Постскриптум. Ещё несколько композиторских имён

Russian music today has a firm hold around the world in the repertoire of opera houses, ballet companies, and orchestras. The music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergey Rachmaninov, Sergey Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich is very much today’s lingua franca both in the concert hall and on the soundtracks of international blockbusters from Hollywood. Meanwhile the innovations of Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Igor Stravinsky have played their crucial role in the development of Western music in the last century, influencing the work of virtually every notable composer of the last century. The Historical Dictionary of Russian Music covers the history of Russian music starting from the earliest archaeological discoveries to the present, including folk music, sacred music, and secular art music. The book contains a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries on every major composer in Russia’s history, as well as several leading composers of today, such as Sofia Gubaidulina, Rodion Shchedrin, Leonid Desyatnikov, Elena Firsova, and Pavel Karmanov. It also includes the patrons and institutions that commissioned works by those composers and the choreographers and dancers who helped shape the great ballet masterpieces. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian music.

The presented material is based on a conversation the author of the article had with the outstanding Russian musicologist, Doctor of Arts, and Professor at the Moscow Conservatory, Valentina Nikolayevna Kholopova (1935–2025). The main focus of the discussion revolves around the musicologist’s influence on the creative biography of composers, as well as on the fate of Russian music as a whole. In the interview, Valentina Kholopova recalls her remarkable classmates from the Moscow Conservatory, among whom Sofia Gubaidulina, Edison Denisov, and Alfred Schnittke particularly stand out. The collaboration between the musicologists and the composers of the “Sixtiers” generation significantly shaped many pathways of Soviet musical culture, facilitating the integration of Soviet music into the global musical landscape. The role of the musicologist in these processes was also exceptionally high; it is enough to recall the story of the creation of the monograph on Anton Webern. The monograph, written by Valentina and Yuri Kholopov, is one of the first books about 20th-century music written in Russian; it became a true bestseller, sparking discussions among musicians throughout the country.

Drawing upon oral history, analysis, and a critical synthesis of secondary literature, this book examines the construction and reception of the “unofficial” music in the Soviet Union produced during the Thaw (roughly 1956–74) by composers including Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, Sofia Gubaidulina, Valentin Silvestrov, Andrey Volkonsky, and Edison Denisov. This book addresses “unofficial” music in all of its contradictions, and argues for a more refined understanding of its changing meanings during the Thaw (and the cold war). The book traces two interrelated phenomena. The first is the developing social function provided by “unofficial” concert life, which allowed Soviet listeners to congregate and question traditional socialist realist verities, and by extension many other facets of life in the USSR. The second is the shifting nature of the musical styles embraced by “unofficial” composers. Initially, while still conservatory students in the 1950s, they encountered music previously off‐limits, including scores by Schoenberg, Boulez, and other Western modernists. They avidly pursued the serial compositional techniques in these “new” scores. However, tiring of the limited expressive possibilities they perceived in these methods, they turned in other directions, first to aleatory devices, and then to quotations from familiar tonal works. The stylistic development of this generation thereby moved from “abstraction” to “mimesis” (borrowing musicologist Karol Berger's terminology). In their mimetic works from the end of the 1960s, the “unofficial” Soviet composers more directly engaged the contemporary situation in the USSR and in so doing received more favorable responses from listeners and Soviet critics alike. Andrey Volkonsky Edison Denisov Alfred Schnittke Sofia Gubaidulina Valentin Silvestrov Arvo Pärt serialism aleatory cold war oral history

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of Soviet music as presented in the Russian‐language educational project Arzamas (2015–2023). Posted in the public domain of the Internet, the materials on the Arzamas website fully fit into the interdisciplinary discourse of public history. In this article, the author selects and from the perspective of cultural recycling analyses an array of materials of the Soviet period presented on the website: from folk and Soviet mass songs, gypsy and classical romance (including romance in cinema) to jazz, symphony, ballet, and break dance. The article traces how the authors of different genre materials interpret selected works and the historical and cultural profiles of their creators from the point of view of postmodernity. Special attention is paid to the principles according to which the website forms a musical image of the Soviet period for the modern audience (which statistically consists of Millennials and, if taking into account the Arzamas Children’s Room, the next two generations — Z and Alpha). The author of this article makes a conclusion that what is meant by Soviet music in the Arzamas project is compositions created from the 1920s to the late 1960s (early 1970s) and listened to by different social groups. The dominant type of a musical composition is a song in various modifications. Soviet music (mostly non-academic) is treated as an integral part of the country’s history which emotionally accurately reflects political and cultural changes. In such a context academic music becomes a peripheral phenomenon: only two composers are highlighted — Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich — but shown as victims of the Soviet system.

