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Excerpted from Bananafish #15

Ana-Maria Avram, composer, pianist, and conductor, was born in Romania in 1961. After graduating from the National Conservatory of Music in Bucharest, she obtained a degree from the Paris Sorbonne in 1992. In 1994, she was awarded the Grand Prize in Composition from the Romanian Academy. Since 1988, Avram has maintained a close collaboration with Iancu Dumitrescu, but she has also continued to forge her own direction in music. She is considered to be one of the most important Romanian composers of her generation. Her music incorporates the outward semblance of sonic abstraction, reaching it's full development in the synthesis of electroacoustic and instrumental sources.

Her primary works are: “Threnia I-II” and “Orbit of Eternal Grace” for orchestra and soloists; “Ekagrata,” “Swarms,” and “Second Axe” for chamber orchestra; “De sacrae Lamentationem” and “In Nomine Lucis” for large orchestra; among her electronic and instrumental works are “Zodiaque I-IV,” “Signum Gemini,” “Ikarus I-IV,” “Traces, Sillons, Sillages,” “New Arcana,” and “Ascent,” as well as the instrumental and chamber ensemble pieces “Archae,” “Metaboles,” “Quatre Žtudes d'ombre,” “Ikarus-Kronos Quartet,” and “Assonant I-III.”

Her music is published by Edition Modern and Electrecord (Bucharest), ArtGallery and Radio France (Paris), ReR Megacorp (London), and Musicworks (Toronto), and has been performed in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Stanford, Vienna (at the Wien Modern Festival in 1992 and 1994), Paris (at Radio France and the Theatre de la Ville), London (at the Royal Festival Hall), Nancy, Allicante, Lisbon, Baden-Baden, Darmstadt, Belgrade, Cluj-Napoca, and Bucharest. Avram's works have been commissioned by prestigious ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet; Vienna's 20 Jahrhundert,; soloists from l'Orchestre National de France; the Bucharest Philharmonic Orchestra; the Romanian National Orchestra; the Romanian Radio Chamber Orchestra; L'Orchestre de Chambre de Roumanie; and others.

Costin Cazaban is an important composer and musicologist living in Paris. He received his Ph.D. in 1993, with a thesis analyzing musical space and time as logical functions based on the philosophical system of Stephane Lupasco, now published by L'Harmattan (Paris). His music is played in all important European festivals and is published by Editions Salabert (Paris). Cazaban teaches musical aesthetics at the Paris Sorbonne (University of Paris I) and is also a contributor to the French newspaper Le Monde and the magazine Le Monde de la Musique.

Costin Cazaban: Starting from your vision of sampling in music, I'd like to ask you what your relationship is to the music of this century and even that of past centuries. Is there a relationship to the past in what you do?

Ana-Maria Avram: Today I have a rather different perspective on musical history than not too long ago. I used to see many faults there. But the more one knows music, I believe, the more one finds continuities. And one realizes how small, just a drop in an ocean, the tonal music that we know is, and how vast and varied the musical universe is. Indian, Tibetan, Ethiopian, Chinese, Eskimo, or other kinds of music are just as attractive to me, and often even more so, because they developed an interest in parameters of sound that were almost neglected by Occidental music.

These musics have a different respect for the sound and call for a different manner of listening. I also think that certain general principles of past musical traditions are enormously interesting, and their potential usefulness has not been exhausted. For instance, the spirit of development in Beethoven -- which arises from a fabulous parsimony of means, but which creates at the same time a formidable tension, incomparable; or the principle of continuous variation -- as seen in analysis of Debussy's music, innovative in its destruction of classical structures -- remain applicable to any material, even today.

As for contemporary music, I highly regard the music of Scelsi. I feel myself very close to his musical concerns. But the treatment of sound remains rather external in his music. Sound is adored like a mysterious object, but kept at a respectful distance. I conceive of and employ sound in a much more dramatic way.

I also admire the music of Varese and find it exemplary, insofar as it is a music of our era more than of his: I think of his devotion to sound, employed in that vision of electroacoustic experimentation of which he was one of the pioneers, the wild energy which emerges from it, and even the eclecticism of his sound materials, which was such a new concept at the time. Xenakis is important to me, especially because of his absolute rejection of mental idleness in music. For him, making music meant expressing human intelligence by means of sound. He developed an extraordinary method of imagination and inventiveness, which is, after all, synonymous with morality. The quest and the refusal to confine musical thought in Xenakis's music, as well as in Stockhausen's, were significant models for me. They're real artists who revolutionized the musical thought of their time through deep theoretical approaches. I know your aversion to neo-tonal music... When one compares the musical richness and rigor and the force of the artistic approach of these composers to the intellectual poverty of "neo" and "post" currents, one realizes that lamentable perpetuators of tonal music are simply impostors. This movement is ready to die. It was only an epiphenomenon, consciously generated by a certain establishment. Establishments have always imposed conservative tastes, but their force of impact is greater now than it was twenty years ago. This sort of music has always found itself in a real deadlock, and I believe that the future will come from another source of new music, emerging from rock, free jazz, underground, from new and impassioned artists, liberated from academic constraints, with a rich and uncorrupted imagination.