Take Five With Andrei Covaciu-Pogorilowski

Meet Andrei Covaciu-Pogorilowski:

Andrei Pogorilowski was born in Bucharest, Romania, in February 1968. Starting with 1982, he studied music independently, helped by several private professors.

In 1989 Andrei started to hear a strange yet beautiful music in his head that he was unable to notate. Short excerpts were presented on the piano to his musician friends, who confirmed that the temporal fabric of the music could not be rendered satisfactorily with help from the traditional, bar-rhythmical, semiography.

Between that point and 1994, Andrei tried to formulate a theory and a notation for that music, the first result being his first published book, Energies of Musical Time—Essential Studies of Pulsatory Functionalism (Ararat Publishing House, Bucharest), in a bilingual Romanian/English edition.

In the late '90s, Andrei discovered cognitive musicology and started to merge his own discoveries with the bulk of scientific contributions from this interdisciplinary domain. After abandoning several approaches, the final result was his last book The Music of the Temporalists, available now on Amazon.

The author is currently living in his hometown, Bucharest, along with his wife Simona and his nine year-old daughter, Ina.

Instrument(s):

Piano.

Teachers and/or influences?

Marian Ionescu, Richard Bartzer, Alexandru Dumitrescu, Verona Maier, Anton Dogaru.

I knew I wanted to be a musician when...

a friend of my father's (screenwriter Titus Popovici) told me that composers are supposed to "invent systems," like great chess players, for instance.

Your sound and approach to music:

Musical time theory.

Your teaching approach:

Just answering questions.

Your dream band:

Mozart, Beethoven & Schubert in their late eighties.

Favorite venue:

Createspace.

The first Jazz album I bought was:

John Coltrane, Ballads (Impulse!).

What do you think is the most important thing you are contributing musically?

Reshaping musical time theory.

Did you know...

I placed the name of a French porn actress in a musical time theory book?

CDs you are listening to now:

TunesIn; I listen to strange and remote radio stations from exotic countries.

Desert Island picks:

Wynton Marsalis, Think of One;

Thelonious Monk, Round About Midnight;

John Coltrane, Soultrane.

How would you describe the state of jazz today?

A mix.

What are some of the essential requirements to keep jazz alive and growing?

Invention and paradigm shifts.

What is in the near future?

Editing a book written by a friend.

What's your greatest fear when you perform?

My neighbors.

What song would you like played at your funeral?

John Cage's :"4'33.""

What is your favorite song to whistle or sing in the shower?

"De-as fi o salcie la mal" ("If I were a riverside willow"), by Horia Moculescu.

By Day:

A temporalist.

If I weren't a jazz musician, I would be a:

Novelist.

Photo Credit

Courtesy of André Pogoriloffsky

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