STUDIA UBB MUSICA, LXVII, 2, 2022 (p.

245 – 251)
(RECOMMENDED CITATION)

BOOK REVIEW

WHY THIS BOOK HAS BECOME SO NECESSARY TO ME

(PASCAL BENTOIU, GÂNDIREA MUZICALĂ (MUSICAL
THINKING), BUCHAREST: EIKON, 2022, 2ND EDITION)

This introductory text is not an actual book review. To explain my

statement, I will invite the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, for whom a
written and published text that finds its recipient and becomes necessary to
the latter is an epistle. And I know his answer would be the one I would
expect: This is a reply to a letter. One sent to Pascal Bentoiu in this rather
unusual way. And that would not be untrue, because this is a letter to the
Maestro. And I would personally add that it is also a confession. Indeed,
going through the text of the book, I understood that it was addressed to me.
Because by writing it, the composer unwittingly revealed to me, in such a
fatherly way, things that I needed in my professional growth. He thus obliged
me to write my own “letter” to him, even though he will never receive it.
Consequently, I see myself compelled to make my own confession,
convinced that he would have shown complete understanding towards my
attitude. Just as he did years ago when he accepted several interview
questions from a novice musicologist.
It is only conventionally that I treat the text of this book as an essay.
Even more so as Pascal Bentoiu says it himself: This work is therefore
intended to be an organized confession rather than a philosophical approach
to music. The emphasis obviously falls on the phrase organized confession.
One formulated in perfect analogy with Johann Sebastian Bach’s prefaces
to his own works: … for the use and profit of young musicians who are
anxious to learn (The Well-Tempered Clavier), and in another place: ... for
music lovers, to refresh their spirits (The Goldberg Variations).
The first thing I disagree with Pascal Bentoiu about is his quality of
aesthetician, which he explicitly claims in Avertisment (Disclaimer). There is
nothing aesthetic in the architecture of the book, nor in the interpretive

©2022 STUDIA UBB MUSICA. Published by Babeş-Bolyai University.

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 OLEG GARAZ

discourse applied to the abstractions of a composer’s consciousness. And

that is because the aesthetic justification is glaringly insufficient for the ideas
contained in this book. This is an essentially musicological text and discourse.
With a clear and gradually accumulative structure. With an orientation toward
thoroughness, differentiation, taxonomic expansion, and involvement of
increasingly advanced concepts. With an efficient and accurate albeit clear
terminology, richly argued and revealingly suggestive. With concise and
pertinent definitions, closely accompanied by convincing demonstrations meant
to guide and inculcate the author’s personal views as deeply as possible in
the reader’s consciousness. And with everything camouflaged in a reflective
and overtly essayistic garb.
Indeed, in Gândirea muzicală (Musical Thinking), the discourse is
different from the technical consistency and analytical excellence exhibited
in the masterful book titled Capodopere enesciene (Enescian Masterpieces)
(Bucharest: Editura Muzicală, 1984). Or, this is not about the same musicology,
with its excitingly diverse applied forms. And, to paraphrase Ioan Petru Culianu,
one can say that in the case of Gândirea muzicală (Musical Thinking) we are
speaking of a true composer’s toolbox 1, essential to a musician who embarks
either on the path of compositional development or on that of musicology.
A poetics and a hermeneutics whose common denominator are the title –
Gândirea muzicală (Musical Thinking).
This last title is emblematic of both the value of the work and the
composer’s profound and brave intuition because it puts forth the key phrase
for the understanding of musical theory and practice. For example, what has
existed so naturally for a long time already – the phrase philosophical
thinking (of the Ancient Greece, of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, of
Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Husserl etc.), or political thinking
(from Plato and Machiavelli to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville,
Habermas, Popper, Hayek etc.) – finally finds its relevance and recognition
also in the craft and art of organized sounds. We know about mousike techné
(skill, prowess in the practice of music) and aesthesis (meaning “sensations”,
or rather feelings of beauty, utterly beautiful or downright “barbaric” – a feeling
accompanying music). But we know nothing about μουσική σκέψη (mousike
sképsi – musical thinking), about which neither Pythagoras, nor Plato or
Aristoxenos of Tarentum, the musicologist, left a single line. And then, thinking
itself is commonly represented as an operating procedure carrying lexical
meanings. An exclusively notional thinking. Even more so, because, as the

1 Borrowed from: Ioan Petru Culianu, Călătorii în lumea de dincolo (Otherworldly Journeys],
Bucharest: Nemira, 1994, title of Chapter 1 – Trusa istoricului pentru a patra dimensiune
(A Historian's Kit for the Fourth Dimension].

