(Photo credit: Fotografia Giu)

Of the troubadours who sang in medieval Provence, most of the surviving legacy belongs to men. The trobairitz, the female troubadours, have largely faded from cultural memory, and Beatriz de Dia left behind a single song preserved with musical notation. That lone canso is the starting point for “de l’encra escafada” (“from faded ink”), a work for choir, orchestra and four violas da gamba by Adrian Mocanu, and the 2026 Azrieli Commission for International Music.

Mocanu, a Romanian and Ukrainian composer born in Kyiv in 1989, studied composition at the National Music Academy of Ukraine and later in Madrid. His awards include the Frederic Mompou International Award, the Borys Lyatoshynsky Composition Competition and the Mauricio Kagel Composition Competition. He has held residencies with Ensemble Recherche, Casa de Velázquez and Maulwerker and has collaborated with and written works for such ensembles as Ensemble Musikfabrik, Maulwerker, Ensemble Recherche, IEMA Ensemble, Ensemble Mosaik, Barcelona Modern Ensemble, PinkNoise Ensemble, Bilbao Sinfonietta, Continuum XXI and Anima Vox Duo, among others.

OperaWire spoke with Mocanu about the Occitan text, the notation and the themes of displacement and memory.

OperaWire: What inspired “de l’encra escafada?”

Adrian Mocanu: The title, “de l’encra escafada,” is a phrase in Occitan that translates as “from faded ink.” Now considered an endangered language by UNESCO, Occitan was once a thriving literary language in medieval Provence, the cradle of the troubadour tradition. We mostly know that tradition through the legacy of its male authors, while the trobairitz (female troubadours) have largely disappeared from our cultural memory. One of them was Beatriz de Dia, and of her entire oeuvre, only once canso (an Occitan love song genre) has survived and was preserved in musical notation. And this is where the inspiration of my piece comes from.

OW: Describe the musical language of your piece and how you arrived at it. 

AM: The musical language comes from the idea of faded ink gradually revealing itself on paper. The entire process comes from noise that is gradually transformed into a more concrete sound in which we may find echoes of Troubadour intonations. I wasn’t trying to make a reconstruction of the canso by Beatriz de Dia, nor a version of it. The work rather questions it, transforms it through various filters. It inhabits complex relations between the choir (which never sings in a conventional way, and whose material is based on an array of vocal noises), the four violas da gamba (which, apart from a reference to early music, merge into one extended sonorous body, a multiplied and fractured “soloist”), and the orchestra (which becomes a mediator between the two). How did I arrive at it? By trying various ideas, juxtaposing them, thinking a lot, and keeping only the boldest ones.

OW: What inspires your creative process? 

AM: The inspiration of the process in this piece was rooted in the architecture of the score – not only how it sounds, but also how it is visualized on paper. There are many ways to notate the same material, but in the end the way it looks will directly influence the manner in which the performers will interpret it. If you want to sound unconventional, the notation has to be it, too. Another defining factor was the Occitan text itself – I wasn’t looking to set it to music, I was looking for music inside its sonorities and rhythms. Here, the language, too, is gradually revealing itself – phonemes slowly assembling into words, words into phrases, phrases becoming tongue twisters that eventually merge in a torrent of sound.

OW: What were some challenges you experienced while creating this work? 

AM: There were a few major challenges, the biggest one was not being afraid to take the risk and follow my intuition. Some of the things I ended up doing in the piece could be considered quite radical for a major work for orchestra and choir. There were several attempts to start the piece using more conventional material, but I kept feeling that something was missing. At one point, I realised I had to go back into a state of a blank mind and start from scratch in a way which was honest and true to my aspirations. In the end, that was probably the biggest challenge: trusting that intuition, even when it meant stepping into the unknown and taking the piece somewhere less predictable.

OW: What do you hope audiences take away from the experience of your piece? 

AM: I hope that my work can resonate with the audience, that there is emotional feedback. I would like them to experience it almost as a ritual, as a sonic narrative that gradually unfolds around them. Although using Beatriz de Dia’s words, I am also telling something of my own story through them. Her voice becomes a way for me to speak about things that are much closer to the present: displacement, memory, the feeling of belonging somewhere and not quite belonging there at the same time. So there is a personal dimension in the piece, even if the source is 800 years old. And I hope the work can also contribute, at least in a small way, to keeping the Occitan language present and making it heard by new audiences today.

OW: On a personal note, what inspired you to become a composer? Who are some of the composers that inspire you? 

AM: It might be just a curious coincidence, but when I started studying music (quite late, actually, when I was 18 or 19), I was just reading “Doctor Faustus” by Thomas Mann. The main character’s name was also Adrian and he was also a composer, so I took it as a kind of strange affirmation. Of course, I wasn’t planning to sell my soul to the devil as he did in the book, but I perceived this novel as a reminder to keep going and not be discouraged by having started late, by having to catch up with so many things and see myself among peers who already had ten years of musical training more than I did.

Other than that, musically speaking, I am equally fascinated by two things: everything pre-baroque – early music and the Renaissance, particularly vocal music; and late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I’m especially fond of the Italian tradition and its almost magical approach to timbre, found in Sciarrino; in the physical exploration of sound and unconventional playing techniques found in Lachenmann; or in music that can create a whole affect-like state of expression from a very limited sound arsenal, as in Scelsi or Furrer. Early music and new music are two very different worlds, but I think they have a lot in common, sharing a strong attention to sound itself and to what can emerge from very simple musical material.