How Communist Censorship Affected Higher Music Education: The National University of Music Bucharest in the 1950s

Censorship, one of the tools of the communist propaganda and a means of controlling the artistic field, was particularly strict in communist Romania. It manifested as the manipulation, the deformation or the imposition of certain sources of information and knowledge and as the omitting, cutting out, and changing of censored works, scores and various publications on music inclusively. Moreover, in art as well as in literature, publishers and creative unions were under state control, and in their turn watched composers and authors. Education, too, was thoroughly politized, and the Bucharest Conservatory (now the National University of Music Bucharest) is but one such example. The 1950s, which I mean to investigate, is part of what was still the first stage of communist government of Romania, when the Party aimed to break completely with the past. Several events prepared or accompanied and encouraged the forms that censorship and control would take: the Censorship of Press and Publications was established (1946); the Royal Conservatory Bucharest became the Ciprian Porumbescu State Conservatory (1948); the resolution of the Central Committee of the soviet Communist Party on music is passed (1948); the Society of Romanian Composers became the Union of Composers of the Romanian People’s Republic (1949). These events consolidated the main doctrine lines and the measures to implement them – Marxist-Leninism, socialist realism, the sovietisation of institutions, the show trials, and censorship.