09/01/2026
More from Romanian Composer Livia Teodorescu-Ciocănea (from her fabulous interview in the July/August Fanfare Magazine):
Asked how she translates feelings into music:
"Your question is about the mystery at the heart of all musical creation. The real question, in my opinion, is how music and feeling turn out to be made of the same substance. Feelings don’t have shapes. They don’t have colors or edges or weight. And music doesn’t have content—not in the way language does. You don’t decode it. You don’t translate it. You undergo it."
"Susanne Langer, the American philosopher, refined this beautifully. She said music is not the expression of feeling—it is the logical form of feeling. What she meant is that feelings have shapes in time—they rise, they swell, they hesitate, they collapse, they resolve or fail to resolve. And music moves through time in the same way. A musical phrase doesn’t represent grief. It moves the way grief moves—it has grief’s rhythm, grief’s arc, grief’s weight."
Thoughts welcome...