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author himself states: Scientific thinking is valid when it accords with reality.
Which is the reality artistic (i.e. musical – author’s note) thinking must accord
with?
And here is Pascal Bentoiu’s proposal – the book Gândirea muzicală
(Musical Thinking) as a dictionary, learning guide, set of instructions, descriptions
of procedures and conceptual tools, and, ultimately, a set of maps of the mind
thinking through sounds – all of which are required in representing the
phenomenon of music in its own terms and, obviously, in knowingly relating
about music. Because, according to Pascal Bentoiu, musical thinking is by
no means thinking about music, no matter how aesthetic or philosophical
both may be, but thinking the music. Like a personal formulation of the
answer to the question how (that is, in what way) can music be thought and,
especially, from what and how is music (itself) made?
And this, without the “flares” of some descriptions of psycho-affectivity,
accompanied by false “road signs” such as the aesthetic categories,
analytics of the beautiful and the sublime, the insufficiently adequate tropes
of rhetoric or the multitude of allegedly illustrative signs of semiotics. Hence
my flat-out refusal to accept the aesthetic, as well as the philosophical in this
text. And gradually, as the reading progresses, it becomes clear that in an
unostentatious (albeit for me exciting and seductive) way, we are speaking
about the technology of the musical (object) and of musicality (substance and
quality) as technologies of the impossible. Because how else can it be when
thinking the invisible and the unrepresentable? Or when (this time more
extensively) thinking the sonorous and the actual (real) sound (as understood
by Polish musicologist Jozef Chominski), for whom music proper, in its traditional
Baroque-Classical-Romantic sense, becomes only a particular case. And here
again, I will paraphrase Culianu, who suggests a fourth dimension, obviously
meaning the situation in another dimension of thinking.
After the reflexive and the essayistic, a third parameter of (self)”
camouflage” is the propaedeutic in its heuristic sense. The transmission of
knowledge involves “coercion”, which produces revelations. Far from being
condescending and in no explicit manner, the author’s narrative aims, with
the wisdom of a true teacher, to achieve the only goal of this book: to
transform the reader by inciting his curiosity and ultimately by awakening his
enlightening amazement at the unveiled mystery of each abstraction treated
like a “character” of the narrative “performance”.
Each “abstraction” is assigned a chapter. And each provides an
answer to the question above: from what and how is music made? It is only
here that logic intervenes. One that is even more necessary, the more abstract –
i. e. invisible and non-referential – the object it is applied to is – music itself.
The logic of the discourse about music will have to be, in this case, exquisitely

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“forged”. The architecture of the book’s content is simple, and therefore effective.
I would say even of an elegant consistency. And in total agreement with
composer Edison Denisov’s statement: “If the score looks bad in one place,
it will certainly sound bad in that place.” Hence the conclusion: the author of
this book organized his text as a “score” and conceived the narrative
dramaturgy literally in terms of an “orchestration”.
The consecution of the ten (actually nine) chapters numbered accordingly
is organized like an ascending “slope” – from (more) simple to (increasingly)
complex. The author himself confesses: Essentially, I was showing that
musical thinking follows (at least in the initial stages of the work) the uncertain
paths of induction rather than the implacable paths of deduction. Induction,
as is known, is the set of logical processes whereby we rise from the
particular to the general, from the phenomenon to the essence (p. 182).
At the same time, glancing over the Cuprins (Contents), we notice the
symmetrical ordering of the chapters: 1+4+4+1. Starting with a (self-)explanatory
Introducere (Introduction), the book concludes with the keystone of the entire
discourse – the tenth chapter titled Gândirea muzicală (Musical Thinking),
grounding and legitimizing the idea and concept of the entire book. Two
“tetralogies” are located between these extremes, an idea borrowed first from
Wagner (The Ring of the Nibelung tetralogy) and later from Mahler (with a
double symphonic “tetralogy” – Symphonies Nos. 1-4 and 5-8, respectively,
as ordered by researcher Irina Barsova).
The first thematic “tetralogy” in Pascal Bentoiu’s book (Chapters 2, 3,
4 and 5) presents, at first, what generically could be called the premises: the
habitat and the primary constituent elements that populate it. The actual seeds
and soil occur in Chapter 2 [Materialele și spațiul (Materials and Space)],
which is both normative and explanatory. The materials are the musical sound
and its four parameters – pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre. All these four
qualities are, in turn, generators of sound space with its dimensions:
horizontal (durations), vertical (pitches), diagonal (sic! melodic synthesis) and
depth (intensities). And all eight already have their own history as technical and
expressive elements, each time different, depending on the historical context
from which they are extracted. Eight premises with a distinct ontological
potential, proving their fecundity by “summoning” the durations to generate
rhythm and rhythms (Chapter 3), with an openness towards the sonic
realization of musical time, while the pitches reveal their hyper-fecundity by
embodying the categories of the melodic (a synthesis between durations and
pitches, Chapter 4) and of the harmonic (pitches “layered” in strict simultaneity).
While the simple enumeration generates a true “polemical” struggle
between intensity and timbre (Chapter 2), the author’s demonstration, like
many others in the book, turns this “belligerent” negotiation into a genuine

