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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
his own individuality. However dogmatism of any kind was ever alien to
Silvestrov, and this time the truly avant-gardist creative daring and the spiri-
tual independence manifested themselves in his denial of the outdated musical
cliches.
Valentin Silvestrov turned his attention to the previously "non-topical"
romantic stylistics: the Russian romances of the 19th century with all their
numerous overtones, from Glinka and Schubert to the home music-making.
However it is not imitation, but a "weak style", to quote the composer; in other
words, his is a contextual style, based not so much on its own matter as on a
metaphor, an allegory, and an allusion. As Silvestrov would say later,
"Romantic phonemes belong not to Schumann but to speech itself."
The composer's poetic programme finds its indirect evidence in his
noted remarks for the performers: "To sing as if listening to himself. All the
songs should be sung very quietly, in an easy, transparent and lucid tone, with
restrained expressiveness and rigidly," without any psychological pressure. It
is desirable to perform the whole cycle without interruption, as a single song»
(Silent Songs).
The song-cycle Steps, which he started to work on back in 1980, contin-
ued to expand the line of Silent Songs but proved to be more refined. The title
of the cycle Steps is polysemantic. It embraces the steps of blessing and molli-
fying love, both earthly and heavenly, ruminations about the essence of being,
and the road to a blissful disappearance. There is no final resolution for the
warmth and naivety of "Last Love" set to Tyutchev's verses departs into the
tragic void of the last poem "I have forgotten the word I wanted to say" by
Osip Mandelstam. Only the reed-pipe tune reaches one’s ears from the realm
of shadows...
The initial version of Steps (nine songs) was first performed by Svetlana
Savenko and Valery Matyukhin in Kiev in May, 1982. The next, fuller, ver-
sion was performed at the "Alternative" Festival in Moscow in October, 1989
(by Svetlana Savenko and Alexei Lubimov). Finally, on September 23, 1997
Silvestrov wrote one more song "You were clearer, truer and more lovely than
the rest" to the verses by Alexander Blok, which he dedicated to his wife
Larissa Bondarenko who had prematurely died in August, 1996. Since then
81
this song came to open up the cycle Steps. Its final version was first performed
by Svetlana Savenko and Yuri Polubelov in the Rachmaninov Hall of the
Moscow Conservatoire on October 10, 1997.
Morning Song set to the composer's own verses and completed on No-
vember 3, 2000, was first presented also by the Duo of Savenko and Polubelov
at the recital of Silverstrov's works within the program of his "Oral Music" (in
the Rachmaninov Hall, on June 15, 2001).
Notes:
1. to sense exceptional spiritual saturation – ощущать исключительную
духовную насыщенность;
2. to avoid predicant pathos – избегать проповеднического пафоса;
3. a metaphorical style in the vein of new traditionalism or neoromanti-
cism – метафорический стиль в русле нового традиционализма и
неоромантизма;
4. the truly avant-gardist creative daring – истинно авангардное творче-
ское бесстрашие;
5. reed-pipe tune – свирельный напев.
THE DUET OF SVETLANA SAVENKO AND YURI POLUBELOV
Svetlana Savenko, born in Moscow, graduated from the Moscow State
Tchaikovsky Conservatoire where she studied with Yuri Kholopov as a musi-
cologist. As a singer she was a student of Dora Beljavskaja. Now she is Pro-
fessor of Russian Music at the Moscow State Conservatoire, author of more
than 100 publications (including several books) in Russian, English and Ger-
man. The major fields of her specialization as a musicologist and as an inter-
preter are Russian music, music of the 20th century including avant-garde and
contemporary music. Her extensive repertoire includes works by Schoenberg,
Berg, Webern (complete songs with pianist Yuri Polubelov), Bartok, Cage,
Eisler, Hindemith, Kfenek, Zemlinsky; those of Russian composers (Stravin-
sky, Prokofiev, Roslavets, Mosolov, Mjaskovsky, Shillinger among others); as
well as works written specially for her (such as Vladimir Tarnopolsky's
82
Chevengur). Savenko has performed as a soloist of Ensemble Studio New
Music (Moscow) with which she has appeared in such prestigious concert
halls as the Moscow Conservatoire, Berliner Philarmonie and Grosses Konzer-
thaus in Berlin. She has participated in many festivals in Russia and abroad,
and has toured in Ukraine, Belarus, Slovakia, Germany, Netherlands, Swiss,
Great Britain, Israel and USA.
