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Viorel Munteanu is a prominent, complex, active, and constant figure in the musical landscape of nowadays Romanian culture. His artistic profile takes many shapes, from a bearer of the spiritual and material traditions of Bukovina (the area where he was born), a composer, a pedagogue, a musicologist, and a music editor, to his vocation as an organizer and supporter of artistic values. In his works, the sacred becomes a guiding and inspiring light, and his folk-based resonances evoke ancestral sounds. Sensitive and receptive to the poetic word, Viorel Munteanu creates sound metamorphs out of the voices of poets such as Eminescu, Blaga, Goethe, Byron, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Maeterlinck or Tasso; however, the landmarks in his compositional work remain George Enescu and Béla Bartók. Nevertheless, along the years, the composer has also created for himself a distinct creative personality through the faithfulness with which he has been serving the universal music tradition, voicing, through it, Byzantine- or folk music-based monody and being in a constant natural balance between the solid ground of the values of European culture and experimental tendencies, without ignoring the potential to dress up and render, with renewed freshness, the resources he uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]