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Файл:About Music at the Lessons of English. Хрестоматия по чтению на английском языке для студентов очного и заочного отделений специальностей 070100 «Музы.pdf
One critic assures us that Sessions derives from Stravinsky, while an-
other hailed him as an "American Brahms." If both are right, the result is an
amazing conciliation of opposites, and this argues a strong character. And that
is exactly what distinguishes the music of Sessions: strength of character. He
has deeply absorbed certain influences, notably those of Stravinsky, Schoen-
berg, and Richard Strauss. His creative personality, the interior dynamism that
prompts him to emotional expression in music, is strong enough to absorb
these influences and to emerge with a mode of utterance that is as personal as
it is eclectic.
He takes with the utmost seriousness every aspect of musical art, the
theoretical, the creative, the didactic, and the interpretative. Among works of
Sessions are three Chorale Preludes for organ, a Concerto for violin and or-
chestra, Two String Quartets, a Piano Sonata, three symphonies, and a one-act
opera The Trial of Lucullus.
Notes:
1. A Concerto for violin – Концерт для скрипки с оркестром, 1935;
2. Two String Quartets – камерно-инструментальная музыка «2 струн-
ных квартета», 1946, 1953;
3. The Trial of Lucullus – одноактная опера «Осуждение Лукулла»,
1947.
ROY HARRIS
Few American composers of our time have achieved so personal a style
as Roy Harris. His music is easily identified by many stylistic traits to which
he has clung through his creative development: the long themes which span
many bars before pausing to catch a breath, the long and involved develop-
ment in which the resources of variation and transformation are utilized ex-
haustively, the powerfully projected contrapuntal lines, the modal harmonies
and the asymmetrical rhythms are a few of the qualities found in most Harris's
works.
Though Harris has frequently employed the forms of the past (toccata,
passacaglia, fugue, etc.), has shown a predilection for ancient modes, and on
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occasion has drawn thematic inspiration from Celtic folk songs and Protestant
hymns, he is modern in spirit. His music has a contemporary pulse, the cogent
drive and force of present-day living; there is certainly nothing archaic about
it. More important still, it is essentially American music, even in those works
in which he does not draw his ideas from folk or popular music. The broad
sweep of his melodies suggests the vast plains of Kansas, the open spaces of
the West. The momentum of his rhythmic drive is American in its nervousness
and vitality. But in subtler qualities, too, Harris's music is the music of Amer-
ica. "The moods," Harris once wrote, "which seem particularly American to
me are noisy ribaldry, then sadness, a groping earnestness which amounts to
sup-pliance toward those deepest spiritual yearnings within ourselves; there is
little grace or mellowness in our midst." Such moods as noisy ribaldry, sad-
ness, groping earnestness are caught in Harris's music; and to these moods are
added other American qualities: youthful vigour, health, optimism and enthu-
siasm.
Harris was born in Lincoln county, Oklahoma, on February 12, 1898.
While still a child, he learned to play the clarinet and the piano. In 1926 he
went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. In Paris he wrote his first major
works: of them, the Concerto for the Piano, Clarinet and String Quartet
(1927) was the most successful. After returning to the United States, he wrote
several important works in which his personal style was being realized, nota-
bly the String Sextet (1932), the Symphony (1933), and the Second Quartet
(1936). Since then, Harris's position as one of the foremost composers in the
USA has never been seriously threatened.
His Fifth Symphony has been dedicated to the "Heroic and Peace-loving
People of the Soviet Union".
Notes:
1. span many bars – растягиваются на (занимают) много тактов;
2. Boulanger, Nadia – Буланже, Надя – французский дирижер, орга-
нист, музыкальный критик, педагог Парижской консерватории;
3. ribaldry – непристойность.
