Ştefan Firca
Stefan Firca holds a Master’s degree in music history from the National University of Music in Bucharest, Romania, and has completed his Ph.D. in musicology at the Ohio State University, United States, with a dissertation on the carnivalesque aspects of the late 1960s psychedelic culture (Circles and Circuses: Carnivalesque Tropes in the Late 1960s Musical and Cultural Imagination, 2011). With a teaching experience in the history of both art music and rock music, he has written on topics ranging from Henry Purcell to Giacinto Scelsi, but is particularly interested in the popular culture of the 20th century, the nexus between avant-garde and popular music, film and film music, and issues of cultural imagination.
Stefan Firca has teached at the Ohio State University School of Music (2003-2011) and is currently a lecturer at the National University of Music in Bucharest, in the department of Musicology (courses on History of Pop Music Culture and Musicology), while pursuing a MIDAS post-doctoral program at the same university.
Stefan Firca was involved in various editorial and collaborative projects, from book, journal (Opus Journal, 1998-2000) and score editing to radio broadcasts. He was awarded the Graduate Outstanding Achievement Award (2006) and the Jack & Zoe Johnstone Graduate Award for Excellence in Musicology (2007) at the Ohio State University School of Music, Columbus, USA.
Journal articles: “Daniel Kientzy in the Romanian Musical Landscape”, Muzica, Vol. 1 (29), 1997; “Music-Text Relationship in George Dima’s lieder”, SCIA, Vol. 44, 1997; “Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas”, Opus, Vol. 1 (1), 1998; “Giacinto Scelsi: Fragments from a Portrait”, Opus, Vol. 2 (3), 1999; “Order and Classification in ‘The Art of Fugue'”, Opus, Vol. 1 (2), 1999; “Modal Projection and Developmental Principles in Gheorghe Costinescu’s ‘Modal Inventions'”, Opus, Vol. 1 (5), 2000; “Cross and Double-Reading Musical Modernism: A Palimpsestic View”, Muzica., Vol. 4 (24), 2005; “Music and the Specters of Marx”, Muzica, Vol. 2 (66), 2006
Chapters in books: “Anatol Vieru’s Theoretical Writings: The Chronology of the Modal Direction”, in Simpozion de muzicologie ‘Anatol Vieru,’ Bucuresti, 1999, Valentina Sandu-Dediu, Patricia Firca, Stefan Firca (eds.), Bucharest: Editura Muzicala, 2001; “Rumänische Komponisten aus der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts”, in Rumänische Musik nach 1944, Saarbrücken, Germany: Pfau-Verlag, 2006; “Manele between Underground and Mainstream: Anglo-American Notes on a Subcultural Style” , in Manele in Romania: Cultural Expression and Social Meaning in Balkan Popular Music, Speranţa Rădulescu (ed.), Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012 (forthcoming).
Books: Imbroglio, Bucharest: Editura Muzicala, 2012 (forthcoming)
Links: Bio, Ph.D. dissertation abstract