First published in 1997. This is Volume 8 in a series of a planned eleven on Contemporary Music Studies. Edison Denisov belongs to the generation of composers who came to the fore in the post-Stalinist era and were destined to change the course of Russian music. It would be hard to find a more impressive case of running against the stream in the history of Russian music. This post-war generation of composers grew up in the deadening atmosphere of totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain, under the sway of the personality cult and the enforced precepts of so-called Socialist Realism. Their maturity in the late 1940s coincided with persecutions of the best writers, poets and theatrical figures, Party resolutions on music, and the struggle against formalism and cosmopolitanism. This generation took up the challenge and embarked on its way, proceeding from unconscious but mounting intellectual ferment to an open breach with official ideological doctrines, towards more and more daring and independent artistic concepts. The creative personality of Edison Denisov, one of the leading Russian avant-gardists, was shaped under these conditions. Starting in a Shostakovian style, Denisov took a sharp tum toward the New Music of Boulez and Nono. Denisov's creative individuality, rooted in the past of Russian music and developed under the beneficial impact of 20th century composers like Stravinsky, Bartok and Webern, revealed itself to its best advantage in his avant­garde compositions beginning with the cantata The Sun of the Incas. In this monograph, detailed analyses are given of Denisov's compositional techniques and his musical and literary works in an attempt to reveal the inner world of one of the foremost repre­sentatives of the Russian avant-garde.

What happened to contemporary music in the Soviet Union after Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev? This book is a valuable source of information on the composers of the generations following these three great innovators. It is a document of the hidden period of Russian music, of what happened after the denunciation of Shostakovich and Prokofiev by the Composers' Union. It contains profiles of the most interesting and innovative composers from Russia and the former Soviet republics, written by leading musicologists. Featured composers include Andrei Volkonsky, Philip Gershkovich, Sergei Slonimsky, Boris Tishchenko, Valentin Silvestrov, Leonid Grabovsky , Nikolai Karetnikov , Alemdar Karamanov, Roman Ledenyov , Vyacheslav Artyomov , Faraj Karayev , Alexander Knaifel , Vladislav Shoot Alexander Vustin, Victor Ekimovksy , Alexander Raskatov , Sergei Pavlenko, Vladimir Tarnopolsy.

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.

Following Stalin's death in 1953, students at Soviet conservatories were able to use various channels to acquire and hear music that had previously been forbidden. This book traces the changing compositional styles and politically charged reception of the music.

This text examines the encounter of avant-garde music and 'the Sixties' across a range of genres, aesthetic positions and geographical locations.

This volume brings together analyses of works by thirteen Russian composers from across the twentieth century, showing how their approaches to tonality, modernism, and serialism forge forward-looking paths independent from their Western counterparts. Russian music of this era is widely performed, and much research has situated this repertoire in its historical and social context, yet few analytical studies have explored the technical aspects of these composers' styles. With a set of representative analyses by leading scholars in music theory and analysis, this book for the first time identifies large-scale compositional trends in Russian music since 1900. The chapters progress by compositional style through the century, and each addresses a single work by a different composer, covering pieces by Rachmaninoff, Myaskovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Mansurian, Roslavets, Mosolov, Lourié, Tcherepnin, Ustvolskaya, Denisov, Gubaidulina, and Schnittke. Musicians, scholars, and students will find here a starting point for research and analysis of these composers' works and gain a richer understanding of how to listen to and interpret their music.