Endless forest of time
ALFRED SCHNITTKE'S
author
Tatyana Efimova
Have you ever tried to watch a film without music? T atiana Efimova, lecturer at the Moscow School of Cinema and the Higher School of Economics, music historian, guest lecturer at the Tretyakov Gallery, and author of articles, asserts it's impossible. Without music, we do not wonder, do not cry, do not believe.
In a unique course of lectures, Tatiana talks about the influence of music on the emotional perception of a film and how a composer helps to bring a story to people's hearts. Especially for our project, T atiana writes about Alfred Schnittke, the brightest representative of the avant-garde in the history of music.
In a unique course of lectures, Tatiana talks about the influence of music on the emotional perception of a film and how a composer helps to bring a story to people's hearts. Especially for our project, T atiana writes about Alfred Schnittke, the brightest representative of the avant-garde in the history of music.
On November 24th, the composer turned 90 years old. Throughout his entire creative life, Schnittke searched, experimented and infringed. We will discuss why the innovator and destroyer of canons was often called a philosopher even during his lifetime, and how Schnittke turned from a ‘sixtiers’ composer of ‘left-wing ideas’ into a classic.
Alfred Schnittke was born in 1934 in Engels, Saratov Region. No one in the family was involved in music, so the composer received his first lessons late, at the age of 12, in Vienna, where his father worked as a translator in the post-war period. On his return to Moscow, Schnittke entered the Moscow Conservatoire and keenly felt an interest in the currents of the time labelled ‘hour zero’ in European musical art. This is what Karlheinz Stockhausen called the year 1950, when the avant-garde burst into music: composers were breaking with tradition and trying to speak a new language.
Schnittke was fascinated by new composing techniques, feeling the influence of György Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki and Henri Pusser, and under the impression of Luciano Berio's Symphony he came to the principle of collage. It is a symphony for large orchestra, violin, piano, electric organ, electric harpsichord and vocal ensemble. In one of its movements, Berio took music from Mahler's Second Symphony and overlaid it with many quotations from works of Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Bartók and other composers.
Collage was incredibly popular among avant-garde composers. They borrowed this technique from artists who glued scraps of newspaper, cardboard, and pieces of fabric onto a base. When Pablo Picasso and other artists experimented with their collages, musical collages began to sound. Painters combined pieces from different materials, while composers combined symbols of bygone eras. Such symbols were quotations from baroque, classical and romantic composers, but Schnittke does not only use them. Expanding the field of meaning of his works, he adds quasi-quotations and allusions and arrives at his main creative method – polystylistics – a mixture of completely different styles.
Alfred Schnittke was born in 1934 in Engels, Saratov Region. No one in the family was involved in music, so the composer received his first lessons late, at the age of 12, in Vienna, where his father worked as a translator in the post-war period. On his return to Moscow, Schnittke entered the Moscow Conservatoire and keenly felt an interest in the currents of the time labelled ‘hour zero’ in European musical art. This is what Karlheinz Stockhausen called the year 1950, when the avant-garde burst into music: composers were breaking with tradition and trying to speak a new language.
Schnittke was fascinated by new composing techniques, feeling the influence of György Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki and Henri Pusser, and under the impression of Luciano Berio's Symphony he came to the principle of collage. It is a symphony for large orchestra, violin, piano, electric organ, electric harpsichord and vocal ensemble. In one of its movements, Berio took music from Mahler's Second Symphony and overlaid it with many quotations from works of Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Bartók and other composers.
Collage was incredibly popular among avant-garde composers. They borrowed this technique from artists who glued scraps of newspaper, cardboard, and pieces of fabric onto a base. When Pablo Picasso and other artists experimented with their collages, musical collages began to sound. Painters combined pieces from different materials, while composers combined symbols of bygone eras. Such symbols were quotations from baroque, classical and romantic composers, but Schnittke does not only use them. Expanding the field of meaning of his works, he adds quasi-quotations and allusions and arrives at his main creative method – polystylistics – a mixture of completely different styles.
