VICOL, ADRIAN

VICOL, ADRIAN (1922– ), Romanian ethnomusicologist. From his youth Adrian Vicol was inclined toward the study of music from a critical and theoretical standpoint. As a result, he became one of the most profound and disciplined minds in Romanian ethnomusicology. He collected thousands of folk music pieces and transcribed numerous items from his musical field collections. Thus, from 1949 until his retirement in 1980 he consistently enriched the largest archival funds of traditional cultures in Romania, including those in the National Archives of the C. Brăiloiu and the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore in Bucharest. Besides this type of fundamental research, he also published several academic essays of particular intellectual acumen. Vicol's research focused on the analytical dimension of the study of traditional music, such as the architectural structures of tunes, the typologies of various genres, and rhythm; these are just a few of the topics he discussed within seminal academic papers. He devoted decades to studying "the parlato recitation in Romanian epic songs." From the 1950s up to the late 1970s he studied and wrote on topics ranging from the construction of peasant flutes and the cymbalom's performing techniques to Premise teoretice la tipologia muzicală a colindelor ("Theoretical Premises for a Musical Typology of Carols," 1970). His anthology Typology and Analysis of Romanian Ballads – A Pioneering Approach was published in 2004. The event gave Vicol new energy, prompting him to publish his old collection of dance music from Muscel-Arge, as well as his old ethomusicological essays (which were scattered among the issues of the Revista de etnografie şi folclor (Journal for Ethnography and Folklore) of the Romanian Academy of Sciences.

[Marin Marian (2^nd ed.)]