DOCSLIB.ORG

VIRTUAL EVENT. Between Serialism and Suprematism: Nikolai Roslavets' Modernist Music

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
VIRTUAL EVENT. Between Serialism and Suprematism: Nikolai Roslavets' Modernist Music H-Ukraine VIRTUAL EVENT. Between Serialism and Suprematism: Nikolai Roslavets' Modernist Music Discussion published by Amber N. Nickell on Thursday, October 8, 2020 VIRTUAL EVENT. BETWEEN SERIALISM AND SUPREMATISM: NIKOLAI ROSLAVETS’S MODERNIST MUSIC Thursday, October 22, 2020 12:00pm EDT Zoom webinar & YouTube Live This event will be held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live. There will be no in-person event. Register here for the Zoom webinar, or tune in on YouTube Live. Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University for a presentation by Leah Batstone (Hunter College, CUNY). Moderated by Mark Andryczyk. The compositions of Nikolai Roslavets, one of many Ukrainian composers often mistaken for Russian, demonstrate the unique musical position of Ukraine in the history of early twentieth-century music. As a mediator between the compositional serialism of the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg and the developing aesthetics of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist philosophies, the works of the ‘first dodecaphonic composer’ illustrate Ukraine’s important position at the center of aesthetic change. Roslavets’s unique stylistic tendencies can be linked to a tradition of Ukrainian openness to new modes of expression, in both a symbiosis with Austrian musical development from Gustav Mahler to the Second Viennese School and the most avant-garde artists and thinkers of the early Soviet period. Leah Batstone explores Roslavets’s musical exchange with both East and West, and aims to more specifically identify a unique space for the compositional contributions of Ukrainian composers in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Through an exploration of the cultural parallels between Austrian and Ukrainian society, including an emphasis on intellectual experimentation and multiethnic collaboration, as well as the ideological resonances between serial composition and Malevich’s Suprematist ideas that shaped artistic output from Moscow, Batstone contextualizes the aesthetic and political foundations of Roslavets’s style that allowed a new form of Soviet music to develop from Ukraine. Batstone outlines the musical correspondences between Roslavets and contemporary musical movements against the backdrop of Ukraine’s intellectual and aesthetic history in the years surrounding the Revolution (Shkandrij, Mudrak, Marcadé). By demonstrating the way in which this experimental Soviet composer engaged with ground-breaking aesthetic traditions from East to West, Batstone also draws parallels with the climate of Ukrainian music today. Leah Batstone is a musicologist and professor of music history at Hunter College, CUNY. Her Citation: Amber N. Nickell. VIRTUAL EVENT. Between Serialism and Suprematism: Nikolai Roslavets' Modernist Music . H-Ukraine. 10-08-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/4555727/discussions/6545935/virtual-event-between-serialism-and-suprematism-nikolai-roslavets Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Ukraine research concerns the intersections of music and social and political change, with focus on fin-de- siècle Austria and 20th-century Ukraine. Her doctoral dissertation on Gustav Mahler and Friedrich Nietzsche was completed at McGill University (2019), for which she was awarded a Fulbright-Mach fellowship to Vienna. Her research has also been supported the Taras Shevchenko Foundation (Canada) and by the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has presented at several international conferences including the American Musicological Society annual conference, both the International Biennial and North American Nineteenth-Century Music Conferences. She serves on the editorial board ofArtistic Culture. Topical Issues, the journal of the Modern Art Research Institute of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine (Kyiv) and is the organizer of the annual festival of Contemporary Ukrainian Music Festival, which first took place in New York City in February 2020 (ucmfnyc.com). Recently, Dr. Batstone received a 2020-2023 Marie Sklodowska Curie Action REWIRE fellowship at the University of Vienna to research her book project on Ukrainian art music of the past 100 years. Citation: Amber N. Nickell. VIRTUAL EVENT. Between Serialism and Suprematism: Nikolai Roslavets' Modernist Music . H-Ukraine. 10-08-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/4555727/discussions/6545935/virtual-event-between-serialism-and-suprematism-nikolai-roslavets Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • City, University of London Institutional Repository
    City Research Online City, University of London Institutional Repository Citation: Pace, I. ORCID: 0000-0002-0047-9379 (2021). New Music: Performance Institutions and Practices. In: McPherson, G and Davidson, J (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. This is the accepted version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/25924/ Link to published version: Copyright: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. Reuse: Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ [email protected] New Music: Performance Institutions and Practices Ian Pace For publication in Gary McPherson and Jane Davidson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), chapter 17. Introduction At the beginning of the twentieth century concert programming had transitioned away from the mid-eighteenth century norm of varied repertoire by (mostly) living composers to become weighted more heavily towards a historical and canonical repertoire of (mostly) dead composers (Weber, 2008).