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PHILLIP GLASS
Born in Chicago in 1937, the American composer Philip Glass began
his musical studies on the flute and violin, going on to study at the Juilliard
School in New York, and later in Paris. By the 1980s Glass had already made
a considerable reputation for himself in the field of composition now generally
referred to as minimalism. In his output from the mid-1960s onwards, he had
examined the possibilities inherent in subjecting very small amounts of musical material – often just a few notes – to extensive repetition, in a style having
some similarities to those of his compatriots and almost exact contemporaries,
who include Terry Riley and Steve Reich. From 1968, all his compositions
were written for the amplified group consisting mainly of flutes, saxophones,
electric keyboards and, later, voices that became the Philip Glass Ensemble. In
the mid-1970s, however, his interest in the structural rigours of his music lessened, and he began to reinvest melody and harmony – elements which had
been sidelined in the obsession with minimalist processes – with a new purchase on their potential. Tunes and the sorts of chord progressions which accompanied them in more familiar kinds of Western music could now be explored afresh in the surviving context of minimalist repetition.
The result was a rather different kind of music from compositions such
as Music in Similar Motion of 1969, or even Glass's first stage work, Einstein
on the Beach, conceived in collaboration with the director and designer Robert
Wilson and premiered in 1976. New investigations of melody and, especially,
harmonic progression were already important strategies enabling Glass to sustain musical and dramatic interest over the several unbroken hours of Ein-
stein's duration. But it was only when these had been allied with the vocal and
orchestral forces of the traditional Western opera house – forces much more
conventional than those of the composer's own ensemble – that he was able to
fulfill his new lyric and dramatic aspirations with the resources which come as
part of the natural territory of twentieth-century opera.
While the differences between Glass's early minimalist and later minimalist scores are considerable – making possible not only a greater range but
also, as a consequence of this, the composer's considerable success since the
early 1980s -continuities between the old Glass and the new abound. One of
these is his involvement with writing music for the 'legitimate', rather than the
musical, theatre. The composer's first wife, JoAnne Akalaitis, had been much
involved with a theatre group first formed during the couple's years in Paris in
63
1964-6, which back in New York eventually became known as Mabou Mines.
This group became particularly associated not only with the plays but also
with other writings of Samuel Beckett, of which the author allowed Mabou
Mines to make staged versions.
th
Akhnaten, first performed in Stuttgart on the 24
of March 1984, is the
composer's third large-scale stage work; it was conceived as the final instalment of a trilogy with Einstein and Satyagraha (1980), the latter, based on
Mahatma Gandhi's early years in South Africa, being Glass's first opera for the
forces of the conventional Western opera house. Akhnaten's subject is the
Egyptian pharaoh of the fourteenth century ВС who is held to be the first
monotheist and whose radicalism led, after seventeen turbulent years, to his
overthrow and presumed murder. The opera's three acts show the rise and fall
of Akhnaten in a series of tableaux; the libretto is sung in a mixture of ancient
languages and English.
The Violin Concerto is the first of many orchestral works that Glass has
composed on commission since the late 1980s, following the acclaim accorded
to Satyagraha and Akhnaten. The choice of the concerto form seemed a natural one for a composer then currently obsessed with opera: he found it 'more
theatrical and more personal' than music for orchestra alone. The work was
premiered by Paul Zukofsky and the American Composers Orchestra under
Dennis Russell Davies in New York on 5th April 1987. Both these musicians
had worked with Glass before: Zukofsky played the part of Albert Einstein (in
Einstein on the Beach the character is represented by a solo violinist, not a
singer) in that stage work's first performances; Davies had conducted the premiere of Akhnaten.
The affecting minor modes and chromatically shifting harmonies of the
Violin Concerto are entirely typical of Glass's style at the time it was composed.
Notes:
1. Einstein on the Beach – опера «Эйнштейн на взморье», 1976;
2. Satyagraha – опера «Сатьяграха», 1980; сюжет из жизни Махатмы
Ганди;
3. Akhnaten – опера «Эхнатон», 1984;
4. The Violin Concerto – Концерт для скрипки с оркестром, 1987.
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IV. RUSSIAN MUSIC
A REAL MASTER OF OPERAS, BALLETS AND SYMPHONIES
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is a leading Russian composer of the late
19th century, whose works are notable for their melodic inspiration and their
orchestration. He is regarded as the master composer for classical ballet, as
demonstrated by his scores for Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Sleeping
Beauty.