Using this technique, the composer writes his First Symphony, in which he epitomises the struggle between good and evil, colliding classical, jazz and avant-garde. He also uses many quotations – from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to themes from Chopin, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. In the symphony, Schnittke embodies life itself, consisting of high and low, and the constant interpenetration of one into the other. Initially Schnittke wanted to call it theAntisymphony, so complex and unusual it seemed even to the composer. The public, however, was shocked by what they heard. The symphony was placed on the list of semi-banned compositions, as were many of Schnittke's other works.
The composer uses polystylistics as a means of expressing the conflict between harmony and chaos in many of his other works: The Second and Third Symphonies, the Third and Fourth Violin Concertos and the Alto Concerto with its romantic collision. The hero (the viola solo) is in conflict with the surrounding reality (the orchestra), but he does not feel harmony in himself either: the singsong lines are constantly ‘corroded’ by dissonances. All attempts to find a balance are drowned out by the raging elements of the orchestral mass.
It is curious that Schnittke first thought about mixing styles while working on the animated film The Glass Harmonica. In it, Andrei Khrzhanovsky pits Leonardo da Vinci against René Magritte, Arcimboldo against Salvador Dali. ‘I didn't realise how to create something whole out of all this, but the director succeeded,’ Schnittke recalled. He then had an idea that the music should also be diverse, contrasting in style, so that it would ultimately emphasise the idea of ‘the artistic and spiritual universality of culture, the universality of the essence of man’.
Reflecting on this led Schnittke to take a different view of ‘calculations in music’, of where the avant-garde was leading him: ‘Of course, I'm simplifying, there was more than just calculations. I realised that a certain abnormality was rooted in the very rupture that exists in contemporary musical language, in the gulf between the laboratory ‘top’ and the commercial ‘bottom’. It is necessary – not only for me, based on my personal situation, but in principle – to overcome this gap. The musical language should be unified, as it has always been, it should be universal. It can have a bias in one direction or another, but there cannot be two musical languages. The development of the musical avant-garde led precisely to a conscious rupture and to finding a different, elitist language. And I started looking for a universal musical language – musically, my evolution looked like this.
The turn towards universality led Schnittke to a sense of the infinity of time, the coexistence of all times. Seizing symbols of the past and weaving them into the present, he spoke of the problems that have always troubled him: life and death, the high and the low, the struggle between good and evil and the indefinite presence of this struggle.
The composer uses polystylistics as a means of expressing the conflict between harmony and chaos in many of his other works: The Second and Third Symphonies, the Third and Fourth Violin Concertos and the Alto Concerto with its romantic collision. The hero (the viola solo) is in conflict with the surrounding reality (the orchestra), but he does not feel harmony in himself either: the singsong lines are constantly ‘corroded’ by dissonances. All attempts to find a balance are drowned out by the raging elements of the orchestral mass.
It is curious that Schnittke first thought about mixing styles while working on the animated film The Glass Harmonica. In it, Andrei Khrzhanovsky pits Leonardo da Vinci against René Magritte, Arcimboldo against Salvador Dali. ‘I didn't realise how to create something whole out of all this, but the director succeeded,’ Schnittke recalled. He then had an idea that the music should also be diverse, contrasting in style, so that it would ultimately emphasise the idea of ‘the artistic and spiritual universality of culture, the universality of the essence of man’.
Reflecting on this led Schnittke to take a different view of ‘calculations in music’, of where the avant-garde was leading him: ‘Of course, I'm simplifying, there was more than just calculations. I realised that a certain abnormality was rooted in the very rupture that exists in contemporary musical language, in the gulf between the laboratory ‘top’ and the commercial ‘bottom’. It is necessary – not only for me, based on my personal situation, but in principle – to overcome this gap. The musical language should be unified, as it has always been, it should be universal. It can have a bias in one direction or another, but there cannot be two musical languages. The development of the musical avant-garde led precisely to a conscious rupture and to finding a different, elitist language. And I started looking for a universal musical language – musically, my evolution looked like this.
The turn towards universality led Schnittke to a sense of the infinity of time, the coexistence of all times. Seizing symbols of the past and weaving them into the present, he spoke of the problems that have always troubled him: life and death, the high and the low, the struggle between good and evil and the indefinite presence of this struggle.