Music
Listen to the latest album White Gold by Cristina Marcu on Spotify:
Track 2: Looking into Your Eyes
White Gold can also be found on Apple Music, Pandora, SoundCloud, and YouTube.
More of Cristina’s compositions can be heard on Sound Cloud and ReverbNation.
Synchronicity of Music and Art can be viewed on YouTube: Marcu Music Art
Member of ASCAP
BIOGRAPHY.
Cristina was born in Romania, in the college town of Iasi, where her piano and music theory studies began at the age of 7 at the George Enescu Music Conservatory there.
In 1974, Cristina emigrated to the U.S. with her parents; residing in New York for four years where she continued her piano studies with a private Romanian teacher through her middle school years. She was then accepted into the famous Manhattan High School of Performing Arts during which time she attended a piano recital by Arthur Rubenstein which further sparked her passion for a career in music. Years of practice and hard work led to a degree with honors in piano performance from USC’s Thornton School of Music.
Musician/Composer/Teacher
Her career as a musician and piano teacher unlocked hidden talents and led her to explore compositional structure and boundaries. The insights gained gave birth to many new creative tools that proved of great value to both her students and herself. “My experience playing chamber music gave me the opportunity to learn more about creative collaboration and this allowed more freedom with my composition endeavors,” she explains.
The next level of her expanding musical journey was unlocked when she discovered meditation and also began to paint. Painting and meditation provided a spiritual harmony which led her down a new creative path: piano improvisation and composition.
Cristina Marcu’s first CD “Meditation Walk” brings healing elements into piano improvisations.“Most of my compositions are written in minor keys and they combine lyrical, romantic tones and simple melodic harmonies with subtle diverse rhythmic patterns,” she explains. “Infinite Ground” followed, a short demo CD for piano and violin. She describes it as “a collaborative experience of two souls in synchronicity.”
The desire to keep exploring the unknown, stretching the familiar boundaries is what keeps her compositional fires burning. New creative ideas and being in the moment are what gives birth to new work. And she strives to keep growing and developing her musical gifts. “I discovered that a lot of my piano pieces were creating a visual story,” she reveals. “This encouraged me to write a short piece for piano and cello that was used for short documentary film project, ‘Stray.’”
“My music has evolved as each stage of my being invites a different variation. My most recent piano compositions combine more classically structured elements. The musical influence of impressionistic composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel can be heard in the subtle and more complex undertones.”
The Synchronicity of Art and Music
The abstract painter W. Kandinsky wrote in his book Concerning Spiritual in Art, “Music is devoted not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist’s soul in musical sound.”
Cristina’s first encounter with the creative power of imagination was at her first classical music concert. She realized then that sound travels together with the colorful lands of one’s imagination.
“There is a synthesis of space in time and feeling that creates the experience”, she says. Marcu’s music is created very much in direct relationship to her paintings. A colorist at heart, the sound expressed simultaneously reflect and integrate both the visual (and emotions) from her art into her newly created musical compositions.
“ I often look at one of the paintings I have in my space as I play the piano and let my imagination take me beyond the present moment.”