Tchaikovsky's father was superintendent of government-owned mines.
Because his mother was half French, and it was a customary practice among
upper-class Russians of the period, he had a French governess. Tchaikovsky
was musically precocious, but his interest in the subject was not actively en-
couraged because his parents considered that it had an unhealthy effect on an
already neurotically excitable child. He adored his governess, but she was
dismissed in 1848 when his father changed his post and moved to Moscow
and then to St. Petersburg, where the boy entered the preparatory department
of the School of Jurisprudence in 1850. There he was obviously disturbed by
being treated as a 'country bumpkin," but he soon settled down happily.
His state of mind was more seriously affected in 1854 when he was
14 and his mother, whom he loved with all the ardour of an acutely introspec-
tive child, died of cholera. To alleviate the distress caused to him both by her
death and by his easygoing father's comparative indifference to it, he com-
posed a short waltz for piano and even thought of composing an opera. During
these school days, desultory singing, piano, and harmony lessons were all the
musical education he received, complemented by increasingly numerous visits
to the opera, which had a lasting influence on his musical taste.
He entered the newly founded St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music in
1862. His job as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice was hardly interesting
enough to prevent his increasing absorption with music. He soon left the gov-
ernment service and became a student. His first orchestral score (composed
1864), an overture based on Aleksandr Ovstrovsky's play The Storm, is re-
markable in showing many of the stylistic features later to be associated with
his music and a youthful vulgarity that was not the only constituent in it to ap-
pall his primly Mendelssohnian teacher, Anton Rubinstein. Even so, he was
offered in late 1865 a post as professor of harmony by Rubinstein's brother at
the Moscow Conservatory.
Tchaikovsky settled down comfortably in Moscow in January 1866, al-
though he underwent a mental crisis as a consequence of overwork on his
Symphony No. 1 in G Minor (Winter Daydreams), Opus 13 (1866). His com-
positions of the late 1860s and early '70s reveal a distinct affinity with the mu-
sic of the nationalist group of composers in St.Petersburg, both in their treat-
ment of folk song and in their harmonies deriving from a common link with
Mikhail Glinka, the "father" of a Russian nationalist style. He corresponded
with the leader of the group. Mily Balakirev, at whose suggestion he wrote a
fantasy overture, Romeo and Juliet (1869). Tchaikovsky's intrinsic charm, tes-
tified to by many who knew him, is nowhere more apparent than in the nation-
alist comic opera Vakula the Smith (1874; first performed 1876), which in its
revised form, Cherevichki (The Little Shoes), is of similar merit to another op-
era, Sorochintsy Fair (also based on one of Nikolay Gogol's Ukrainian tales),
by the most original composer in the Petersburg group, Modest Mussorgsky.
Tchaikovsky's opera, however, is much closer to Balakirev's own folkloric id-
iom than anything Mussorgsky ever wrote.
During 1878-1880 P.I. Tchaikovsky wrote some of his compositions –
the Piano Sonata in G Major, Opus 37 (1878), the orchestral Suite No. 1 in D
Minor, Opus 43 (1878-79), music for the coronation of his patron the emperor
Alexander III, and the first of his mature attempts to write a commercially
successful opera. The Maid of Orleans (1878-79), for he never imagined that
Eugene Onegin was dramatic enough in the "theatrical" sense to be a popular
success.
