It is impossible to fully appreciate the music of Adina Spire without an understanding of its historical context. Its roots reach deeply into the traditional Romanian and Christian orthodox culture, with its shadow and mystery, under the bleak, searing light of her country's recent struggle against its totalitarian government.

In the 1989 Romanian Revolution and subsequent civil war, the country was thrown into chaos. Violence and suffering were everywhere. Adina Spire found herself suddenly an orphan. With no one to help, and nowhere to go, she was placed in the orphanage of Bezdin, a monastery near Arad.

Adina Spires music is a tapestry of complex, interrelated themes. Grief, nostalgia, fear, solitude, hope, brutality, innocence, protest, sensuality and longing, all find expression in layers of overlapping sonic colors.

There is rebellion in her music. It is the protest of the soul against the darkness of the Forgotten, hammering at the monolith of indifference. One can hear not only the cry of innocents dying in hunger, war, and neglect around the world today, but also of renewal, of solace, of the Divine.

Adina Spires' ideas and emotions form the harmonic and dynamic designs that frame her music. There is a slowly shifting ambiguity, as intense feelings seem to peer out from behind a frozen and fearful facade. She freely utilizes folk and orthodox compositional idioms in her writing. But her method is also influenced by the film-editing techniques taken from her work in the cinema. Often discarding orthodox modulation, the composer cuts abruptly between keys or slowly dissolves one chord into another by accumulating their pitches into blurred clusters.

The tonic at any given point in her score is a disputed issue. It may be suddenly established by the orchestra, and then completely absent. These arpeggio-clusters, which have their precedents in the cinematic soundtracks of suspense and horror movies, are tonal ambiguities themselves.

Her layering of tonality and atonality, can suggest change, or hesitation, or at times, a wistful hope. In no other composer's works do the solo instruments or the choir speak so quietly, nor do they venture such modest pitch excursions so diffidently, before a wall of atonal abstraction.

Often, tempos are so slow as to give the impression of motionlessness. This effect is sustained even when short note-values are in play, by the use of small and very simple progressions, tense pedal points, and agonized suspensions.

Adina Spire works with extreme contrasts between moments of tonal delicacy and cataclysmic avalanches of atonal sound. Between these extremes, time seems to stand still, while the music pivots from key to key, as if gradually shifting its viewpoint. She uses timbre as lighting, and sound positioning as camera angle, in her three-dimensional orchestrations. Her cinematic compositions are the work of a personal and uniquely moving voice.

Hymns

Sibiu Oratorium

Oratoriuul

Tatal Nostru