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plot with an unpredictable ending. At the same time, rhythm, and meter
(Chapter 3) have also claimed their right, thus causing a further admirably
logical demonstration. Here are just two narrative contexts, which have
invited me to multiple (re)readings. (Re)readings with “accelerating” effects.
In turn, the melodic (Chapter 4), in the same cumulative “layering” of
several horizontal levels, opens access to the (this time) polyphonic
dimension. Both the harmonic and the polyphonic are enlarged upon in a
subsequent thematic section of the book. But things do not stop here either,
because, in a new generative momentum, the melodic becomes able to also
produce sound organization systems such as the modal one (Antiquity, the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance), the tonal-functional one (the Baroque, the
Viennese Classicism and Romanticism) and the atonal one (the last European
Modernity with the three musical modernisms). These are structures of a
completely different order of complexity than the indivisible entities.
The second “tetralogy”, however, is focused on the treatment of some
complex entities (of structural synthesis) with an advanced degree of
abstraction. It is worth noting that the historical order of appearance of each
concept is observed in all four following chapters (6, 7, 8 and 9). First,
Dimensiunea polifonică (The Polyphonic Dimension) (originating in the
European Middle Ages), closely followed by Conceptul armonic (The Harmonic
Concept) (invented in the Enlightenment Baroque), and then by Conceptul
timbral (The Timbral Concept) (assimilated compositionally only in twentieth-
century modernist music). The list ends with Forma și formele (Form and
Forms) (a concept formulated in a modern sense in the Viennese Classicism).
This concept cumulates the contents of both “tetralogies”. And if polyphony
and harmony are sound organization systems, and timbre is one of the four
parameters of the musical sound, then form and forms excel at cumulating
several states ranging from the simple compositional scheme to the exclusive
ontological state (performed, sonic) of any musical work.
Musical Thinking itself, as the last conceptual frontier of this book,
thus proves to be an entity – substance, process, and space –, in which the
pressure of the intuitive and pre-formal a priori triggers the will for form and for
its aural realization in performance. Hence starts the convergent cumulation
of the elements, as well as the progressive multiplication of the relationships
between them, towards an a posteriori of the musical composition performed
like a “three-headed” fact – psychological, cultural, and essentially ontological.
In an obvious archetypal triunity. It is in this last quality that it justifies its
value, primarily as a representative sign of the thinking that engendered it. It
is precisely the musical thinking of the composer, who is his own first listener,
performer and evaluating critic. How else could Beethoven’s three Leonores
be explained? How else, if not in a (self-)generative loop, did Bruckner’s

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endless versions and editions of his own symphonies occur? Moreover, and
already on an inter-subjective level, how else can one explain the successive
editions of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, edited in turns by Johann Nikolaus
Forkel, Carl Czerny, Bruno Mugellini, Vincent d`Indy, Friedrich Chrysander,
Ferruccio Busoni, Hugo Riemann, Gabriel Fauré, Hermann Abert, Alfredo
Casella, Béla Bartók etc.? And finally, how else does the musical thinking of
Palestrina (the Saviour), Bach (the Unifier), Beethoven (the Revolutionary)
and Schoenberg (the Liberator) become, one by one, a Canon of European
Music? Because, through their thinking, the European musical culture was
able to achieve successive reloadings leading to ever-new evolutionary
mutations.