Born in Vitebsk, Belarus, Russian pianist Yuri Polubelov studied piano
at Lvov Secondary Music School with Alexander Eidelman. He gave his first
solo recital at the age of 13 and became winner of the Ukrainian Young Musi-
cians' Competition in Kiev. Polubelov graduated from the Moscow State
Tchaikovsky Conservatoire (piano class of Vera Gornostayeva and chamber
ensemble class of Konstantin Adjemov). Post-graduate studies included work
in Moscow and in New York with A. Eidelman. Now he is professor of
Chamber ensemble class at the Moscow State Conservatoire.
Yuri Polubelov has participated in festivals in Germany, France, Italy,
Slovakia, Estonia, Russia, and Ukraine. He has performed both as soloist and
in chamber ensembles with prominent musicians such as Alexei Lubimov,
Yuri Bashmet, Tatiana Grindenko, Ivan Monighetti, Alexander Rudin, Alex-
ander Knyazev, Nelli Lee, Mark Pekarsky, Francois Leleux, Janne Thomsen,
Pascal Moragues, Mario Brunello. He has also given premieres of a number of
works by contemporary Russian and Ukrainian composers and pays special
attention to rarely performed works by composers such as Zemlinsky,
Schoenberg, Webern, Krenek, Hindemith and Brahms (choral works with
piano).
As a Duo Svetlana Savenko and Yuri Polubelov performed since 1997.
Their repertoire includes more than 300 songs for voice and piano of contem-
porary composers, from Stravinsky and Schoenberg to actual Russian authors.
They have given a number of world premieres of works, among them compo-
sitions written specially for the Duo, such as the vocal pieces of Leonid Hof-
man, Josef Bardanashvili and Alexander Knaifel. The Duo are also committed
to promoting vocal repertoire under special themes, for instance "Silhouettes
of the Silver Age", "In Schoenberg's Direction", "Hundred Years of the New
Music", "Stravinsky: Nursery and Music Hall".
83
The Duo pays a special attention to Silvestrov's music. Savenko and Po-
lubelov have performed the vocal cycles Steps, Simple Songs, Diptych on Po-
ems by Fyodor Tyutchev, Two Songs on Poems by Velemir Khlebnikov, River
of Times on Poem by Gavriil Derzhavin, Moments of Poetry and Music on Po-
ems by Paul Celan and others. A number of them were world premieres.
Notes:
1. duo – итал. дуэт; duet (англ.) – дуэт;
2. to give a number of world premieres – представить (дать) ряд миро-
вых премьер;
3. to pay a special attention to… – обращать особое внимание на…
ELENA FIRSOVA – A CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN COMPOSER
The essential qualities of Elena Firsova's music were established almost
from the very beginning of her composing life. Even in her student days she
was already an unashamedly confessional artist, whose clear intention was to
give utterance to intimate personal feelings. From her earliest works she fa-
voured smaller, more delicate combinations of instruments, and deployed a
distinctive and at that time unfashionable musical language centred on the sub-
tle manipulation of an emotionally expressive melodic line, often supported on
a delicate web of post-romantic harmony. She showed no interest at all in the
noisily conventional rhetoric so characteristic of most of the Soviet music be-
ing written and played around her. Firsova was born in Leningrad on the 21 of
March 1950.