This article presents a framework to approach musical hybridity, which is understood generally as any combination of musical identities. The framework focuses on the concepts ofmixture strategies—perceptible processes of interaction and manipulation of styles, genres, and other identity markers. Mixture strategies are recurrent treatments of disparate musical identities in hybrid music, and not only do they definewhatthe materials are, they more fully explorehowthese entities are put together. There are four distinct mixture strategies—clash, coexistence, distortion, and trajectory—and each have peculiar characteristics and significations contingent on their use structurally and contextually.In the article I define and exemplify each of the four mixture strategies in composers from, or related to, the post-1960s polystylistic concert music such as Alfred Schnittke, George Rochberg, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Peter Maxwell Davies. In these works, hybridity itself is foregrounded, and articulates the musical discourse as much, and oftentimes more so, than other musical parameters. Thus, this repertory proves helpful to demonstrate a general framework that can, and should, be applicable to other hybrid repertories. As I discuss the mixture strategies, I will debate the potential interpretive tropes for each. Then, I apply these ideas in interpreting the entire second movement of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, a work that explores all four mixture strategies. The second movement is then contextualized within the entire concerto.

The purpose of this critical commentary is to explore the concept of the composerperformer relationship. In order to do so, it will consider some famous composer-violinist partnerships, which have produced repertoire reflecting both musicians’ contribution - Johannes Brahms and Josef Joachim, Dmitri Shostakovich and David Oistrakh, and Alfred Schnittke and Gidon Kremer. In addition, the commentary also seeks to ground itself in my own experience, and document the process of commissioning and performing a solo work for violin. It explores the relationship between composer Joseph Twist and myself as a violinist, specifically relating to the work performed in my final recital in March 2005, and allows me to experience first hand the composer-performer dynamic and compare my experience with those I have researched.

Michael Steinberg’s 1996 volume The Symphony: A Reader’s Guide received glowing reviews across America. It was hailed as “wonderfully clear...recommended warmly to music lovers on all levels” (Washington Post), “informed and thoughtful” (Chicago Tribune), and “composed by a master stylist” (San Francisco Chronicle). Seiji Ozawa wrote that “his beautiful and effortless prose speaks from the heart.” Michael Tilson Thomas called The Symphony “an essential book for any concertgoer.” Now comes the companion volume--The Concerto: A Listener’s Guide. In this marvelous book, Steinberg discusses over 120 works, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach in the 1720s to John Adams in 1994. Readers will find here the heart of the standard repertory, among them Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, eighteen of Mozart’s piano concertos, all the concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, and major works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Bruch, Dvora’k, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Elgar, Sibelius, Strauss, and Rachmaninoff. The book also provides luminous introductions to the achievement of twentieth-century masters such as Arnold Schoenberg, Be ‘la Barto’k, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron Copland, and Elliott Carter. Steinberg examines the work of these musical giants with unflagging enthusiasm and bright style. He is a master of capturing the expressive, dramatic, and emotional values of the music and of conveying the historical and personal context in which these wondrous works were composed. His writing blends impeccable scholarship, deeply felt love of music, and entertaining whimsy.

Is there a relationship between urbanization and vegetation cover conflict or coordination? A survey of 74 federal subjects in Russia

The article analyzes the term "freedom" as an important concept in the history of Cold War music. This contested notion existed along two major axes of the prewar era: socialism versus liberalism and social freedom versus autonomy. These neat divisions between East and West began to unravel after 1953 when the different sides started to interact and reference each other. In presenting a case study of the "Moscow Troika" (a group of composers consisting of Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, and Sofia Gubaidulina), this essay highlights the importance of communication and contact among individuals and groups in establishing notions of "freedom." Концепция "свободы" в настоящей статье рассматривается в контексте процессов в советской музыкальной среде времен холодной войны. Понятие "свободы" в политическом пространстве наделялось смыслом в рамках двух важнейших дихотомий: социализм и либерализм, социальная свобода и личная автономия. Географически эти полюса распределялись между "Востоком" и "Западом". Но с 1953 г., когда между противостоящими сторонами началось сотрудничество и вырос взаимный интерес, бинарное восприятие "свободы" усложнилось. Обращаясь к феномену "московской тройки" (группа композиторов вокруг Альфреда Шнитке, Эдисона Денисова и Софии Губайдуллиной), автор настоящей статьи вскрывает важность общения и контактов между индивидуумами и группами в определении понимания "свободы".

Yurii Boiko. Forest-Steppe Ukraine: Society in Statistics (1846 – 1897) : Monograph. Riga, Latvia : Baltija Publishing, 2025. 280 p. The monograph is the result of an investigation into the society of the most famous region in the history of Ukraine, which consisted of Kyiv, Podillia, Volyn, Poltava, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv (Slobozhanshchyna) provinces in the mid-second half of the 19th century. The author proposes to call this former “heartland” of Ukraine “Forest-Steppe Ukraine,” similar to the name adopted in archaeology. The study’s novelty lies in the regional approach and the emphasis on the statistical variety of historical sources. What results does the researcher present to the readers? They are atypical for classical Ukrainian historiography: a multidimensional statistical model of the demographic potential of Forest-Steppe Ukraine in the middle of the 19th century; a regional spatial-dynamic model of adverse changes in the provision of agricultural resources to the population from the mid-1840s to the end of the 1890s; multidimensional statistical model of the social situation in the region; statistical classification and typology of urban settlements in the area in the early 1860s; dynamic statistical model of the ethnic composition of the Right-Bank subregion in the second half of the 19th century and the region as a whole according to the 1897 Census; the issue of the state of health and the health care system in the Forest-Steppe provinces of Ukraine using statistical data; a multidimensional statistical model that reflects the ethnic composition of the leading professions in the region at the end of the 19th century. All models are built on the same source base using the same methods, making the obtained results comparable in regional and interregional studies.

