Houses of Musicians aims to direct the collective memory towards a dwelling typology specific to the period from the end of the 19th-century to the imposition of the new Communist housing rules in Romania, a period whose residential architecture gave particular importance to the then-customary music-making space and one, today, a nostalgic world in which financial prosperity also meant the cultivation of beauty and taste. One of the goals of this endeavour is to join the values of two adjacent fields, architecture with its tangible heritage and music with its intangible heritage, in order to show how they support and enrich each other. Another would be the resuscitation, if still possible, of forgotten elements of that subjective but influential and emblematic geography of Timișoara, Lugoj, and Sânnicolau Mare.
There are several investigative directions:
- an inventory of the houses and venues where famous musicians lived and performed, with an interest in looking at their architecture as part of their cities’ architectural language and evolution, in exploring and stressing, as appropriate, their architectural value, and in underlining the importance of their maintenance or restoration;
- an analysis of particular dwelling typologies that underwent mutations under the pressure of political history and of urban evolution. For example, at the turn of the 20th century and through to the inter-war years, many of the houses where musicians lived were built around a central drawing room destined for musical evenings with the participation of the intellectual elite of the time. Music education, areas for music making, salons for convivial gatherings were a common given for most bourgeois homes. Under the Communist rules, that “musical” dwelling radically changes: the old unifamilial buildings were forced to accommodate several families, the drawing room, which used to be main room, lost its original function, and life in cramped apartment buildings hardly allowed a dedicated space for music (people however adapted even to such conditions, and music-making carried on);
- a reconstruction of a specific type of living and its ambiance by means of personal archives of musicians’ families, testimonials, biographies, creating a valuable collection of items brought together for the first time.
In addition to the bilingual (Romanian – English) site timis.casedemuzicieni.ro, these houses will also be included on the digital maps of Timișoara, Lugoj, Sânnicolau Mare (available on Google Maps), as well as on a paper map, Timișoara muzicală, on which will be added Timișoara’s musical institutions.
In the more general context, Houses of Musicians also wishes to be a means of supplanting what remains a lack of visibility and concern for an affective heritage that doubles that tangible; and such a perspective, musical-architectonic, far from being minor, can represent the path to the rediscovery of the city in another key, as fresh and relevant as it is ignored or forgotten.