Doina Rotaru

Doina Rotaru (1951, Romania) is an outstanding composer of her generation, also a most appreciated professor of composition at the National University of Music in Bucharest. She has written over 120 pieces: solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, and works that mix instrumental with electronics. Some of her works have been commissioned by important music establishments, such as Radio France, Radio Graz, Suntory Hall Tokyo, French Ministry of Culture, Warsaw Autumn Festival. „Doina Rotaru has a unique and very distinguishable style, which is founded on an archetypal aesthetic: sound and timbre patterns going back to primary Romanian and trans-geographical folklore as well as structural principles of symbolic value and function, circular and spiral shapes, sacred numbers.” (Irinel Anghel)

Written for Mario Caroli, Mithya I (2007) is a part of the cycle of three solo works. In Indian philosophy, mithya means “not real, not unreal, illusory”. For me it means a special, strange music for a special, strange and beautiful instrument, at the crossroad between dream, desire and illusion. Each of the three works has a subtitle, suggesting its spirit, its particular expression. The first piece of the cycle – “like a prayer” – expresses my idea about the flute, as an instrument of meditation and prayer. As I have tried to suggest special emotions like painful and hopeful, the flute monodie is caressing or imploring. The first sound gesture is the seed of the whole work: ascensio – an ascent rising of the eye-sight – followed by a slow descent. Emerging from this gesture, the further compositional process is a continuous and slow evolution and variation of it that looks like the development of a spiral shell. (Doina Rotaru)