Vol. 26 No. 25-26 (2022): ARTES. JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY

The works presented in the framework of the International Conference of the Doctoral Programmes from the “George Enescu” National University of Arts (4-6 November 2021) are the main contents of the joint 25th and 26th volumes of the scientific journal Artes. Journal of Musicology. The topic of the conference – Senses of interpretation in artistic research – was extremely challenging for specialty research.
In music, performance is a concrete and individualised phenomenon, as one does not come across in the other arts, thus differentiated even from the theatrical fact. The problematics of performance, regarding the analysis of a sensitive, practical, emotional, aesthetic phenomenon, is a newer topic in music research, also being treated from a theoretical point of view in recent years. We are drawing closer to what the researcher-theoreticians mean to say by artistic research, a concept still underdeveloped in music. Nevertheless, at the level of doctoral studies there is the tendency of associating research with observations on one’s own creative process, as the author is both the researcher and the object of research in self-analytical and self-referential works. The development of this practice is encouraging for the conclusions that musicologists can reach over time by perceiving the multiple nuances of the process of performative work. Classical musicology is something else: a science, in which all the launched ideas and information must be proven through data, through results of investigation and analysis – an objective thinking phenomenon. Not until recently, in the post-structuralist period, have hermeneutic theories permeated musicology, determining a wider addressability of texts, which can interest not only specialists, but also intellectuals in general, the wider music-lover circle, artists with differing options from the visual or performative areas.
By also launching this direction in the theoretical reflection of Iași musicologists, the conference Senses of interpretation in artistic research and the articles published in the journal join the new tendency in musicology of integrating critical observations of a subjective nuance in the analysis of the works, performances and scientific texts in the literature dedicated to sonic art. This volume of Artes. Journal of Musicology is recommended through interesting titles and notorious authors but also through works belonging to the young generation of researchers – all grouped in the three sections: 1. Directions, themes, new styles in the hermeneutics of music; 2. Byzantinology studies – extended classical methods; 3. Doctoral research.
We dedicate the two issues of the journal to professor Liliana Gherman, the initiatior and initial editor of the Artes journal, a modern and rigorous musicologist, and to professor Gabriela Ocneanu, a passionate researcher of the history of music and Byzantinology – both of whom passed away in the year 2021.

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