Edison Denisov’s Second Conservatory: Analysis and Implementation

Introduction

During the rule of Stalin, composers in the Soviet Union lived and worked within a world of severe restrictions.¹ The dogma of socialist realism prohibited music, literature, and the arts from revealing any sort of “formalist” tendencies.² Music was expected to play a societal role—one of glorifying the state and the working classes—and promoting the spirit of socialism.³ Without offering much in the way of specific criteria, a composition was only deemed acceptable by the Soviet authorities if it was accessible to a general audience, tuneful, optimistic, folk-influenced, and of a traditional style.⁴

Composers during this time had virtually no legal access to scores, recordings, or books related to avant garde music of Europe and the Americas; influences of the modern West had no place in the world of Soviet music. Ideologically, the composition of serial music in Stalin’s Soviet Union, then, was doubly problematic: first, it was derided as formalist by the state, and second, the method itself demonstrated an unacceptable Western influence.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the situation became somewhat less severe. During the so-called Khrushchev Thaw, access to Western musical sources was permitted to varying extents. While absolute open access was still impossible, the composers who were studying at the Moscow Conservatory during this time were aware of the trends that had been developed thirty years prior by Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, Anton Webern and Alban Berg.⁵ Though these techniques certainly were not officially taught within Conservatory walls, Edison Denisov, a composition student at the Moscow Conservatory from 1951 to 1959, and others reportedly sought the aid of their open-minded composition instructor Vissarion Shebalin to help in their unofficial study of as much of this modern music as they could acquire. Because access to this music was now legal but still not widespread, the scores and books studied by the young composers were not openly available through the Conservatory library and had to be found elsewhere.

A number of young Soviet composers experimented with serial techniques. Denisov, Andreĭ Volkonskiĭ, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, Sofia Gubaĭdulina, Valentin Sil’vestrov, and Nikolaĭ Karetnikov were among those who tried their hands at twelve-tone writing during the early years of the Thaw. For Denisov and the other experimenting composers, twelve-tone composition was simply a new tool to be included in the compositional toolbox, alongside aleatoricism, graphic notation, and free atonality. Their novelty made them exciting tools, to be sure, but these composers used or ignored them as they deemed necessary to fulfill an expressive purpose. Regarding twelve-tone composition specifically, Peter Schmelz convincingly argues that “the young composers did not view [serialism] as a monolithic method…that implied a single style. They were more intent on applying the techniques and integrating them into their own, already developing styles.”⁶ Unlike his peers, Denisov appears to be one of the few for whom the twelve-tone approach found a permanent home in his compositional style.

Denisov’s peer Andreĭ Volkonskiĭ is generally credited with having written the first piece of Soviet serial music, with his four-movement piano composition Musica Stricta (1956–1957).⁷ Though a thorough analysis of Volkonskiĭ’s work is beyond the scope of the present paper, a few brief notes are appropriate here. The first movement of this piece is organized around manipulations of an unordered pitch-class set, and therefore does not fit into standard Western definitions of “serialism.”⁸ It may be described more comfortably by the general label of “freely atonal” music.⁹ The second, third, and fourth movements are serial, as they are based on transformations of ordered twelve-tone rows. All three of those movements derive their pitch material from multiple, simultaneous twelve-tone row classes: the second movement features four distinct row classes used in counterpoint, while the third and fourth movements each use two, and all three movements make use of non-row-based, freely atonal material. Throughout the remainder of this paper, I will use the word “row” to...