Horațiu Rădulescu

In the early 1970s he attended classes given by Cage, Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Xenakis at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, and by Ferrari and Kagel in Cologne.

[6] Beginning in the early 1970s Rădulescu's works began to be performed at the leading contemporary music festivals, including Gaudeamus (Taaroa, 1971; in ko 'tro – mioritic space, 1972), Darmstadt (Flood for the Eternal's Origins, 1972), Royan (fountains of my sky, 1973; Lamento di Gesù, 1975), Metz (Wild Incantesimo for nine orchestras, 1978; Byzantine Prayer, 1988) and Donaueschingen.

In 1988 he lived in Berlin on a DAAD fellowship, and in 1989–90 he was a resident in San Francisco and Venice as a laureate of the Villa Médici hors les murs scholarship.

His compositional aim, as outlined in his book Sound Plasma[9] was to bypass the historical categories of monophony, polyphony and heterophony and to create musical textures with all elements in a constant flux.

Central to this was an exploration of the harmonic spectrum, and by the invention of new playing techniques the aim to bringing out, and sometimes to isolate, the upper partials of complex sounds, on which new spectra could be built.

For example, in Lux Animae (1996/2000) for solo cello or viola, the open strings are retuned to the 3rd, 4th, 7th and 11th partials of a low E. Many of Rădulescu's later works derive their poetic inspiration from the Tao Te Ching of Lao-tzu, especially in the 1988 English version by Stephen Mitchell: the titles of his second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth piano sonatas, and of the fifth and sixth string quartets, are taken from this source.