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In this section, I review literature dealing specifically with Romania. I look only at the relatively small body of research that since the end of the Cold War has reflected on the politics of folk music and ethnomusicology during the socialist period. In other words: I will look at postsocialist research on Romanian ethnomusicology. I also look at research on composed music where it overlaps with my own research.

In general, this body of research on Romania confirms the findings detailed in the previous section for the region as a whole. For example, Speranța Rădulescu (1997) reflects on her own experience in socialist Romania, and what drove her to become an ethnomusicologist during this time, discussing some more general structures of cultural policy in the process. The text focuses on the 1970s and 1980s and includes the time when Rădulescu worked as an ethnomusicologist at the Institute in Bucharest, then called Institut de Cercetări Etnologice și Dialectologice (Institute of Ethnologic and Dialectological Research, IECD). Rădulescu suggests that the Romanian state was generally successful in replacing original folk music with the newly crafted, mass-mediated version it promoted to an extent where only a few ethnomusicologists still knew what real rural folklore was:

With a few exceptions, intellectuals were completely ignorant of the original form of traditional music. All that they knew was the popular music of the media, that is to say a peasant music which was palpably 'improved for the purposes of broadcasting'. (Rădulescu 1997:9)

Like the other texts discussed so far, Rădulescu also describes the judging system, which ensured that only those performers and performances that complied with official policies were awarded and promoted by the state.²⁷

A jury had to include one member of the Securitatea (secret services), one representative of the army and another of the Ministry of Culture and Socialist Education. Theoretically, these were charged with the efficient management of the competition; in practice, they took care that 'convenient' persons won suitable prizes. (Rădulescu 1997:10)

These juries show that ethnomusicology as an academic research discipline was subject to the same cultural policy as the practical sphere of making folk music on stages:

For the problem of political pressures exerted on the traditional musical cultures cannot be dissociated from that of the pressures exercised on ethnomusicology as a science [academic discipline] and implicitly on the intellectual development of people working in it. (Rădulescu 1997:8)

27 In this article Rădulescu does not explain the extent to which she was in a privileged position. For example, she was able to study in Paris and one of her books (1984b) won a prestigious award in Socialist Romania.

Rădulescu identifies the folk music manufactured by the state with the state. For her, this music embodies some of the characteristics she also associates with the socialist state at large:

We [herself and other musicians and intellectuals] felt that it [folklore as transmitted by the radio] was manufactured in the image of our society: planned from the 'centre', ideologically conformist, hopelessly optimistic, noisy, artificial, false. (Rădulescu 1997:8)

An ethnography that reflects on cultural policy towards folk music in Romania is Nixon 1998.

The British social anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Paul Nixon carried out fieldwork in Romania in 1979 for about a year, until the Romanian state forced him to suspend it. Nixon suggests that the Romanian secret service later discredited him in the UK as retaliation for not following orders of the Romanian bureaucrats, resulting in the loss of his job. He therefore published his research only after the end of the Ceaușescu regime, a decision that enabled him to go back to Romania and carry out more interviews.

Like many fieldworkers in his time, Nixon was interested in rural folk music, but unlike others he was not willing to ignore the fact that cultural politics were shaping folk music everywhere. His ethnography is centered on the Transylvanian Gurghiu Valley, where Roma, Hungarians, and Romanians live together. This topic touches on the identity politics that were an especially important topic in the increasingly nationalistic 1970s.

Nixon's findings on identity politics are important, but perhaps his research is most revealing where he is able to show the contradictions between official doctrines and reality. For example, he observes a folk music competition where the audience dutifully attends the performance of an ensemble that embodies state policy, but they do not show excitement.

Descriptions like these are virtually absent in most of the 1970s and 1980s, indicating that, if the socialist governments wanted their cultural policies not to be internationally known, they were successful.

In 2007 the Journal of Musicological Research published a special issue on "music and ideologies," which focused on Romania. Two of the four contributions on Romania discuss nearly the same topic. Crotty (2007) and Sandu-Dediu (2007) examine the range of options available to composers roughly during the first decade after Romania became a Soviet satellite late in December 1947. They focus on Romanian composers and the Composers' Union, which, following the Soviet model, acquired an important regulative function for many music professionals, such as composers and music researchers.

