centre, bringing back into discussion, together with other colleagues of his generation (Octavian Nemescu, Corneliu Cezar), the spectre of natural harmonics, the universal and the oscillation as a fundament of the world. In regards to the musical structure, he works with numerical ratios, particularly with the Fibonacci string and Lorentz equation with respect to the study of chaos and of unpredictability. Employing the idea of transformation as a composition principle, he conceives a minimalistic music, in the sense of maximum economy, defined as non‑repetitive and transformational, which constitutes the ground of his works, including Ergodica (1967), Conexe (1967–1968), String Quartet No. 2 (1968), Pythagoreis (1971), Evolutio (1973). Having a passion for electronics, he specialises at the Studio for Electronic Music of the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, where he completes his pioneering work, Pythagoreis. Living in Lausanne since 1984, he established an acoustic and electronic music laboratory at the Conservatory, where he taught from 1990 to 1998.