RĂZBOIUL ÎN MUZICĂ
WARFARE IN MUSIC

Summary/Abstract: Warfare is a common phenomenon of the evolution of humanity in the process of building the society of our times. Moreover, the implications that the concept has in the realm of human social perspectives has often been studied by multiple political, historian and social researchers. The question that remains is what implications has a strictly external concept in the sphere of musical art? Music is a complex phenomenon that has accompanied humanity since its inception by adopting multiple forms. The compositional act itself can be defined, in a broad sense, as the processing of a certain musical content springing from the infinite cognitive processing of the individual. What are the implications of war in this whole preamble? In the psychological dimension it is a certainty that people are influenced in their development and evolution as social individuals largely by the environment, as well as by genetic predispositions, this being the debate in continuous progress called nature versus nurture. Therefore, the personalities and characters of musical composers are definitely influenced by the political events that happened in their times. It is also well known that many musical worksdating from previous centuries have a multitude of references to the conflicting political acts that took place in the immediate social proximity of the composer’s environment. Such explicit references, a suggestive title of the work or a dedication describing the commemoration of a conflicting political event, are often found in the evolution of music history, and the real challenge lies in identifying the methods by which the composer inserted and evoked throughout musical means (melody, rhythm, harmony, forms, orchestration) the image of conflictual events. The main premise in the research approach is the term `conflict`; the concept is common in the two areas concerned. In the sphere of tonal music, the musical conflict can be found in different hypostases: musical intervals characterized by tensions (increased fourth, decreased fifth, seventh major, seventh minor) that need to be resolved; conflicting harmonic chains (increased, decreased, seventh, ninth, eleventh chords) that are naturally resolved on perfect major or minor chords; formal structures configured in antithesis based on strong contrasts revealing a conflict between their sections. The musical material can give us a broad vision of how the composer impregnated social ideological conflicts in the natural development of the artistic dimension through the prism of the specific means of expression mentioned above; or, configured in the form of an interrogation: how is war reflected in the musical mind of the composers?

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