Both Crotty and Sandu-Dediu (Sandu-Dediu 2006, Sandu-Dediu 2007) employ the term

"socialist realism" to describe socialist cultural policy. This term seems not to have been used in contemporary Romanian discourse.²⁸ It originates in Soviet discourses on aesthetics from the 1930s (Sandu-Dediu 2007:179, cf. Groys 1992). Crotty and Sandu-Dediu employ this term to describe an anti-formalist artistic program:

28 Crotty and Sandu-Dediu do not quote the term "socialist realism" from Romanian discourse and I never came across it in Romanian ethnomusicology of the socialist era. Instead they refer to sources from the Soviet Union. I am pointing this out not to undermine their argument, but to highlight that they make visible a Soviet influence that existed and was fairly obvious to most people involved in the 1950s and later, but was rarely acknowledged in contemporary Romanian discourse. The fact that an important term such as "socialist realism" was not widely used in Romanian discourse illustrates the pattern of familiarity with Soviet policy without any explicit acknowledgement of it.

The message of a work of art had to be clear-cut, mobilizing, tonic, accessible to large masses of working people and it had to comply with the doctrine of socialist realism, in accordance with Stalin's famous watchword: 'Writers are engineers of the human soul'. (Sandu-Dediu 2007:179)

Crotty and Sandu-Dediu do not distinguish strictly between socialist realism as an aesthetic program and a system of cultural policy that institutionalizes and enforces such a program. They do, however, describe such a political system in passing, referring to characteristics similar to those pointed out in the previous sections:

[I]n the new cultural system imposed by Moscow, the forms of art and literature became instruments of state politics. Ideals of the autonomy of art and formalism were viewed as heretical concepts, dangerous to those who might have continued to advocate them, because art had to serve the creation of the 'new man,' for example, to convince peasants to enthusiastically accept collectivization, and so forth. (Sandu-Dediu 2007:179)

Crotty and Sandu-Dediu highlight the role of the composer Matei Socor, who from 1949 to 1954 served as the president of the influential Union of Composers and Musicologists, a successor to the earlier Society of Composers. His term as president coincided with the reorganization of this institution following Soviet models (Crotty 2007:155, cf. Fitzpatrick 1992). Socor not only promoted "total Sovietization" (Crotty 2007:155), but also and more specifically socialist realism as an aesthetic program in Romanian music. What was regarded as socialist realism was codified in various speeches and writings such as "the famous 1948 Soviet anti-formalist resolutions"

(Crotty 2007:155) of Soviet politician Andrei Zhdanov. Translated into Romanian in the year of their publication, they functioned as a guideline in Romania until the Romanian Composers' Union published their own resolution in 1952, according to which composers were urged to

"struggle intransigently against every manifestation of formalism, impressionism, atonality, and cosmopolitanism, against the bowing and scraping before decadent bourgeois art" (quoted in Crotty 2007:156). Next to formalism, cosmopolitanism was another target in this context: it implied the rejection of Western cultural influences, while the term "internationalism" in this context denotes admired Soviet-style models (Crotty 2007:154).

Crotty summarizes the central idea of this system of cultural policy as "a tool for the dissemination of the [Communist] Party's propaganda" (Crotty 2007:156). Generally, absolute music was considered problematic while programmatic music and functional music, such as "a rousing song sung by schoolchildren" (Crotty 2007:156), were encouraged in socialist realism.

Crotty and Sandu-Dediu describe the time after Stalin's death in 1953 and the end of Socor's role as president of the Composers' Union in 1954 as the first of several periods of relaxation.

Socor's successor at the Union "possessed the diplomatic skills to be able to keep direct political intervention at bay." (Crotty 2007:157)

Crotty and Sandu-Dediu argue that socialist realism did not go away when Socor left, but that it remained as one current next to others. However, other aesthetical programs which were largely repressed during the Stalinist period became possible again. Other positions were tolerated as long as they did not openly contradict official policies and did not draw too much on ideas associated with cosmopolitanism: "Abstract music could find a place in the repertoire (if only

fleetingly) if titles and/or program notes were added that underlined its socialist commitment"

(Crotty 2007:158).