Her parents were both physicists, and she grew up in an atmosphere
where education was taken seriously. When she was still quite young, her
family moved to Moscow, and there she received her musical training, enter-
ing music college in 1966 and the Moscow Conservatoire in 1970. During five
years at the Conservatoire, she studied composition with Alexander Pirumov
and analysis with the distinguished Yuri Kholopov. Edison Denisov and Philip
Gershkovich influenced on her creativity greatly. It was at this time when she
met her husband, the composer Dmitri Smirnov.
84
In 1970, when she was still at music college, she wrote her first settings
of Osip Mandelstam who died in the Stalinist camps in 1938. Though now re-
garded as one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century, Mandelstam
was unpublished in the Soviet Union in the period when Firsova first fell in
love with his work, and was to remain so until Glasnost in the late 1980s. Her
contact with the luminous world of this writer's imagination could come only
through carefully hidden and preserved old editions or through unofficial sam-
izdat publications. Firsova has written more than a dozen settings of Mandel-
stam’s verse and a series of instrumental compositions inspired by his words.
One of her most appealing and characteristic pieces is the chamber cantata
Earthly Life of 1984.
The collapse of Soviet power in the late 1980s and the troubled condi-
tions of the new Russia have had a considerable effect on Elena Firsova's life
and music. Between 1988 and 1992 she completed four pieces for full orches-
tra which, taken together as a cycle, make up what is perhaps her most impor-
tant creative statement to date.
The first of these orchestral works, Augury, composed in 1988 and pre-
miered at the 1992 BBC Proms in London by the BBC Symphony Orchestra
under Andrew Davis, culminates in a choral setting of Blake's famous lines
beginning “To see the world in a grain of sand…” Although the text is by
Blake, Augury seems to sum up many of the characteristic preoccupations and
moods of Firsova's settings of Mandelstam; the music rises and falls on the
waves of a romantic and lyrical reaching after ecstasy. The composition of
Augury was followed in 1989 by Nostalgia, where both title and music seem
to reflect the composer's growing anxiety about the future and the increasing
pressure to consider a period spent outside Russia. In 1991 the decisive break
was made: Elena Firsova and her husband and children moved to Britain
where they made brief stays at Cambridge University and Dartington Hall in
Devon, before being appointed as joint composers-in-residence at Keele Uni-
versity.
Early in 1992, Firsova completed one of her most ambitious works, an
uncommissioned setting for soprano and full orchestra of poems by her be-
loved Mandelstam entitled Secret Way, commissioned by WDR and premiered
85
by the Moscow Radio Orchestra under Vladimir Fedoseyev at the Musikver-
ein in Vienna in 1996. The human voice, as in Augury, here fulfils a summa-
rising role towards the end of the work, singing a text which explores a bleak
and broken world in which verbal memory is lost amidst the tolling of Stygian
bells. The fourth and last of this cycle of recent orchestral works is Cassandra,
commissioned, premiered and recorded by the BBC National Orchestra of
Wales under Tadaaki Otaka It is named after the prophetess of impending
doom who, for Firsova, spoke not only of Troy but also of contemporary Rus-
sia.
Firsova has continued to produce a large body of chamber music, both
for purely instrumental forces as seen in her ongoing series of string quartets,
and for the idiomatic combination of solo voice and chamber ensemble which
has been so central to Firsova's output. In 1992 she composed Distance for the
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, a setting of poems by Marina Tsve-
tayeva which depicts the same loneliness and desperation as the contemporary
Secret Way. Firsova's 1994 chamber cantata Before the Thunderstorm returns
to Mandelstam and is an impressive successor to Earthly Life and Forest
Walks. All three chamber cantatas were given their premiere by the Nash En-
semble who together with the BBC, have been the most stalwart of champions
for her music. New departures for Firsova in recent years have included a
chamber opera, The Nightingale and the Rose, premiered at the 1994 Almeida
Opera Festival.
