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CFA hosts composers, players, and scholars on cutting edge of Russian music
By David J. Craig
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| As part of CFA’s Educational Bridge Project, 40 Russian composers, musicians, and music scholars are visiting Boston University through November 20 to participate with their BU counterparts in a variety of concerts, lectures, and workshops. Among the visitors are members of the Moscow State Conservatory’s Studio New Music ensemble: (above, from left) soloists Pavel Zhdanov, Maria Khodina, and Mihail Doubov, ensemble conductor Igor Dronov, and soloists Marianna Vysotskaya, Maya Bakum, and Maria Volkova. Photo by Sergey Belyaev | |
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When Mauricio Pauly-Maduro hears his latest composition performed by
the Moscow State Conservatory’s Studio New Music ensemble on November
18, he’ll be listening through the ears of the group’s artistic
director, Russian composer Vladimir Tarnopolsky. Pauly-Maduro (CFA’04)
would have it no other way: he wrote his experimental octet specifically
for Studio New Music, and he says its success depends on the sort of
technical precision the ensemble’s players are known for. In a
workshop prior to the performance, he hopes to find out Tarnopolsky’s
opinion on what aspects of his piece work.
“
My score is complex in that it contains a lot of detailed annotations
about rhythm, dynamics, and attack,” says Pauly-Maduro, “and
the playing has to be very nuanced to turn what could sound like just
a line of notes into living, organic gestures.” Pauly-Maduro is
one of six students in the CFA school of music master’s program
in composition who will have a piece performed by Studio New Music in
a composers’ workshop that Tuesday evening at 6:30 p.m. in the
CFA Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave. The workshop will include a performance
of six short pieces, each preceded by a discussion among the BU student-composers,
Studio New Music conductor Igor Dronov, Tarnopolsky, and audience members. “I’m
anxious to hear Tarnopolsky’s opinion of my piece, aesthetically,
because he is at the very edge of new music,” Pauly-Maduro says.
The
composers’ workshop is one highlight of BU’s Sixth Annual
Russian Festival, which is bringing 40 Russian composers, musicians,
and music scholars to Boston University through November 20 and features
chamber music and vocal performances and lectures, all free and open
to the public, as well as master classes. The festival, offering a repertoire
ranging from Shostakovich and Schnittke to the new music of contemporary
Russian composers, is part of BU’s Educational Bridge Project.
Since 1997, the project has brought Russians to Boston in the fall and
sent BU students and faculty to Moscow and St. Petersburg in the spring
to collaborate on performances and share ideas about music, scholarship,
and teaching.
This fall’s festival includes a performance by Studio
New Music entitled 50 Years After Stalin’s Death: The History
of Soviet Russia in Sounds, which will take place on Sunday, November
16, at 8 p.m. in
the CFA Concert Hall. The concert will include several pieces never before
performed in the United States. In addition, a collaborative concert
of Russian arias and songs will be performed by soloists of the St. Petersburg
Mariinsky Theater Academy of Young Singers and BU’s Opera Institute
on Saturday, November 1, at 8 p.m. at CFA’s Concert Hall. Among
other events is a lecture on Russian jazz by Zinaida Kartasheva, a musicology
professor at Moscow State University of Culture and Arts, on Wednesday,
November 19, at 8 p.m. in CFA Room 216.
A goal of the Bridge Project,
says founder and director Ludmilla Leibman (CFA’99), is to inspire
participants to think in fresh ways about the tension between tradition
and innovation in contemporary music. “Music
needs fresh air, and since the late 1980s, the big question in Russia
has been how much of the new should be allowed in the country’s
education institutions,” says Leibman, a CFA assistant music professor.
The Russian native immigrated to the United States in 1991 and subsequently
earned a doctorate in musical arts at BU.
BU students who took part in
concerts, master classes, and lectures at both the progressive Moscow
State Conservatory and the more traditional
St. Petersburg Conservatory in May, she says, were struck by the dramatic
differences in their educational approaches. “It raised interesting
artistic and philosophical questions about where is the fine line between
clinging to tradition so much that you limit yourself,” she says, “and
leaving it altogether so that you’re lost and uprooted.”
Pauly-Maduro,
who traveled to both cities, blossomed under the tutelage of Tarnopolsky,
a teacher of composition at Moscow State Conservatory.
Tarnopolsky critiqued the work of Pauly-Maduro and several other BU student-composers
in a master class held at the conservatory. “Hearing him talk so
passionately about new music confirmed for me ideas that I had been thinking
about for a long time,” says Pauly-Maduro, a 27-year-old native
of Costa Rica. “He said that music doesn’t have to have a
clear function or message, and that art actually should be ambiguous.
He also said that he doesn’t try to write like great Russian composers
such as Shostakovich because he loves them so much, and that if you try
to re-create the past, you destroy it. He told us to write music for
our own time, with our own tools, in our own medium.”
Although
Pauly-Maduro speaks no Russian and Tarnopolsky little English, the CFA
master’s student is anxious to communicate with the Russian
composer and teacher again, using all the “pointing, gesturing,
and face-making” that people revert to when the only language they
share is that of music. “Once you put a score on the table, and
start pointing toward particular annotations and other things you like
about the music,” Pauly-Maduro says, “everybody forgets about
the language barrier pretty quickly.”
For a full schedule of Russian
Festival events, visit www.bu.edu/cfa/music.
31
October 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations