Timisoara2023: What’s next for the local music landscape

The grand opening of Timisoara as the Capital of Culture attracted a crowd exceeding 60,000 people, with the Victor Brauner exhibition captivating over 12,000 visitors. The temporary installation “Pepiniera – 1306 Plants for Timisoara,” featuring a modular metal structure enabling the public to explore diverse uses of public space, welcomed over 100,000 visitors in Opera Square. Additionally, since its launch in October 2023, more than 45,000 exhibition tickets for Constantin Brancusi’s artistic creations have been reserved. However, there’s more to discover. This article accentuates the significant figures within the realm of local music industry.

Music

In the landscape of contemporary national music, Timisoara holds a prominent position. The city was a significant unofficial hub for international music during the communist era, primarily thanks to the generosity of Serbians and Germans who made world-famous vinyl records available in Romania when the country had limited access. One of the most remarkable new media initiatives that has revived this pop-cultural memory of Timisoara, specifically its role in local music representation and its response to diverse cultural and socio-political environments, is known as “Arhiva de Sunet” (The Sound Archive).

An 8-episode podcast series and a unified media product explores—through a series of interviews with artists, journalists, and commentators—the representation of Timisoara as a relationship between its history and urban cultural production, and the role of music in shaping a local identity. The audio podcast series was created by journalists Paul Breazu, Ionut Dulamita, and Mihai Lukács, a theatre director, researcher/artist, theoretician, and is available online, in Romanian only.

The focal point of this year’s music scene was the Codru Festival, an event that earned its place among the Top 10 Medium-Sized Festivals in Europe, which unfolded in the Bistra Forest near Timisoara. On this occasion, the forest became a captivating blend of nature and art and hosted an enchanting experience of light and artistic expression. This narrative unfolded in the heart of the forest, showcasing light installations from talented global artists. Besides music, for this edition of the festival, the forest has been reborn as a realm of light, where cutting-edge technologies and responsive materials gave birth to extraordinary installations.

Nonetheless, the city’s infrastructure for music venues leaves much to be desired, even though they are presently hosting large-scale live concerts, such as those featured in JazzX, formerly known as JazzTM.

“I would be pleased and would like to see Timisoara have a multifunctional concert hall for large-scale concerts, not just for contemporary music but also for classical music, as the Opera is becoming too small, and even if it were to be rehabilitated, its capacity is already limited compared to the potential Timisoara will have after 2023. So, we will need to think about a larger cultural infrastructure for the future, and we should consider this seriously,” added County Council president Alin Nica, in an interview for Business Review.

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The Brancusi exhibition in Timisoara will be open for 24 hours on December 20th, marking the first day of democracy in Romania

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Nica also noted that they had acquired state-of-the-art live music equipment that would be made available for use by festival organisers.

“We’ve made investments that will help perpetuate the festivals we launched during this period along with the cultural capital. For example, we acquired high-quality stage and sound equipment that will allow us to bring renowned artists. Considering these factors and our experience in bringing artists to these festivals, we purchased the most important audio systems, which we will make available as the County Council for anyone who wants to purchase these services from us. I know how difficult it’s been to find such resources on the market, especially in a year with so many events and limited technical resources,” he concluded.

More music

The closing event for Timisoara2023 will happen on December 8-10, when the organizers invited Jessie J, Róisín Murphy, Katie Melua, José González, among others, some of the most popular and esteemed artists of the moment, whose communities of fans and followers on YouTube alone total over 12,000,000 people worldwide, and who are listened to by over 25,000,000 people monthly on the Spotify platform.

This article was produced through funding from Energie! Creation Grants, awarded by the Municipality of Timișoara, through the Project Center / Centrul de Proiecte, within the Power Station component of the national cultural program “Timișoara – European Capital of Culture in 2023.” The material does not necessarily represent the position of the Project Center of the Municipality of Timișoara, and it is not responsible for its content or how it may be used. The article is part of a series which got published in Business Review’s November 2023 issue.