Through all the various changes that have taken place over the last dec-
ade, both in her outside life and in the inner life of her music, Elena Firsova
has clung tenaciously to her distinctive musical voice and to her fiercely held
musical ideals. In each new piece we can be sure to hear the characteristic
qualities that emerged so early in her career, the same singing line and supple
harmonies, and the same sense that this is an artist telling us about what she
herself has felt, about what she would have us feel too.
Gerard McBumey
Notes:
1. Earthly Life – кантата «Земная жизнь» для сопрано и камерного
ансамбля, слова О.
Мандельштама, 1984;
86
2. Cassandra – музыка для оркестра «Кассандра», 1992;
3. The Nightingale and the Rose – камерная опера «Соловей и Роза»
по О.Уайльду, 1991;
4. Before the Thunderstorm – кантата «Перед Грозой», 1994;
5. Forest Walks – кантата «Прогулки в лесу, 1994.
VLADIMIR TARNOPOLSKI
Vladimir Tarnopolski (1955) was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine.
He studied composition at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory with Niko-
lai Sidelnikov and Edison Denisov and music theory with Yuri Kholopov.
His composition for the Conservatory's final exam was his Concerto for
Cello (1988); it was selected by G. Rozhdestvensky for a series of concert
programs, titled as From the history of Soviet music.
Tarnopolski is a frequent guest in many Western contemporary music
festivals, such as: The World Music Days of the ISCM, The Berliner Fest-
wochen, The Munchener Biennale, Wien Modern, Holland Festival, Frank-
furter Musikfest, Almeida Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festi-
val, Hommage aux Russes Paris, The Schleswig-Holstein Musikfest, Tage fur
Neue Musik Zurich, Make Music Together (Boston U.S.A.), The San Diego
Arts Festival, Aktive Musik Dortmund, Rencontres Musicales d'Evian, War-
saw Autumn and many others. Numerous famous Russian conductors, such as
Gennady Rozhdestviensky, Mstislaw Rostropovich and Alexander Lazarev
have conducted his works. His music has been performed by such ensembles
as Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Ensemble Modern,
Schonberg Ensemble, Ensemble Reshershe, Ensemble of Soloists of the
Bo!shoi Theatre. His stage works were premiered in Russia, Germany, France,
Netherlands.
In Tarnopolski's compositions there is a fulminantly charged musical
substance which fits into a concisely articulated, well-balanced construction.
The composers' music combines in a paradoxical manner two aesthetical as-
pects. The first is a search for a new euphony, which is developed on the basis
of a complexly constructed sound material, which abolishes the juxtaposition
87
between consonance and dissonance, sound and noise, harmony and timbre, as
well as electronic and acoustic instruments. The second is a refined post-
modernist theatricality, filled with either a joyful irony or a surrealistic grotes-
querie.
Tarnopolski plays a significant role in the development of contemporary
Russian musical life. He was one of the initiators of ACM, the Association of
Contemporary Music in Moscow (1989), which represented a group of com-
posers, who reacted against the official Soviet cultural philosophy (the so-
called socialistic realism). In 1993 he had founded the Centre for Contempo-
rary Music at the Moscow Conservatory as well as the Studio for New Music
Ensemble, which had performed many works by the Russian Avant-garde
composers. In 1994 Tarnopolski had also founded Moscow Forum, a new an-
nual International Festival of Contemporary Music in Moscow, the main focus
of which is the integration of contemporary Russian and East-European con-
temporary music with Western European contemporary music.
Since 1992 Tarnopolski is the professor of composition at the Moscow
Conservatory. He holds numerous composition seminars in Germany, Austria,
Netherlands, Switzerland and other countries.
Tarnopolski's musical compositions had been awarded many prizes in-
cluding the Dmitri Shostakovich Prize (Russia 1991) and the Paul Hindemith
Prize (Plon 1991).
Notes:
1. joyful irony – радостная ирония;
2. euphony – благозвучие;
3. to premier – занимать первое место;
4. the Association of Contemporary Music (ACM) – ассоциация современ-
ной музыки.
