Dimitrie Cuclin

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Dimitrie Cuclin (April 5 [O.S. March 24] 1885, Galaţi-February 7, 1978) was a Romanian classical music composer, musicologist, philosopher, translator, and writer.

Contents 1 Life 2 Musical works 3 Philosophical works and ideas 4 References

[edit] Life

Dimitrie Cuclin was born in the city of Galati, a harbour on the left shore of Danube. His father was an emigrant from czarist Bessarabia, from the village of Cucleni, near the town of Ismail. He had studied music at the Theological Seminar of Ismail and at the Universities of Iasi and Bucharest, and he taught music, at the time of Dimitrie’s birth at the high-school „Vasile Alecsandri” from Galati. His mother was of pesant origin, from the village Pechea located at about 25 miles away from Galati, and she was a house-wife.

Dimitrie Cuclin did his primary and secondary studies in his native city, where his father was his first music teacher. When in high-scool he began to compose small musical pieces, which impressed the composer G.D. Kiriac, who thus suggested that Cuclin should go to Bucharest to study music. The young composer applies first at the Conservatory (1903), where he is rejected for being above the age limit, ant then at the Royal Academy of Music (1904), where he is accepted at the section of Theory and Harmony. After three years of studentship in Bucharest, Cuclin obtains a scholarship for Paris. He fails to get into the Conservatory (he was not a brilliant violin player, although he was an acceptable one), but he is admitted at Vincent D’Indy’s Schola Cantorum, where he studies until his scholarship expires, in 1914. Because of the government’s refusal to supplement his scholarship, Cuclin has to live France without completing his studies, thus without a French university degree, but with an attestation from D’Indy that certified his competencies. In Paris he meets his future wife, Zoe, born Dumitrescu, ex Damian (d. 1973). They will get married in 1920.

Once in Romania, he is mobilised during the First World War, but does not go to front. He plays violin at the Orchestra of Iasi, conducted by famous musician George Enescu, in what was left free of the Kingdom of Romania. After the War’s end, in 1919, he becomes Professor at the Conservatory of Music, titular of the new-founded chair of Musical Aesthetics. Between 1922 and 1930 Cuclin teaches in New York, at the Brooklin Conservatory of Music and City College of Music. He will get back at the Bucharest Conservatory beginning with 1930 and he will stay until1948, when he will retire. During the Second World War, in the times of the National-Legionary State, Cuclin is briefly the Director of the Conservatory, but he has not the best relations with the Legion, fact that gets him relieved from the function. At the beginning of the Communist regime, Dimitrie Cuclin is condemned for political reason to serve two years (1950-1952) in a labour camp at the Channel Danube-Black Sea. The event that fired up the regime’s reaction was the Cuclin’s attendance at a musical soirée at the Goethe-Institute in Bucharest. He was thus imprisoned for being “idealist” and “reactionary”.

After this sinister episode, Cuclin is able to create again, and in fact it is in this period that he commences his carrier as a symphonist. Towards the end of his life, he is close to get elected member by correspondence of the Romanian Academy, but the proletkultist poet Mihai Beniuc opposes. He dies in 1978 from the complications of a heart disease contracted while a prisoner in the communist work camps.

[edit] Musical works

Cuclin realised a symphonic system containing 20 symphonies, and he was a representative of the monumental in symphony. Some of his symponies last like a whole symphonic concert (the twelfth, which is the longest, lasts 6 hours). Cuclin also composed 6 operas:

“Soria” (1911)

“Ad majorem feminae gloriam” (1915)

“Trajan and Dochia” (1921)

“Agamemnon” (1922)

“Bellerophon” (1925)

“Meleagridele” (1958)

He is also the author of a ballet, “Tragedy in the forest” (1962). In addition to these, Cuclin composed sonatas, quartets, madrigals, melodies of folkloric inspiration, etc. As a composer, Cuclin is an exponent of the French school, following the line of César Frank and Vincent d’Indiy.

