Russian Composers Abroad

How They Left, Stayed, Returned

Elena Dubinets

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253057808
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

As waves of composers migrated from Russia in the 20th century, they grappled with the complex struggle between their own traditions and those of their adopted homes.

Russian Composers Abroad explores the self-identity of these émigrés, especially those who left from the 1970s on, and how aspects of their diasporic identities played out in their music. Elena Dubinets provides a journey through the complexities of identity formation and cultural production under globalization and migration, elucidating sociological perspectives of the post-Soviet world that have caused changes in composers' outlooks, strategies, and rankings.

Russian Composers Abroad is an illuminating study of creative ideas that are often shaped by the exigencies of financing and advancement rather than just by the vision of the creators and the demands of the public.

Part I

National versus Global

DIASPORANS ARE OFTEN CALLED “GLOBAL citizens,” but what does this term mean, and how does it relate to their national identification? Let us again turn to the example of Alexander Raskatov. In 1990, while still permanently living in the USSR, he became a composer-in-residence at Stetson University in Florida. In 1994, he emigrated to Germany and then, a few years later, became a permanent resident of France. In 1998, he was awarded the main composition prize at the Salzburg Easter Festival and became a composer-in-residence at the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival in Austria. Since leaving his native country, Raskatov has attended the world premieres of his works that have been commissioned and performed by such major organizations as the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester in Germany, the Sinfonieorchester Basel in Switzerland, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in the United States, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Hilliard Ensemble in the United Kingdom, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Asko-Schönberg Ensemble in the Netherlands, and many others. Raskatov’s opera A Dog’s Heart (2010, after Mikhail Bulgakov’s Sobach’e serdtse [The Heart of a Dog]) has been performed by the Netherlands National Opera, the English National Opera, Teatro alla Scala in Italy, and the Opéra National de Lyon in France. His opera GerMANIA (2018) was premiered in Lyon in May 2018 and another opera, Zatmenie (Eclipse), was premiered a month later at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.¹ His career is truly cosmopolitan, and with each new concert locale, Raskatov embraces the surrounding cultural experiences and influences, weaving them into his social and musical practices.

As Raskatov’s example demonstrates, the music that composers create—their means of communication—transcends boundaries and connects very different spaces, times, and cultures, allowing musicians and their audiences to evoke compelling memories. Music helps construct and rearticulate identities in this transnational world, where the legitimacy and superiority of national elites is weakened and social consensus and bonding can develop outside of explicitly nationalist agendas. As Edward Said pointed out, “The transgressive element in music is its nomadic ability to attach itself to, and become a part of social formations, to vary its articulations and rhetoric depending on the occasion as well as the audience, plus the power and the gender situations in which it takes place.”²

At the beginning of the current century, globalization was seen as a given—inexorable and inevitable. The ongoing omnidirectional encounters between peoples, cultures, and knowledge continue to decentralize power and weaken the cultural insularity of nations. The recent resurgence of neonationalist and populist movements in Europe and the United States—including both the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in 2016—have cast doubt on the future. But it seems undeniable that, despite the risk of future protectionism and nativism, the informational, economic, and cultural connections that have already been established cannot be easily undone and will only continue to increase, if at a slightly slower rate and in a more constrained manner. States and people will continue to interact and influence one another, sharing an entangled history and causing territorial distinctions to become less relevant.

Because advances in communication and transportation have diminished geographical and informational boundaries, many musicians are constantly on the move, fulfilling professional obligations in different places in rapid succession. Performers most frequently exemplify this global movement, but composers also share in such transnational peregrinations. They find themselves amid a complex web of relationships predicated on state policies, the dominant discourse of the times, and encounters with other people within and across cultural and social boundaries. This part of the book discusses these kinds of border crossings. It is organized according to four main types of belonging: the universal (belonging to the entire world rather than to a specific nation); the national (belonging to a particular nation-state); and the two types of belonging to a culture rather than to the nominal nation-state for that culture: cultural affiliation (foreign composers striving to belong to Russian culture) and diaspora (former Soviet and Russian citizens still positioned as belonging to Russian culture).

