Liviu Marinescu
Liviu Marinescu’s works have received recognition in numerous festivals of new music throughout the world, and have been performed by prominent orchestras and ensembles, including the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Czech Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic, Orchestra 2001 in Philadelphia, the National Chamber Radio and Music Academy orchestras in Bucharest, as well as the 20th Century Consort, North-South Consonance, and Archaeus ensembles.
His debut at the Bucharest International New Music Festival when he was 21 years old, was noted by the Parisian newspaper Le Monde de la Musique, which described one of the concerts he co-organized with other young composers and artists as being “inventive in its evolution, content, and substance,” and promoting an “anti-conformist view.” Soon after, the Bucharest newspaper Actualitatea Muzicala acknowledged that Liviu Marinescu “not only has the intelligence and maturity expected from a modern artist, but also the ability to express himself through sounds in a convincing way.” In the U.S., his music has been praised by numerous publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, while the critics of The Strad, Strings Magazine, and New York Concert Review recognized its “real expressive power and attractive rhetoric,” “majestic assertiveness,” and “startling moments.” His works have been recorded and released by Centaur, Navona, and Capstone Records and published by the American Society of Composers.
Over the past two decades, Marinescu’s voice has brought the contemporary music scene a refreshing aesthetic stance, in which the traditions shaped by the Eastern European avant-garde have been organically integrated with the sounds and attitudes of the postmodern era. His early works, such as his first String Quartet from 1990 and the Chamber Concerto of 1993, focused on the exploration of heterophony, sound mass, and various types of elastic sound textures. This direction was soon to be changed. Following Edwin London’s invitation to study in the U.S. in 1994, Marinescu developed a growing interest in the distortion and twisting of established compositional forms and practices, through the use of paraphrases, quotations, and subtle humor. The widely acclaimed Quodlibet Sonata of 1997 as well as many of the chamber and orchestral works that followed, including Mozamorphosis, Déjà Vu, Pastiche, Bach Variations, Über Alles or Homage Collage, are representative of Marinescu’s original voice. Recently, his interest in exploring acoustic instruments in combination with electronic media has led to the development of new sonic gestures, and the creation of an archetypal musical language, more personal and refined.
Equally committed to mentoring young musicians, Liviu Marinescu has taught a wide range of composition and theory courses at Concordia College, MN, West Chester University, PA, University of Maryland, and Cleveland State University, and has been a visiting professor at the Trondheim Conservatory in Norway and the National University of Music in Romania. Since his 2002 appointment as coordinator of music composition and theory at California State University Northridge, Dr. Marinescu has received numerous awards and grants from the Fulbright Commission, the American Music Center, ASCAP, Meet the Composer Fund, as well as the Fromm Music Foundation Prize at Harvard University.
MUSIC: Harmonic Fields