Fr. Adrian Cristian Maziliţa, The Religious Musical Culture in Mehedinţi in the Nineteenth-Twentieth Century, 2015

Mitropolia Olteniei Publishing House, Craiova, 2015, ISBN 978-606-731-017-7

It is a synthesis work on the historical context of the development of the Mehedinţi musical culture, from the perspective of bringing up to date, with analyzes based on documents and manuscripts of a flourishing period of psaltic and choral singing, as well as musical-spiritual life in the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, with references to its sources and reverberations in the Romanian musical culture. The work includes five chapters with historical documentation on the main moments that marked the evolution of church music culture until the19th century (Chapter I), the schools of church singers that existed in this county (Gura Motrului, Cerneţi, Drobeta Turnu-Severin) and the amplitude of religious singing in this space – (Chapter II), the psaltic manuscripts from Mehedinţi, constituted in the valuable funds of the I.Gh. Bibicescu of the National Archives from Drobeta Turnu-Severin, as well as in private funds – (Chapter III) and materialized in the analysis of the unique manuscript no. 9/1751, from the National Archives of Drobeta Turnu-Severin, where new aspects of the old theory of Byzantine music are treated, such as: metrophony and solfeggio, median modes, trohos system and the ermine about tererems with a theological approach of this type of chant of the calophonic idiom named: hyphen – (Chapter IV) and as a particular note of the reflection of the thematic content, in Chapter V is presented the activity of the choral societies and of the church choirs from Drobeta Turnu-Severin and Orşova until the middle of the twentieth century.