[edit] Philosophical works and ideas

Works

Cuclin had a permanent preoccupation for metaphysics all his life and he wrote several versions of a work called “A Treatise of the Metaphysics”. The earliest such treatise that is available in manuscript is entitled “La théorie de l’immortalité” (1931), and an abridged version in Romanian, realised by Cuclin himself, was published only in 1990. The latest integral version of a “Traité de la métaphysique” dates from the ’50, most probably after Cuclin’s release from the labour camp. There are indications that Cuclin wrote at least four versions of the treatise, in French and Romanian, but those could not be found, as they are berried in the private collections. This last book-length treatise has two subtitles, namely, “A theory of nothingness” and “Towards a new aspect of Marxism”. Cuclin had the naivety to think that the official Marxism could incorporate his philosophy. We have several published compressed versions of his metaphysical system, some being to his disciples which noted them after a lecture or oral exposition of the master, and one being wrote by Cuclin himself (in Cuclin 1986), thus more reliable . Other published works with philosophical content are “Musique: science, art et philosophie” (Cuclin 1934), in the documents of the Eighth International Congress of Philosophy from Prague and his innovatory “Treatise of Musical Aesthetics” (Cuclin 1933). The first part of this treatise is a partial exposition of his metaphysical vision, the foundation of his aesthetics.

Ideas

Cuclin’s explications concerning the title of his Traité de la métaphysique are of great value for the understanding of his vision. Thus, we have “a treatise” and not “the treatise”, because metaphysics can be exposed in many treatises; and we have “of the metaphysics”, and not “of metaphysics”, because there is but one “metaphysics”. “The metaphysics” is, in fact, more like “the metaphysical realm” for Cuclin, or the domain of the transcendence. Thus, he proposed to produce one of the possible surveys of this domain.

The method of Cuclin is the logical enquiry, followed up to an absurdity, or violent contradiction. The contradiction is the sign of reaching the truth, because the truth is found in logical reasoning, not in reason. An absurdity is the sign that the reason does not agree with the results of the logical reasoning, but is not a sign of unreality or falseness. Rather the opposite is true, that the point of view of the reason is unreliable and many times false. With this almost Eleatic method, Cuclin reaches some sort of spiritualist monism, which will be briefly presented in the following lines. But firstly we will note another methodological aspect of Cuclin’s metaphysics, namely the contribution of the “science of music” to the knowledge of the reality. The science of music is not a science of the sound, because the sound is not essential to music. The phenomenon of the “enharmony” and the fact that each sound can have different functions in different chords proves to Cuclin that the sound is only the contingent bearer of a “function” which can have other contingent bearers, like emotion and feeling. The “function” is determined as a degree of the movement of the soul, towards pleasure or pain. Thus, the music is literally done with the soul, not with the sound, and it passé from the sound into the soul in virtue of this invariant which is the function. The science of music, then, provides us with the laws of the function, the ultimate component of reality.

His central category is that of essence, which constitutes the ultimate ontological fond. Equated by Cuclin with the pure nothingness, but a positive nothingness, like the Buddhist nirvana, the essence it is roughly an equivalent of the spirit, but it differs greatly because it presents itself as a system of harmonics, like an absolute sound composed of infinitely many harmonics, each one bearing a specific function within the whole. This realm of essence, governed by the laws of harmony (which laws we know from the science of music) has a will, and a purpose for the realising of which the will mobilises. The purpose of this great harmonic system is to acquire self-consciousness. Therefore, the essence degrades itself in an impure mode, the substance.

The process of degradation that commences with the pure essence and ends with the pure substance is called by Cuclin “the separation of essence”. In this process of separation are generated diverse entities which are a mixture of substance and essence, where one of these aspects is prevalent. Actually, every extant thing is a mixture of essence and substance in different proportions. The first element into which the essence separates is the magnetism (or magnetic field), from which is further separated the electricity, followed by light and so on until the living matter is obtained. This cosmology, mostly fantastic, bears the influences of evolutionism and voluntarism, with a trace of Hegelianism.

