Music of Romania

A brief history

History

Romanian folk music is considered the oldest form of Romanian music and has strongly influenced the country's sacred and secular art music. Conservation of Romanian folk music has been aided by a large and enduring audience and by numerous performers who helped preserve and popularize Romanian folk music. One of them, Gheorghe Zamfir, is world-famous today and helped popularize a traditional Romanian folk instrument, the panpipes. Romanian sacred music, which developed under the influence of Byzantine music and adapted to the intonations of indigenous folk music, saw a golden age between the 15th and 17th centuries, when schools of liturgical music developed within Romanian monasteries. Western influence exposed religious music to polyphony in the 18th century, and a series of Romanian composers continued to develop the genre into the 19th and 20th.

Popular music

Popular music

Romanian rock music has a great history with an array of influences. During the 1980s, bands such as Iris, Phoenix, Celelalte Cuvinte, Compact, Holograf or Cargo achieved popularity, with songs about love and friendship. Contemporary popular Romanian rock bands include Vița de Vie, Robin and the Backstabbers, Coma, Alternosfera, Vama, Luna Amară, The Kryptonite Sparks, and Grimus.

The term could be translated literally as "Romanian Easy Music" and, in the most common sense, this music is synonymous with "Muzică de stradă" (from French "estrade", which means "podium"), defining a branch of Pop music developed in Romania after World War II, which appears generally in the form of easy danceable songs, made on arrangements, which are performed by orchestras (and lately pop bands), following a mix of the Soviet and Western pop music influences. This musical form shows many similarities with Western Popular music, as most songs could be defined as a form of Schlager.