    [Show full text]
  • 5. Calling for International Solidarity: Hanns Eisler’S Mass Songs in the Soviet Union
    From Massenlieder to Massovaia Pesnia: Musical Exchanges between Communists and Socialists of Weimar Germany and the Early Soviet Union by Yana Alexandrovna Lowry Department of Music Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Bryan Gilliam, Supervisor ___________________________ Edna Andrews ___________________________ John Supko ___________________________ Jacqueline Waeber Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Music in the Graduate School of Duke University 2014 i v ABSTRACT From Massenlieder to Massovaia Pesnia: Musical Exchanges between Communists and Socialists of Weimar Germany and the Early Soviet Union by Yana Alexandrovna Lowry Department of Music Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Bryan Gilliam, Supervisor ___________________________ Edna Andrews ___________________________ John Supko ___________________________ Jacqueline Waeber An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Music in the Graduate School of Duke University 2014 Copyright by Yana Alexandrovna Lowry 2014 Abstract Group songs with direct political messages rose to enormous popularity during the interwar period (1918-1939), particularly in recently-defeated Germany and in the newly- established Soviet Union. This dissertation explores the musical relationship between these two troubled countries and aims to explain the similarities and differences in their approaches to collective singing. The discussion of the very complex and problematic relationship between the German left and the Soviet government sets the framework for the analysis of music. Beginning in late 1920s, as a result of Stalin’s abandonment of the international revolutionary cause, the divergences between the policies of the Soviet government and utopian aims of the German communist party can be traced in the musical propaganda of both countries.
    [Show full text]
  • The War to End War — the Great War
    GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE GIVING WAR A CHANCE, THE NEXT PHASE: THE WAR TO END WAR — THE GREAT WAR “They fight and fight and fight; they are fighting now, they fought before, and they’ll fight in the future.... So you see, you can say anything about world history.... Except one thing, that is. It cannot be said that world history is reasonable.” — Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND “Fiddle-dee-dee, war, war, war, I get so bored I could scream!” —Scarlet O’Hara “Killing to end war, that’s like fucking to restore virginity.” — Vietnam-era protest poster HDT WHAT? INDEX THE WAR TO END WAR THE GREAT WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1851 October 2, Thursday: Ferdinand Foch, believed to be the leader responsible for the Allies winning World War I, was born. October 2, Thursday: PM. Some of the white Pines on Fair Haven Hill have just reached the acme of their fall;–others have almost entirely shed their leaves, and they are scattered over the ground and the walls. The same is the state of the Pitch pines. At the Cliffs I find the wasps prolonging their short lives on the sunny rocks just as they endeavored to do at my house in the woods. It is a little hazy as I look into the west today. The shrub oaks on the terraced plain are now almost uniformly of a deep red. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE WAR TO END WAR THE GREAT WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1914 World War I broke out in the Balkans, pitting Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Serbia, the USA, and Japan against Austria, Germany, and Turkey, because Serbians had killed the heir to the Austrian throne in Bosnia.
    [Show full text]
  • Toccata Classics TOCC 0127 Notes
    SERGEI VASILENKO AND THE VIOLA by Elena Artamonova The viola is occasionally referred to as ‘the Cinderella of instruments’ – and, indeed, it used to take a fairy godmother of a player to allow this particular Cinderella to go to the ball; the example usually cited in the liberation of the viola in a solo role is the British violist Lionel Tertis. Another musician to pay the instrument a similar honour – as a composer rather than a player – was the Russian Sergei Vasilenko (1872–1956), all of whose known compositions for viola, published and unpublished, are to be heard on this CD, the fruit of my investigations in libraries and archives in Moscow and London. None is well known; some are not even included in any of the published catalogues of Vasilenko’s music. Only the Sonata was recorded previously, first in the 1960s by Georgy Bezrukov, viola, and Anatoly Spivak, piano,1 and again in 2007 by Igor Fedotov, viola, and Leonid Vechkhayzer, piano;2 the other compositions receive their first recordings here. Sergei Nikiforovich Vasilenko had a long and distinguished career as composer, conductor and pedagogue in the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in Moscow on 30 March 1872 into an aristocratic family, whose inner circle of friends consisted of the leading writers and artists of the time, but his interest in music was rather capricious in his early childhood: he started to play piano from the age of six only to give it up a year later, although he eventually resumed his lessons. In his mid-teens, after two years of tuition on the clarinet, he likewise gave it up in favour of the oboe.
