Polystylistic Traits in Ede Terényi's Music: The Baroque Concertos

Abstract This paper presents some aspects concerning a group of works written by Ede Terényi in the 1980s, a time in which composers were preoccupied with regaining a certain expression through the revival of the musical past. Romania was not an exception to this orientation, and composers applied the same technical devices as their Western colleagues, such as quotation, collage, allusion, pastiche, etc. This stylistic approach provided Terényi with the opportunity to find ways for the reconciliation of the European canon with the musical tradition of his native Transylvania, a reconciliation that was meant to make music accessible and beautiful again. He composed a series of twelve concertos for various instrumental combinations, in which the Baroque formal and expressive strategies meet the folkloric idioms of the central Romanian multiethnic region.