Accessibility and Avantgarde in Tiberiu Olah’s Music for Osânda
Accessibility and Avantgarde in Tiberiu Olah’s Music for Osânda

Summary/Abstract: Considered by film critic Tudor Caranfil to be one of Sergiu Nicolaescu’s finest achievements, Osânda, completed in 1976, is based on the novel Velerim and Veler Doamne by Victor Ion Popa (1933). For Tiberiu Olah, Osânda is his 27th experience in film music, having composed music for almost 40 films over four decades. In Osânda, the dramatic arc of the music is constructed in a flexible and effective way, with a constant concern for the balance between unity and diversity. On the one hand, the same musical structure is used to highlight certain congruencies between different moments of the film and to give cohesion to the whole. On the other hand, diversity is ensured through the use of the variational principle, different variations of orchestration and, last but not least, the integration of the concept of open form, specific to the avant-garde – consisting in the selection and/or different ordering of fragments within a structure. The music in Osânda is a demonstration of how Olah has been able to combine the modern and the traditional, unity and diversity, and has succeeded in creating music that is aimed at the general public, but which incorporates techniques and procedures specific to radical modernism.

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