It is no accident that both Crotty and Sandu-Dediu single out extremes: Socor, a clear representative of socialist realism in music, and Andricu, a composer who fell prey to exaggerated ideological accusations and injustice. Although by focusing on extremes they risk painting a schematic history populated by heroes and villains, this seems to be a good first step to evaluate which possibilities were available for Romanian composers at the time. Their analysis is also helpful because they work on a chronology that shows a succession of periods of strict enforcement of political direction (during Stalin's lifetime) and relaxation or thaws (the first begins after Stalin's death), the latter of which appear to coincide with more general periods of relaxation in Romanian politics (cf. Tismaneanu 2004).

Crotty and Sandu-Dediu do not discuss ethnomusicology and they mention folk music only in passing, as one of the welcomed influences of composed music in socialist realism. However, it is quite possible that the concept of socialist realism was also applied to state folklore.

If socialist realist music is "beautiful and comprehensible, but at the same time monumental" as Crotty quoting Jirí Fukac (Crotty 2007:161) states, then it is likely that the same aesthetic program was also at work when state institutions such as the IEF and state officials evaluated the folk music produced, recorded, and published by the socialist state. If so, it would also indicate that the doctrines and programs pointed out by Crotty and Sandu-Dediu were also applied to folk music performances and, as such, that they were relevant for Romanian ethnomusicologists. In this literature review, I have outlined several attempts to describe the sonic features of socialist folklore, especially in the works of Giurchescu, Rădulescu and Rice. A characterization like "beautiful, comprehensive, monumental" is roughly compatible with their descriptions of socialist folklore.

In her dissertation, Sabina Pauța-Pieslak (2007a) looks at one specific case of how a single genre of folk music was treated during socialism. She focuses on colinde (carols) as performed by the choir Madrigal. Her choice of topic is motivated by childhood memories from when she was growing up in Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this time her parents sang in the choir Madrigal, then Romania's leading early music ensemble. She remembers that during Christmas the family secretly listened to the choir's recordings of colinde, which were illegal at the time. Years later, after emigrating to the US, she investigates how colinde acquired a political meaning, how listening to this music could signify resistance to the socialist state and how a leading ensemble like Madrigal was able to record and perform illegal repertoire in spite of tight censorship. She finds that colinde were suspicious to socialists because of their association with religion.²⁹

29 It is not always readily apparent which (musical) traditions the socialists regarded as religious or undesirable and to which degree this lead to a suppression of the respective tradition. Also sometimes the treatment of certain genres changed over decades. Later I will argue that for ethnomusicologists during the socialist period it was possible to research colinde, but that it was almost impossible to perform them inside Romania to a larger public (as illustrated by Pauța-Pieslak).

Madrigal performances were indeed tightly supervised by the state. For example, members of the secret service accompanied the choir on tours to foreign countries. For such tours and on special occasions the ensemble was officially allowed to perform colinde, for example after a successful European tour. While the state was able to regulate the choir's performances inside and outside the country, it was not able control all recordings made on such occasions. Inside Romania, people could privately listen to these recordings. Furthermore, in spite of the near total control of what could be published, the interpretations of recordings were to some extent beyond the state's control. Through the interplay of colinde censorship, sanctioned performances and illegally consumed recordings, colinde required a connotation of political resistance, which became perhaps most clear when Madrigal's colinde recordings were used during the 1989 revolution. They were played on the radio after Ceaușescu attempted to flee, signifying change and the end of Ceaușescu's regime (Pieslak 2007a:178).