The human being is a culmination of the substantialisation of the essence; from here can begin the reverted process, that of the re-essentialisation of the substance. The first process, the separation of the essence or its substantialisation, was also called analysis. The process of the re-essentialisation of the substance is called synthesis. Through this synthetic process which is the human creation, the de-essentialised substance can be transposed as a magnetic double in a great harmonic system, which is the image of the pure essence, regarded as re-essentialised substance. Thus, the essence stand in front of itself and, with the help of the human creation, takes consciousness of itself. This implies an ethics of creation and a theory of immortality. Through his creations the man constitutes a magnetic double of his personality, which is integrated in the great harmonic system which is the Essence. Thus, by contributing through creation to the becoming self-conscious of the Essence, the man becomes also immortal.

The system of Cuclin is obviously a form of idealism, but not one very easy to characterise. It is a panpsychism, claiming influence from the Pythagorean thought, and showing the Absolute to be a living system of harmonized functions, in continuous expansion. It has been suggested that his particular brand of idealism be called “functional idealism” (Rusu 2002). During the communist period, the philosophy of Cuclin was considered a materialist dualism (Matei 1985, Tanase 1985), point of view contested by Rusu.

Influence

Although isolated from the community of the philosophers, Cuclin had private disciples which assimilated his philosophy (e.g. Ion Bârsan). One of his students, Alexandru Bogza, wrote in solitude a philosophical system, called „the critical realism” (no connection with the homonymous American philosophical movement), published posthumously. This system bears the traces of a certain Cuclinian influence (Cuclin is quoted several times by Bogza), but the depth of this influence is yet to be assessed.

[edit] References

• Operone page about Cuclin

Works by Cuclin

Cuclin, Dimitrie (1933) Tratat de estetică muzicală, Bucuresti, Tipografia Oltenia

Cuclin, Dimitrie (1934) « Musique : science, art et philosophie », communication delivered at the Eighth Internation Congress of Philosophy from Prague

Cuclin, Dimitrie (1983) O istorie polemică a muzicii, Iaşi, Junimea

Cuclin, Dimitrie (1990) Teoria nemuririi, Galati, Porto Franco

Works on Cuclin

General

Bârsan, Ion (1995) Convorbiri cu Dimitrie Cuclin, Galaţi, Porto Franco

Bârsan, Ion (1997) „Dimitrie Cuclin – repere al biografiei şi operei”, Revista de etnografie şi folclor, nr. 5-6

Istratty, Ella and Smântânescu, Dan (1985) Convorbiri cu Dimitrie Cuclin, Bucureşti, Editura muzicală

Moldovan, Nicolae (2001) Dimitrie Cuclin. Omul, gânditorul şi compozitorul, Galaţi, editura Alma

Musicological

Ticulescu, I. (1933) Dimitrie Cuclin – studiu critic asupra vieţii şi operei lui, Bucureşti

Tomescu, Vasile (1956) Drumul creator al lui Dimitrie Cuclin, Bucureşti, Editura muzicală

Philosophical

Matei, Dumitru (1985) “Câteva observaţii asupra metafizicii lui Dimitrie Cuclin: teoria existenţei”, Revista de filozofie, nr. 6

Matei, Dumitru (1986a) “Teoria cucliniană asupra omului”, Revista de filozofie, nr. 5

Matei, Dumitru (1986b) “Dimitrie Cuclin despre imortalitate”, Revista de filozofie, nr. 6

Rusu, Bogdan (2002) “Schiţă a metafizicii lui Dimitrie Cuclin”, Eidos, nr. 2

Surdu, Aexandru (2002) “Trebuinţa de filosofie a lui Dimitrie Cuclin”, in Confluenţe cultural-filosofice, Bucureşti, Paideia

Tănase, Al. “Un sistem filosofic şi estetic original al muzicii”, foreword to Istratty and Ştefănescu (1985)