In 1885 he bought a house of his own at Maidanovo in the vicinity of
Moscow, where he lived until the year before his death, when he moved into
the house that is now the Tchaikovsky House Museum in the nearby town of
Klin. He began to travel more in Russia, spending two particularly delightful
vacations in the Caucasus, where he was enthusiastically feted at Tbilisi. He
overcame an aversion to conducting, with successful performances of the
66
newly revised Vakula, and in 1888 he undertook an important foreign tour, di-
recting his own works in Leipzig (where he met the composers Johannes
Brahms and Edvard Grieg), Hamburg, Berlin, Prague, Paris, and London. His
music was well received everywhere.
This tour was the apex of Tchaikovsky's later life. From then on, in
spite of the continuing success of many of his former compositions and the ac-
clamation of new ones, including his second Pushkin opera, The Queen of
Spades, and his favourite ballet, The Sleeping Beauty (first received coolly;
both performed 1890), he was working his way toward another nervous
breakdown. His major compositions, starting with Symphony No. 5 in E Mi-
nor, Opus 64 (1888).
Tchaikovsky went on further tours, including to the United States and
England, where he conducted his popular Piano Concerto No. 1 in В Flat Mi-
nor, Opus 23 (composed 1874-75), in 1889 and his Fourth Symphony in 1893.
In 1893 he was also awarded at the University of Cambridge an honorary de-
gree of doctor of music. These arid other successes, including the tumultuous
reception accorded to the suite he hastily made for concert performance from
his Nutcracker ballet music (1892).
Among the most subjective of composers, Tchaikovsky is inseparable
from his music. His work is a manifestation, sometimes charming, often
showy, and occasionally vulgar, of repressed feelings that became more and
more despairing in later years and culminated in the composition of the Sixth
Symphony, one of the greatest symphonic works of its time. Though unequal,
his music shows a wealth of melodic inspiration and imagination and a flair
for orchestration. Its lapses of taste are partly redeemed by enormous technical
efficiency. Though his later work rejected conscious Russian nationalism, its
underlying sentiment and character are as distinctively Russian as that of the
Russian nationalist composers. Tchaikovsky's success in bridging the gulf be-
tween the musician and the general public partly accounts for the position he
enjoys in the Soviet Union.
No composer since Tchaikovsky has suffered more from changes of
fashion or from the extremes of over- and undervaluation. On the one hand, he
achieved an enormous popularity with a wide audience, largely through his
67
more emotional works; on the other, the almost hypnotic effect that he was
able to induce led to serious questioning of his true musical quality. He is cer-
tainly the greatest master of the classical ballet. The symphonies may be vari-
able in quality but all contain important music. The last three are deservedly
famous, though to these should be added the neglected Manfred Symphony,
The First Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto, on the other hand, deserve
a higher reputation than vehicles for virtuosity. Notable among his other or-
chestral works are the early Romeo and Juliet Overture and the exquisite
Serenade for Strings. Of the operas, Eugene Onegin is a masterpiece and The
Queen of Spades dramatically effective. His string quartets are excellent, but
his piano music is largely undistinguished. His numerous songs include sev-
eral fine examples.
Notes:
1. musically precocious – зд. музыкально одаренный;
2. neurotically excitable child – невротически (нервно) возбудимый
ребенок;
3. a country “bumpkin” – «деревенщина»;
4. Symphony No. 1 in G Minor (Winter Daydreams) – Симфония № 1,
соч. 13 соль минор («Зимние грезы»), 1866;
5. Romeo and Juliet – Увертюра-фантазия «Ромео и Джульетта», 1869;
6. Vakula the Smith – опера «Вакула Кузнец», 1974;
7. Cherevichki (The Little Shoes) – опера «Черевички», 1976 (2-я редак-
ция оперы «Кузнец Вакула»);
8. the Piano Sonata in G Major – соната для фортепиано соль минор,
соч. 37, 1878;
9. Suite No. 1 in D Minor – сюита для оркестра № 1 ре минор, соч. 43,
1878-1879;
10. The Maid of Orleans – опера «Орлеанская дева», 1878-1879;
11. The Queen of Spades – опера «Пиковая дама», 1890;
12. The Sleeping Beauty – балет «Спящая красавица», 1890;
13. Piano Concerto No. 1 in В Flat Minor – концерт для фортепиано
с оркестром № 1 си бемоль минор, соч. 23, 1875;
68
14. Nutcracker – балет «Щелкунчик», 1892;
15. Serenade for Strings – Серенада для струнного оркестра, соч. 48,
1880.
SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Prokofiev composed his first piece of music when he was five. He
entered the St. Petersburg Conservatoire at the age of 13, appearing at the
entrance examination with manuscripts of four operas, a symphony and a
number of piano pieces.
At the age of 19, making his first public appearance, he showed a defi-
nite taste of his own and a vivid personal style.
After the October Revolution Prokofiev emigrated to America. How-
ever he soon realized that it had been a bitter mistake. The splendid American
orchestras were indifferent to his music. He decided to try Paris. He was luck-
ier in Paris where his ballet "The Buffoon" was produced. He stayed in Paris
making tours to the musical centres of Europe and the US. But living abroad
Prokofiev remained Russian, a citizen of his country. Acclaimed as a virtuoso
pianist and an outstanding composer, a mature artist at the height of his fame
Prokofiev still felt unhappy, homesick and lonely, living far from his native
land. He missed Russia and kept thinking about going back. He believed that a
composer who had lost his roots and musical traditions of his nation would in-
evitably lose the desire to compose and to create. It was only his motherland
that could give him spiritual strength and be a pure source of inspiration.
Between 1927 and 1932 Prokofiev took several trips to the Soviet Un-
ion. His concerts in Moscow and Leningrad aroused great interest among the
music-lovers. People listened to his music in complete silence. During these
concerts Prokofiev felt that he was listened to by his compatriots. Ever since
his first visit to the USSR in 1927, Prokofiev had been looking forward to re-
turning to Russia. He wrote: "I have to live in the atmosphere of my home-
land. I have to see Russian winter and its changeable spring. I have to hear the
Russian language and talk to people who are my people, so that they give me
back something I lack here – their songs, my songs. Here I risk dying of aca-
demism. Yes, I am going back!"
69
In 1932 after his return to the Soviet Union, Prokofiev devoted all his
inspiration to his people. For 20 years until he died in 1953 he served his
country. In his new compositions he strove for clarity and simplicity. Proko-
fiev became one of the leading composers of the Soviet school.
Prokofiev has enriched both Russian and world music with superior
works full of humanism, original imagery and warm love for his people.
The influence of Prokofiev's music can still be traced in the works of
contemporary musicians. His invaluable heritage includes eight operas, seven
cantatas, seven ballets, seven symphonies as well as numerous piano pieces.
Among them there are such masterpieces as the opera "War and Peace", the
ballet "Romeo and Juliet", and the cantata "Alexander Nevsky".
Notes:
1. to show a definite taste – показывать определенный вкус;
2. to give somebody spiritual strength and inspiration – давать кому-либо
духовные силы и вдохновение;
3. to strive for something – стремиться к чему-либо.
S. PROKOFIEV: "ALEXANDER NEVSKY"
Prokofiev's Cantata is based upon music which the composer wrote for
Eisenstein's film "Alexander Nevsky". Prokofiev was so pleased with this pro-
ject and so gripped by the subject, that he expanded his film material into a
full-length dramatic Cantata. Its hero is the Novgorod Grand Prince Alexander
and the work celebrates his victorious campaign in 1242 against the maraud-
ing Teutonic knights who had turned from the Crusades to pillaging the lands
of the further north.
The first of its seven movements, "Russia under the Mongol Yoke", de-
picts a depressed and defeated land; the second, "Song about Alexander
Nevsky", praises his previous successes and the third, harsh and cruel in ac-
cents portrays the Teutonic knights, with a grieving central section conveying
the feelings of the enslaved people of Pskov. The fourth movement, "Arise ye
Russian people", calls the country to arms. The fifth movement, "Battle on the
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