In more than two dozen articles mostly published in two edited volumes (Marian-Bălaşa 2003c, Marian-Bălaşa 2011a, cf. Mengel 2013), Marin Marian-Bălașa has discussed various issues of postsocialist ethnomusicology in Romania. Unlike any other Romanian ethnomusicologist, he focuses on the domain of research rather than that of musical practices, covering both the history of Romanian ethnomusicology and its entanglement with politics, and often treating them as two sides of the same coin. He is one of the few researchers who addressed aspects and periods which otherwise receive little scrutiny. This includes the fascist tendencies in Romanian ethnomusicology during the 1930s and 1940s as well as the last decades before Ceaușescu's fall. In recent years he has focused on anti-Semitism in music research in both time periods. Furthermore, he looks at musical developments since the fall of the Iron Curtain, emphasizing manele, a recent musical genre of popular music which is often associated with Turkish or Oriental origins. Marian-Bălașa is not so much interested in manele as a musical genre, but as a topic that separates different factions within present-day society and through which xenophobia is negotiated on a political stage (cf. Beissinger 2007, Giurchescu and Rădulescu 2011).

Most of the postsocialist research on Romania and its folk music is published in relatively short articles or chapters. It deals both with short periods, such as Crotty's work on the late 1940s and early 1950s, and with long time spans, such as much of Marian-Bălașa's historical work. My work is both broader and narrower: I attempt to look at one relatively small part of Romanian ethnomusicology - the research carried out at a single research institution – and attempt to follow it over many decades. By doing so, I hope I can follow my subject in greater detail than existing research; I also pay greater attention to Romanian ethnomusicological discourse than most.

However, my research does not cover Romanian ethnomusicology in its entirety, as the comparison with Marian-Bălașa's work makes clear. He discusses several aspects not related to the IEF, which hence play no important role in my research, such as an ultranationalist ethnomusicology during the 1920s and 1930s.

POSTSOCIALIST ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

Recent investigations of folk music in "actually existing socialism" tended to focus on the state as the one of the most important agents shaping the realities of folk music during the socialist period.

Inevitably, the focus on the state resulted in increased attention to the cultural policy created and enforced almost exclusively by state institutions. In this context the wider political context - until the 1990s, almost anathema to folk music research - became a relevant topic. Postsocialist ethnomusicology has analyzed a growing number of specific case studies on different kinds of music, including folk and popular music.

I have here reviewed mostly examples from scholarship on Bulgaria, but even a cursory look at studies of other Socialist countries indicates that there are many parallels in the cultural policy of folk music, which hitherto have been studied neither comparatively nor systematically.

Examples of commonalities include a system of oversight that resembles censorship and applies to media, performances and research. As a result of common or similar policies, many socialist states create a gamut of institutions for their folk music, including large ensembles (folk orchestras, dance ensembles), research and higher education institutions, as well as separate institutions for amateurs, which in Romania were called case de cultura (houses of culture). These were often new folk music institutions³⁰ which tended to replace the more traditional practice of folk music in a systematic and quasi-colonial fashion, especially in the early period of socialism in the Eastern Europe, the late 1940s and early 1950s. In this phase especially folklore practices related to religion were actively suppressed.

Explicit postsocialist research concerning Romanian folk music is rare, although two topics have received some attention. First, research on the cultural policy of art music during the socialist period, however, is relevant for folk music since the policies were often derived from common political directives and enforced by or overseen by the same institutions (such as the Composers' Union). Second, identity politics have received perhaps the most attention in postsocialist research on Romania. Research both inside (Marian-Bălașa) and outside ethnomusicology (Verdery) indicates that national ideology permeates intellectual activity during nearly all decades of the 20^th century. Yet brief periods were marked by a significant relaxation of nationalistic restrictions mandated by the political domain, so that in certain periods research on the music of Romania's minorities is possible, while at other times the same texts would not have passed censorship. The most important of these thaws happens in Romania after Ceaușescu became the secretary general, from the mid to late 1960s, a phase in which Ceaușescu eliminated political rivals and enjoyed a higher level of public support than in other periods (cf. Tismaneanu 2004).

So far postsocialist ethnomusicology has by and large focused on musicians, composers and arrangers – those who actively produce music -, as well as on musics which tended to be ignored during the socialist period, such as the music of the Roma. After the end of the Cold War, it is still important to determine the leeway individuals had within systems at specific times and in specific

30 Not in all cases, the creation of such institutions coincides with the advent of the socialist period; occasionally, such institutions existed earlier.

contexts. Yet a more intimate knowledge of cultural policies of folk music is necessary to

contexts. Yet a more intimate knowledge of cultural policies of folk music is necessary to