«STUDIO FOR NEW MUSIC» ENSEMBLE
The Studio for New Music Ensemble, Russia's most active contempo-
rary music group, was founded by composer Vladimir Tarnopolski and con-
ductor Igor Dronov, in 1993. The first concert was given in France with Msti-
88
slav Rostropovich as conductor. The main aim of ensemble is to integrate
Russian music into the contemporary Inter-European musical and cultural de-
velopments. The ensemble consists for the most part of graduate students of a
special class contemporary ensemble of the post-graduate program of
Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Moscow.
The ensemble specializes in 20th century and contemporary music;
among the vast repertoire of the Studio special attention is given to the Rus-
sian Avant-garde of the 1920's (Sergei Prokofiev, Gabriel Popov, Nicolai Ro-
slavets, Alexander Mosolov, Arthur Lourie, Leo Golyshev, Ivan Vyshne-
gradsky, Alexei Zhivotov, Leonid Polovinkin, Vladimir Shcherbachiov,
Michail Gnesin) as well as compositions by contemporary composers, written
especially for the group. Another particular interest is given to all kinds of col-
laboration with young composers in competitions, workshops, masterclasses
and various other forms.
Studio for New Music regularly presents concerts in some of the most
famous concert halls in Moscow, and frequently goes on tours within Russia,
in the former Soviet republics and in Europe. During the eight years of its ex-
istence the ensemble gave nearly two hundreds concerts, on a monthly basis,
each time with new programs; it also took part in numerous international fes-
tivals of contemporary music in Russia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Czech
Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal,
USA. It has recorded works for various foundations and radio stations, and
produced several CDs by Russian and foreign contemporary composers, in-
cluding series of CD-portraits by most famous Russian contemporary compos-
ers on the Belgian label MEGADISC.
Studio for New Music is the basis ensemble of the «Moscow Forum»
Festival of contemporary music, which is organized by the Centre for Con-
temporary Music of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory.
Notes:
1. contemporary music – современная музыка;
2. vast repertoire – огромный репертуар;
3. all kinds of collaboration – разного рода сотрудничество.
89
V. THE HISTORY OF ROCK-MUSIC
WHAT IS ROCK?
Rock Music, group of related music styles has dominated popular music
in the West since about 1955. Rock music began in the United States, but it
has influenced and in turn been shaped by a broad field of cultures and musi-
cal traditions, including gospel music, the blues, country-and-western music,
classical music, folk music, electronic music, and the popular music of Asia,
Africa, and Latin America. In addition to its use as a broad designation, the
term rock music commonly refers to music styles after 1959 predominantly
influenced by white musicians. Other major rock-music styles include rock
and roll (also known as rock 'n' roll), the first genre of the music; and rhythm-
and-blues music (R&B), influenced mainly by black American musicians.
Each of these major genres encompasses a variety of substyles, such as heavy
metal, punk, alternative, and grunge. While innovations in rock music have
often occurred in regional centers – such as New York City, Kingston, Ja-
maica, and Liverpool, England – the influence of rock music is now felt
worldwide.
Dictionary definitions of rock are problematic, not least because the
term has different resonance in its British and American usages (the latter is
broader in compass). There is basic agreement that rock “is a form of music
with a strong beat”, but it is difficult to be much more explicit. The Collins
Cobuild English Dictionary, based on a vast database of British usage, sug-
gests that “rock is a kind of music with simple tunes and a very strong beat
that is played and sung, usually loudly, by a small group of people with elec-
tric guitars and drums”, but there are so many exceptions to this description
that it is practically useless.
Legislators seeking to define rock for regulatory purposes have not done
much better. The Canadian government defined “rock and rock-oriented mu-
sic” as “characterized by a strong beat, the use of blues
of rock instruments such as electric guitar, electric bass, electric organ or elec-
tric piano”. In 1990 British legislators defined pop music as “all kinds of mu-
sic characterized by a strong rhythmic element and a reliance on electronic
forms and the presence