P.S. 1. Pascal Bentoiu’s discourse is even more exciting and effective

as it is not a monologue, but rather a fruitful polemic between several discursive
postures of the author himself. A “monodrama” in several voices. In other words,
the narrative is not linear, although it has a precise referential subject in each
chapter but refers directly to the image of an ideational multi-timbral polyphony,
instruments, as well as voices. And not only the space of the discourse is
transformed, saturated by the “sections” of several “instruments” and “voices”,
but even time is re-dimensioned through a pluriphony of several referential
cultural pasts, engaged by the author as special guests. And even despite the
musicological substance of the narrative, these guests make their presence felt
through the quotes by which Pascal Bentoiu invokes them as referential obligato
sections. The author impregnates his discourse with references to ideas, titles
of works and books, genres, and styles of thinking (philosophical, poetic,
historical etc.) from various time periods and geographies, but which in the text
of the book relate in a consonant and harmonic way, actively participating in the
idea of the book. And finally, here is the quintessence of Gândirea muzicală
(Musical Thinking), as the author himself states it:

A piece appears – with obvious chances of survival – if the author can

think the music, that is, to operate in his imagination directly with the data
of the sound field, if he is able to make and unmake a multitude of
musical images, of possible models, from which to choose the ones that
are most capable of leading to the intended meaning. And he must have
intuited this meaning in the most perfect originality and with the
maximum force and depth that he is capable of.

P.S. 2. For me personally, Gândirea muzicală (Musical Thinking) is

still a pretext for voluntary re-readings of the book. This is because each re-
reading of the text leaves me with the feeling that some “secret rooms” in the

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book are still waiting to be unveiled. I read somewhere that to acquire a

proper understanding of Wagner, Schoenberg went through twenty-seven
re-readings of the musical drama Tristan and Isolde. By himself. On the
piano. As for myself, I have given up counting my re-readings of Gândirea
muzicală (Musical Thinking). Because what really matters is the fact that
going through Pascal Bentoiu’s text amplifies and accelerates me. And thus,
this book of indisputable topicality, this text and discourse, these ideas
clothed in a captivating narrative, have all remained necessary to me for over
three decades.

P.S. 3. The first and only printed edition of the book was published in
the distant year of 1975, by Editura Muzicală (Music Publishing House), in
Bucharest. I got acquainted with the text in the not-so-distant year of 1990,
when I arrived in Romania to continue my musicological studies. Indeed, it
took me multiple readings of Pascal Bentoiu’s “essay” to finally understand
that I was dissatisfied with the “imprisonment” of these ideas of undeniable
topicality within an “ancient” temporality and a visibly worn-out polygraphic
body. At the same time, it really puzzled me to find that such a sample of
musicological excellence had not been claimed as an imperative necessity
and was lying forgotten on a shelf of some conservatory’s library, as a
marginal work of a famous composer. I considered it a tremendous injustice
that this truly valuable piece of writing of such formative and heuristic power
was excluded from the institutional-didactic circuit instead of acquiring its
rightful place on the mandatory reading list. Even more so as Gândirea
muzicală (Musical Thinking) was presented as a second volume, like a
continuation of a previous book – Imagine și sens (Image and Meaning),
published in the even more distant year of 1973 by Editura muzicală of the
Composers’ Union, in Bucharest.
It had become obvious that Gândirea muzicală (Musical Thinking),
along with Imagine și sens (Image and Meaning), had to be republished. I re-
typed the text of both volumes, grateful for the opportunity to indulge myself
in yet another reading of some already intimately familiar lines. The page
type area was also changed to a more adequate one, to allow for a more
comfortable reading experience. And all this because, in my strong opinion,
the republication of a book of such musicological calibre and obvious
topicality was stringently necessary.
Translated from Romanian by Marcella Magda

OLEG GARAZ2

2 Associate professor dr. habil., “Gh. Dimaˮ National Academy of Music, Cluj-Napoca. E-mail:
oleg.garaz@gmail.com

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