Notes

1.GerMANIA is based on the adaptations of Heiner Müller’s avant-garde plays about Germany’s haunted past, satirizing one of the worst dictatorships of all times; Zatmenie is dedicated to the life story of the Decembrist Sergey Muraviev-Apostol and was commissioned and paid for by his distant relative Christopher Muraviev-Apostol.

2.Edward Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 70.

1

The “Universal”

Globalizing the Local

BELONGING TO THE ENTIRE WORLD rather than to a specific nation constitutes the first type of self-identification. It refers to a utopian situation in which national rules are less important than ostensibly universal ones. It is exemplified by composer Alexander Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, who, about ten years ago, perceived globalization as a means to save the planet—both its artistic and philosophical advances and humanity as a whole:

It is difficult to make people free. For this reason, it would not be bad to try and create one unified state. Otherwise we will blow the planet up because some people believe that they are better than everyone else. Instead of thinking about how to save the planet, they prefer to be at each other’s throats. That’s why I like the idea of a joint state that could somehow control the aggression that exists in us. We face a problem of survival, and without a globalized state the planet appears to be doomed. As do all products of humanity’s thought.

Rabinovitch-Barakovsky has intentionally de-Russified and “globalized” his output, removing any ethnic connotations from his music. In his work, he has established his own unique globalizing style by integrating all his compositions into a large cycle called Anthology of Archaic Rituals—In Search of the Center. Rituals is an accurate definition of his music’s essence, which he thinks is subject to a higher order: the cyclical nature of the universe that has ruled society from ancient times to the present and that is based on cross-cultural archetypes or mythological models. The persistent succession of stereotypical actions that characterize all rituals is conveyed in Rabinovitch-Barakovsky’s music through the minimalistic repetitiveness of its tonally rooted musical material. The unchanging organization of the world, which revolves incessantly around the same center for everyone in all societies, resonates in our ears in many ways: through surprising superimposed chords, disquieting melodies, an architecturally solid construction based on numerology, and insistent harmonic phrases that stubbornly recur in each successive work.

Rabinovitch-Barakovsky’s tonally organized music is recognizable from the very first sound—or, to be more precise, from the first chord, which is typically a six-four chord. The triumphant instability demonstrated by such a chord characterizes his overall compositional style. The seemingly typical minimalism featured in his music is also quite unusual because it features tonal and formal development, aside from nonsynchronic repetitions of some material in individual voices. His music always contains intricate harmonic work and a fine structural organization in addition to a grain of uncertainty represented by the fifth degree in the bass voice, unresolved harmonies, and systematically traversed chromatic scales. The listener is not beaten up by truisms but is asked to consider the truth instead.

Rabinovitch-Barakovsky attempts to understand the system ruling the outside world and its vital governing thread; he hopes this will allow him to navigate the labyrinth of the human condition, no matter how naive and questionable this idea is. This explains his seemingly paradoxical passion for both science and alchemy as well as for the cultural principles of multiple world religions simultaneously. As he admits: “I am very much at home with this tendency of Oriental mysticism to see the world with the ‘eyes of the heart.’ And yet, emotions are no longer directly expressed; they are explored and analyzed within the context of therapy in which the patient establishes a dialogue with oneself and becomes one’s own psychoanalyst. This creates a type of cognitive and intelligible emotion thanks to the use of arithmosophy (the analyst’s role being played by the numbers).”¹ He later states that his idea about a global system of organizing the world order was wishful thinking on his part and suggests the concept of the new musical paradigm that he named Terza Pratica (pace Seconda Pratica, introduced by Claudio Monteverdi at the beginning of the seventeenth century), “a kind of mystical rationality which would reevaluate the spiritual orientation of music and its cognitive, holistic and therapeutic power.”² Thus, Rabinovitch-Barakovsky has admitted that, to his chagrin, the world remains far from a single, peaceful global village; total homogenization is not on the agenda.

In the current political discourses, the national and transnational are equal and simultaneously existing variables of a multivector and multilayered space.³ People may feel either local or global—or both—depending on circumstance. Nevertheless, while the civic attachments and regulations initiated by nation-states are essential to the lives of most citizens, the traditional power relationships of nation-states have been challenged by the creation of transnational unities—the European Union is still the most powerful of them, even after Brexit—and through the multifaceted traces of economic and cultural globalization, including financial and corporate conglomerates, religious institutions, and such organizations as t...