    [Show full text]
  • JAMES D. BABCOCK, MBA, CFA, CPA 191 South Salem Road  Ridgefield, Connecticut 06877 (203) 994-7244  [email protected]
    JAMES D. BABCOCK, MBA, CFA, CPA 191 South Salem Road Ridgefield, Connecticut 06877 (203) 994-7244 [email protected] List of Addendums First Addendum – Middle Ages Second Addendum – Modern and Modern Sub-Categories A. 20th Century B. 21st Century C. Modern and High Modern D. Postmodern and Contemporary E. Descrtiption of Categories (alphabetic) and Important Composers Third Addendum – Composers Fourth Addendum – Musical Terms and Concepts 1 First Addendum – Middle Ages A. The Early Medieval Music (500-1150). i. Early chant traditions Chant (or plainsong) is a monophonic sacred form which represents the earliest known music of the Christian Church. The simplest, syllabic chants, in which each syllable is set to one note, were probably intended to be sung by the choir or congregation, while the more florid, melismatic examples (which have many notes to each syllable) were probably performed by soloists. Plainchant melodies (which are sometimes referred to as a “drown,” are characterized by the following: A monophonic texture; For ease of singing, relatively conjunct melodic contour (meaning no large intervals between one note and the next) and a restricted range (no notes too high or too low); and Rhythms based strictly on the articulation of the word being sung (meaning no steady dancelike beats). Chant developed separately in several European centers, the most important being Rome, Hispania, Gaul, Milan and Ireland. Chant was developed to support the regional liturgies used when celebrating Mass. Each area developed its own chant and rules for celebration. In Spain and Portugal, Mozarabic chant was used, showing the influence of North Afgican music. The Mozarabic liturgy survived through Muslim rule, though this was an isolated strand and was later suppressed in an attempt to enforce conformity on the entire liturgy.
    [Show full text]
  • Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Koenig Books Isbn 978-3-86560-706-5 Early 20Th Century Russia · Andrey Smirnov
    SOUND IN Z Russia, 1917 — a time of complex political upheaval that resulted in the demise of the Russian monarchy and seemingly offered great prospects for a new dawn of art and science. Inspired by revolutionary ideas, artists and enthusiasts developed innumerable musical and audio inventions, instruments and ideas often long ahead of their time – a culture that was to be SOUND IN Z cut off in its prime as it collided with the totalitarian state of the 1930s. Smirnov’s account of the period offers an engaging introduction to some of the key figures and their work, including Arseny Avraamov’s open-air performance of 1922 featuring the Caspian flotilla, artillery guns, hydroplanes and all the town’s factory sirens; Solomon Nikritin’s Projection Theatre; Alexei Gastev, the polymath who coined the term ‘bio-mechanics’; pioneering film maker Dziga Vertov, director of the Laboratory of Hearing and the Symphony of Noises; and Vladimir Popov, ANDREY SMIRNO the pioneer of Noise and inventor of Sound Machines. Shedding new light on better-known figures such as Leon Theremin (inventor of the world’s first electronic musical instrument, the Theremin), the publication also investigates the work of a number of pioneers of electronic sound tracks using ‘graphical sound’ techniques, such as Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, Nikolai Voinov, Evgeny Sholpo and Boris Yankovsky. From V eavesdropping on pianists to the 23-string electric guitar, microtonal music to the story of the man imprisoned for pentatonic research, Noise Orchestras to Machine Worshippers, Sound in Z documents an extraordinary and largely forgotten chapter in the history of music and audio technology.
