Guiding the People’s Army Music. Mechanisms of Censorship and Control of Musical Composition Dedicated to Military Bands in Communist Romania

In communist Romania, military bands were under a double subordination: administratively, logistically and financially they were part of the Army. From a professional point of view, however, the military band leaders wanted the bands to be part of the Union of Composers, in their real desire to professionalise and develop, and this will happen at the end of 1957, when they will become a subsection of the Union. The present paper examines the ways in which the Bureau of the Military Music Subsection controlled, guided, censored and imposed the compositional subjects dedicated to brass bands, according to the ideological directions imposed on the Union of Composers by the Party, as well as the compositional techniques specific to this genre of music that musicians had to adopt in their works. The study is based on archives in the libraries of the Ministry of Defence and on the records of the Subsection of the Military Music.