Vol. 21 No. 21-22 (2020): ARTES. JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY

The contents of volumes 21-22 of the scientific periodical Artes. Journal of Musicology reflects and develops the themes of the International Musicological Symposium organised in Iaşi in November 2019. For this academic event, the members of the Research Centre “The Science of Music” launched a new orientation of study, synthesised in the title “The current reception and research of musical phenomena”. Each of the two notions has lately become a key topic in the dynamics of scientific interest in art. Approaching works and artists through the lens of variable reception is a controversial topic in musicology, while the association with the problematics of social and political ideology created a veritable wave of axiological reconsideration in the writing of former communist countries. A thematic approach fulfilling this type of research would require the drafting of historic syntheses and evaluations, the study of archives and of biographical testimonies, combined artistic interpretation and musical analyses.
The second key topic in the themes of the symposium and of volumes 21-22, research – the core of academic and scientific activity –, has new parametres as a consequence of the radical change in access to knowledge but also of the connection with the artistic world, out of which it subtracts subjectivism. Research in music, much like in other humanities, reconfigures the criteria along which documentary sources are stratified, as the digital are increasingly prevalent, and relativises the relations between extremes: originality – pastiche, authenticity – simulation, objective distanciation – subjective involvement, etc. In this new landscape artist-researchers are increasingly present, owning up to the methods of documentation and scientific discourse but enriching the text through the testimony of having experienced creative processes.
The four thematic sections – A. Music history. New directions in the interpretation of the artistic past; B. Analytical views of modern and contemporary musical works; C. Current musical performance; D.Ethnomusicology and sacred music – are covered through studies of real interest, belonging to teaching staff or Ph.D. candidates from important institutions of higher education in Romania and the Republic of Moldova. Without offering (as yet) a full picture of the principles and methods of artistic research, the published articles eloquently reflect the contemporary line in theoretical studies founded on the experience of the reception of and of living out artistic acts.

Editor-in-chief,
Prof. Laura Vasiliu, PhD