    [Show full text]
  • The Life of the Machines Vladimir Stoupel, Piano 1
    Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997): Sonatina for Piano (1941) the life of the machines vladimir stoupel, piano 1. Presto 1: 38 2. Moderato / Più allegro 3: 40 3. Allegro molto 1: 50 ANTHEIL / MOSSOLOV / NANCARROW / ROSLAVETS / SZPILMAN Nikolai Roslavets (1881-1944): Sonata No. 2 (1916) 4. Moderato con moto 16: 50 Władisław Szpilman (1911-2000): Suite “The Life of Machines” (1933) 5. Begin slowly 3: 19 6. “Machine at rest” 2: 48 7. Toccatina 1: 47 Alexander Mossolov (1900-1973): Sonata No. 4 (1925) 8. Presto 10: 40 George Antheil (1900-1959): Sonatina “Death of the Machines” (1922) 9. Moderato 0: 33 10. Accelerando 0: 20 11. Accelerando 0: 23 12. Accelerando 0: 55 Sonata No. 4 (1948) 13. Allegro Giocoso – Ironico 6: 09 14. Andante cantabile sostenuto 10: 58 15. Allegro (Presto) 3: 34 More than by war and religious and political upheavals, his reputation as the iconoclastic “Bad Boy of Music”: Szpilman’s piano suite The Life of the Machines: “In it, have picked up Nancarrow’s gauntlet, have measured the experience of life in the modern age has been ten years after Stravinsky’s Sacre, the musical world the musical transfer of that which perpetuates itself their technique against the piano transcriptions of his radically changed by industrialization. The intrusion needed a new scandal. mechanically is not informed by power and threat; works for pianola – and have thus provided the proof of machines into the world of man, the increasing rather these are good-humoredly humming, cheeky, that, a century after Scriabin, Godowsky, Leschetitzki, dominance of machines in industrial processes are The topos of machine music exerted – also less sometimes sardonic machines, like come-to-life Medtner, Hoffmann, and Paderewski, the Gradus ad already reflected in paintings and the literature of ostensibly – a substantial influence on the generation clockwork mechanisms: they attain their own individual Parnassum has yet to be surmounted.
    [Show full text]
  • Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble
    Chapman University Chapman University Digital Commons Printed Performance Programs (PDF Format) Music Performances 11-8-2012 Ensemble-in-Residence in Recital: Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/music_programs Recommended Citation Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, "Ensemble-in-Residence in Recital: Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble" (2012). Printed Performance Programs (PDF Format). Paper 756. http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/music_programs/756 This Guest Recital is brought to you for free and open access by the Music Performances at Chapman University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Printed Performance Programs (PDF Format) by an authorized administrator of Chapman University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Ensemble-in-Residence in Recital: Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble November 8, 2012 FORMING ARTS fau 2012 . YOF• ••CHAPMAN -·U N I V E R S I TY SIC COLLEGE OF PERFORMING ARTS CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY FALL 2012 calendar highlights september Conservatory of Music September 27-29, October 4-6 Company, Book by George Furth, Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim presents the Directed by Todd Nielsen, Music Direction by Bill Brown october October 19-21 Opera Chapman presents "2012: An Opera Odyssey - The Journey Continues" Peter Atherton, Artistic Director, Carol Neblett, Associate Director, David Alt, Assistant Director October 26 Chapman University Choir and Women's Choir
    [Show full text]
  • 14.203 Bazayev
    The Politics of Atonality during the Thaw and Beyond INESSA BAZAYEV Abstract The article provides a critical survey of harsh Soviet attacks on atonal music both foreign and domestic, which began to take root about a decade after the formation of the Soviet Union and continued through the Soviet period. To better contextualize the criticism of atonality within the Soviet Union, the author first discusses the thriving state of atonality prior and during the first two decades of the formation of the Soviet Union, especially highlighted by performances of works by Schoenberg and Berg, as well as their visits to Russia in the 1910s and 1920s. Then, the political climate drastically changed due to the Resolution of 1932, which sought to eradicate all artistic activities and publications that did not comply with Socialist Realism. The term “atonality” became a taboo and was used as a weapon to smear the reputation of Soviet composers. Finally, the article concludes with a brief summary of selected publications by theorist Yuri Kholopov, who tried to re-validate atonality. His creation of the new term—neotonality (1980s)—permitted him to discuss atonal music freely, without the use of the so-called “taboo” term that permeated the Soviet years, allowing open discussion of music by foreign and domestic composers. In official Soviet publications on contemporary music from the 1950s and 1960s, the terms “atonality” [atonal’nost’] and “twelve-tone music” [dvenadtsatitonovaya muzïka] were considered taboo. When used, they functioned to either smear the reputation of Soviet composers or condemn the works of their Western counterparts, especially members of the Second Viennese School.
