Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina (1931- ) has achieved international acclaim for her unique musical oeuvre which draws on Eastern and Western musical traditions. This text places her life and the evolution of her work within the broader cultural and political context of the post-Stalin Soviet Union.
Following Stalin's death in 1953, during the period now known as the Thaw, Nikita Khrushchev opened up greater freedoms in cultural and intellectual life. A broad group of intellectuals and artists in Soviet Russia were able to take advantage of this, and in no realm of the arts was this perhaps more true than in music. Students at Soviet conservatories were at last able to use various channels--many of questionable legality--to acquire and hear music that had previously been forbidden, and visiting performers and composers brought young Soviets new sounds and new compositions. In the 1960s, composers such as Andrey Volkonsky, Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Valentin Silvestrov experimented with a wide variety of then new and unfamiliar techniques ranging from serialism to aleatory devices, and audiences eager to escape the music of predictable sameness typical to socialist realism were attracted to performances of their new and unfamiliar creations. This "unofficial" music by young Soviet composers inhabited the gray space between legal and illegal. Such Freedom, If Only Musical traces the changing compositional styles and politically charged reception of this music, and brings to life the paradoxical freedoms and sense of resistance or opposition that it suggested to Soviet listeners. Author Peter J. Schmelz draws upon interviews conducted with many of the most important composers and performers of the musical Thaw, and supplements this first-hand testimony with careful archival research and detailed musical analyses. The first book to explore this period in detail, Such Freedom, If Only Musical will appeal to musicologists and theorists interested in post-war arts movements, the Cold War, and Soviet music, as well as historians of Russian culture and society.
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
In the years 1917 to 1991, despite unfavorable prevailing conditions, there were outstanding achievements in the music created for the cinema in the Soviet Union. Perhaps in no other country was film music associated with so many distinguished composers: Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitry Shostakovich, Isaak Dunayevsky, Georgy Sviridov, Aram Khachaturian, Alfred Schnittke, Nikolai Karetnikov, Edward Artemyev, Edison Denisov, and Sofia Gubaidulina. They were ready to accept film directors' invitations because they considered the cinema to be a perfect laboratory for testing the concepts and themes for future operas, symphonies, oratorios, and other large-scale compositions. A remarkable characteristic of Soviet film music was the appearance of successful director - composer collaborations, such as the famous 'duets' of Eisenstein - Prokofiev, Kozintsev - Shostakovich and Tarkovsky - Artemyev. This fascinating volume is the first attempt at a historical analysis of Soviet film music - a unique and full
Do today's composers draw inspiration from life experiences? What has influenced recent composers? How essential is it for a composer to develop a personal style? This book reveals the spontaneous thoughts of some of the most famous composers from around the world about their own development as composers and their reactions to the outside world.
Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music, 1960-2000 is the first to appear in an exciting a four volume series devoted to the work of women composers across Western art music history. Featuring rich analyses and detailed study by the most reputed music theorists in the field, along with brief biographical sketches for each composer, this collection brings to the fore the essential repertoire of a range of important composers, many of whom otherwise stand outside the standard canon.
Extensive and generously illustrated interviews have been a feature of the lively Danish music periodical Dansk Musik Tidsskrift (Danish Music Review) since the 1960s. Now a long-standing tradition, these conversations with influential composers from all over the world are prepared by professional musicians and experienced writers on music. This volume is a collection of interviews selected from issues published since 1990 by Anders Beyer, the journal's editor-in-chief.
This book studies recent music in the western classical tradition, offering a critique of current analytical/theoretical approaches and proposing alternatives. The critique addresses the present fringe status of recent music sometimes described as crossover, postmodern, post-classical, post-minimalist, etc. and demonstrates that existing descriptive languages and analytical approaches do not provide adequate tools to address this music in positive and productive terms. Existing tools and concepts were developed primarily in the mid-20th century in tandem with the high modernist compositional aesthetic, and they have changed little since then. The aesthetics of music composition, on the other hand, have been in constant transformation. Lochhead proposes new ways to conceive musical works, their structurings of musical experience and time, and the procedures and goals of analytic close reading. These tools define investigative procedures that engage the multiple perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners, and that generate conceptual modes unique to each work. In action, they rebuild a conceptual, methodological, and experiential place for recent music. These new approaches are demonstrated in analyses of four pieces: Kaija Saariaho’s Lonh (1996), Sofia Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet (1987), Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet no.2, Demons and Angels (2004-05), and Anna Clyne’s "Choke" (2004). This book defies the prediction of classical music’s death, and will be of interest to scholars and musicians of classical music, and those interested in music theory, musicology, and aural culture.