Costin Miereanu was born in Bucharest in 1943, but naturalized French citizen in 1977. He did extensive studies at the Bucharest Academy of Music (first prizes for harmony and counterpoint, analysis, music history, esthetics, orchestration, composition). Miereanu evolved his compositional style featuring a sensuous sonic fabric by combining of Satie's techniques with an abstraction of Romanian traditional music. Many of his complex and often virtuoso works include visual components.
Miereanu has composed aleatoric works and works in the style of musique concrète for orchestra and chamber orchestra, often with the employment of tape-recording equipment, as well as works for the theatre. Between 1967 and 1969 he was a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti, and Ehrhard Karkoschka at the Internationale Ferienkurse für neue Musik in Darmstadt (Cosma 2001). In 1977 he became a French citizen. Since 1981 he has been professor of philosophy, aesthetics and the science of art at the Sorbonne.
Costin Miereanu’s growing interest for form development inspired by the discursive narration of storytelling - an eventful musical form, like an imagined scene - has given rise in recent years to work that are more complex, crossed by rifts, traps and ambushes, «flying carpets» and labyrinths with unpredictable itineraries. Music becomes musical dramaturgy; a composition becomes a poly-artistic scenography - via Salabert Editions.
Ana-Maria Avram once told me about one of her teachers and great representatives of the Romanian school of avant garde (Costin Miereanu) that he is a charming man and everything he touches turns into gold: he has an immense talent and produces miracles with great ease. For me too, his music has to do with another realm, a fantastic one. Here are some illustrations from his eighties electronic ventures.
Words & mix by Victor Stütz