Doru Popovici

In 1966, Popovici married Alina Musat, a music teacher, musicologist, and author of Ottorino Respighi, (Ed. Muzicala, 1972). Starting in 1968 Popovici made regular trips to Darmstadt, Germany, and studied modern composition technique with György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis. He became an SACEM member, a French professional association that collects payments of artists' rights. In the same year he started working as a musical editor in the Romanian Radio Society. From 1970 to 1990 he was employed as a musical journalist by the Saptămîna newspaper, conducted by the writer Eugen Barbu. Since 1990 he has been a History of Music professor at Spiru Haret University in Bucharest.

Ionel Doru Popovici was born in Reșița, Romania, a city close to the border of what was formerly Yugoslavia, now Serbia. His father was Ioan Popovici, a surgeon who was assassinated in 1959 in the Gherla political prison, accused of being an "Enemy of the Romanian State" because he helped write the Hungarian Counter-Revolution. His mother, Eugenia Popa, was the daughter of an Orthodox priest.

Popovici graduated from the Constantin Diaconovici Loga High School in Timișoara in 1950 and in the same year decided to pursue a musical career. He moved to Bucharest where he was admitted to the Ciprian Porumbescu Music Conservatory from which he graduated in 1955 with a degree in composition. Popovici studied under Mihail Andricu, Mihail Jora, Paul Constantinescu in harmony, Martian Negrea in counterpoint, Theodor Rogalski in instrumentation, and Zeno Vancea in music history.

Ionel Doru Popovici (February 17, 1932 – March 5, 2019) was a Romanian composer, musicologist, writer and musical concerts manager.