Octavian Nemescu (Pașcani, 1940 – Bucharest, 2020) is one of the leading figures of the Romanian avant‑garde composition school, his musical vision and grammar operating at a deeper level centered on retrieving the primordiality present in the spine of all musical traditions, with the aim of reaching a new artistic universality. Together with other colleagues from his generation, he is responsible for the emergence and development of the Romanian spectral music movement (Illuminations for Orchestra, 1967), of the isonic spectralism and, especially, the archetypal spectralism (Concentric, 1969), based on an aesthetic of essentialisation. Octavian Nemescu theoretises the archetypal conceptions, which he also puts into practice in his music (alongside Corneliu Dan Georgescu). He cultivates sonic discourses around cadenzas, incipits, finales and intervals and further becomes engaged with the ambient music, of ecological expression, with the processual or transformational music (together with Lucian Meţianu), with the ritualistic music (Combinations in Circles, 1965; Suggestions, 1968). Octavian Nemescu has carried out a number of projects with ritualic features which entail extensive unfoldings in space and time, aspiring to liberate the performing act of the spectacular context of the concert hall and to re‑place it in a natural setting, in the energetic entourage of the Nature and Cosmos. He takes part in the development of the artistic movement interested in the issues of the open work, practicing the diagrammatic conceptualism.