    [Show full text]
  • The Piano Prelude in the Early Twentieth Century: Genre and Form
    THE PIANO PRELUDE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY: GENRE AND FORM by Siew Yuan Ong, B.Mus.(Hons) This thesis is presented for the degree of Master of Arts of The University of Western Australia School of Music Faculty of Arts 2005 Abstract This thesis focuses on a group of keyboard pieces composed in the first half of the twentieth century entitled ‘prelude’, and explores the issue of genre, investigating the significance in the application of this generic title, and the development of the piano prelude in this period. The application of a generic title often invokes the expectation of its generic features – its conventional and formal characteristics. Though the prelude is one of the oldest genres in the history of keyboard music, it has relatively few conventions, and hence, with the abandonment of its primary function – the prefatory role – in the nineteenth century, it has been considered an indeterminate genre. Rachmaninoff, however, asserted that a generic title should carry with it appropriate generic manifestations, which parallelled similar generic concepts in literature. This expectation of generic traits is like setting up a ‘generic contract’, offering an invitation to either conform or reform, and thus affecting its course of development. A survey of the prelude’s historical development points to six rather consistent generic conventional and formal characteristics: (i) tonality, (ii) pianistic/technical figuration, (iii) thematic treatment and formal structure, (iv) improvisatory style, (v) mood content, and (vi) brevity. Though these general characteristics may overlap with other genres, it is their collective characteristics that have contributed to the genre’s unique identity.
    [Show full text]
  • Toccata Classics TOCC0186 Notes
    ANATOLY ALEXANDROV: PIANO MUSIC, VOLUME ONE by Malcolm MacDonald he ‘Russian Piano Tradition’ – a term widely used in scholarly discourse, though more oten in discussions of performance than of composition – is a distinct and yet insuiciently mapped and chronicled phenomenon of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. he rich and complex interrelationships of a legion of remarkable pianists, composer-pianists, pianist-pedagogues and composer-pedagogues established a dynamic of excellence and master-pupil relationships (especially but not exclusively conined to the Conservatoires of Moscow and St Petersburg/Leningrad) that saw the emergence of generation ater generation of great performers and great music, continually reacting upon one another. To mention the names only of – for example – the brothers Rubinstein, Pavel Pabst, Mily Balakirev, Karl Klindworth, Sergei Taneyev, Alexander Skryabin, Georgy Catoire, Felix Blumenthal, Sergei Lyapunov, Nikolai Medtner, Sergei Rachmaninov, Samuil Feinberg, Nikolai Myaskovsky,1 Sergei Prokoiev, Arthur Lourié, Nikolai Roslavets, Alexander Goldenweiser, Alexei Stanchinsky, Konstantin Igumnov, Leonid Nikolayev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Lev Oborin, Vladimir Sofronitsky, Maria Yudina, Herman Galynin, Emil Gilels, Viktor Merzhanov, Svyatoslav Richter, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Nikolai Kapustin – and not to P invoke the current astonishing elorescence of Russian pianistic talent – is to adduce evidence of one of the most vibrant and creative traditions in the history of the piano. Within this galaxy of mingled talent, mastery and genius the igure of Anatoly Nikolayevitch Alexandrov holds an honoured place at least in Russia, though outside it his name remains hardly known. He is a fascinating if eventually enigmatic igure.2 Clearly he was a survivor, for he lived a very long life by the standard of Soviet composers, dying in his nineties.
    [Show full text]
  • Soviet Influence on the Music of Socialist Republics
    Soviet Influence on October 3 the Music of Socialist Republics Sponsored by Dr. Marc Eagle, Western Kentucky University, History Department, for KATH 2015 Raymond F. Betts By Sarah Fox Undergraduate Writing Award 1 From the 1930s to Stalin’s death in 1953, the government of the Soviet Union controlled and transformed the musical cultures of its republics. The Soviet state sought to simultaneously Russianize, socialize, and modernize the music of its nation and its republics, but this effort was never streamlined or well organized. Instead, a conglomeration of contradictory music policies resulted from Soviet efforts. Nevertheless, significant change occurred in the music of the Soviet republics. From 1932 to 1956, the Soviet Committee on Artistic Affairs, Soviet Composers’ Union, and Stalin himself enforced three methods of control to produce a unique genre of Soviet music. These Soviet policy makers punished “Western” sounding music, promoted “socialist realist” music, and utilized opera as the new voice of the proletariat. Soviet control over music and the arts did not begin immediately following the creation of the Soviet State. Stalin and the Soviet leadership were preoccupied by the Civil War from 1918 to 1920 and the economic challenges associated with nationalization throughout the 1920s.1 Therefore, 1918 through 1932 marked a time of relative artistic freedom throughout the Soviet Union. In 1923, the year before Stalin took the reins as leader of the Soviet Union, musicians from Moscow grouped themselves into two camps. One camp, embodied in the Association of Contemporary Music (ASM), constituted progressive musicians. Members of the ASM included Dmitri Shostakovich, Alexander Mosolov, and its founder Nikolai Roslavets: a Ukrainian Soviet Modernist composer.
    [Show full text]