The article examines Yuliy Meitus's musical ballads on Robert Burns's lyrics as part of Soviet musical Burnsiana of the 1940–50s. Up to the present time the names of such Soviet composers as Dmitry Shostakovich, Tikhon Khrennikov, Georgy Sviridov, Yuri Levitin and Edison Denisov embody the perception of the national poet of Scotland's heritage by Soviet composers of the middle of the twentieth century. However, the musical compositions of such prominent Soviet composers as Dmitry Kabalevsky, Lucian Prigozhin and Yuliy Meitus on Samuil Marshak's translations of Robert Burns dating back to the same period have been neglected. The contribution of Yuliy Meitus deserves special attention as he was neither Shostakovich's pupil nor close friend, unlike the majority of the composers mentioned, and his ballads: ‘A small ballad’ on ‘There was a Bonny Lass’, ‘ Macpherson before execution’ after ‘McPherson's Farewell’ and ‘Love’ on ‘A Red, Red Rose’ were composed in less then a month. The aim of the article is to attract the attention of musicologists to encourage analysis of these musical pieces in comparison with other interpretations of the same songs by Robert Burns, e.g. Dmitry Shostakovich's ‘Macpherson before execution’ (‘McPherson's Farewell’), Yuri Levitin's ‘Love’ (‘A Red, Red Rose’) and Edison's Denisov's ‘A small ballad’ (‘There was a Bonny Lass’).

This paper aims at reconstructing the genealogy of Siberian Tatars of Knyazevs (Western Siberia), identifying the origins of their surname, which is not characteristic of the Tatars, and at analysis of the influence of socio-political and socio-economical processes in Russia in the 18th through 20th centuries on the social transformation of the family. The sources were represented by the materials of the Inventory Revision Book of Tarsky District of 1701 and census surveys of the end of 18th through 19th centuries, which allowed tracing the Knyazev family through the genealogical succession and identifying social status of its members. In this work, recordkeeping ma-terials of the 18th–20th centuries and contemporary genealogical and historical traditions of the Tatars have been utilized. In the research, the method of genealogical reconstructions by archival materials and their correlation with genealogies of modern population has been used. The history of the Knyazev family is inextricably linked to the history of modern village of Bernyazhka — one of the earliest settlements of the Ayalintsy (a group of the Si-berian Tatars) in the territory of the Tarsky Irtysh land which became the home to the Knyazevs for more than three centuries. The 1701Inventory Revision Book cites Itkuchuk Buchkakov as a local power broker of the Aya-lynsky Tatars in the village. During the 18th century, this position was inherited by his descendants who eventually lost this status in the beginning of the 19th century in the course of the managerial reforms by the Russian gov-ernment. Nevertheless, the social status of the members of the gens remained high. In the mid. 19th century, the village moved — the villagers resettled from the right bank of the River Irtysh onto the left one. As the result, the village was situated nearby the main road connecting the cities of Omsk and Tara. At the same time, the village became the center of the Ayalynskay region. That led to the strengthening of the social status and property en-richment of the descendants of Itkuchuk Buchkakov. The Knyzevs’ surname first appeared in the materials of the First All-Russia Census Survey of 1897. Some of the descendants signed up under this surname later in the Soviet period. During the Soviet years, members of the Knyzev’s gens had different destinies: some worked in the local government, whereas the others were subjected to political repressions and executed. Knyazevs took part in the Great Patriotic War and seven of them perished. Presently there are no descendants of the Knyazevs in Bernyazhka as they spread over the villages of the Omskaya Region, some living in Omsk and other towns of Russia and abroad.

This article presents the creative project of Archimandrite Gabriel (V. N. Voskresensky), a prominent figure of the first half of the 19th century, a theologian, philosopher, and scholarly monk. Archimandrite Gabriel is a key figure for understanding the historical and philosophical process in Russia for several reasons. First and foremost, he created the world’s first history of Russian philosophy, creating a new academic genre for his time, «Russian philosophy». But as an intellectual «pioneer» in the historiographical format, he consistently constructed not only a «Russian philosophy» but also a national philosophy of law, known as «philosophical truth». After composing the first «history of Russian philosophy» in Russia (1840), Archimandrite Gabriel undertook the development of a textbook at the Imperial Kazan University, presenting a philosophy of law reflecting the precepts of his time, characterized by the clash of «faith and reason», «conservative and liberal». Adhering to the parameters of historical and philosophical research (revealing the form and essence of ideas in their history, the genealogy of the intellectual process), he reconstructed a creative event, a creative act, dominated by the formation of a nationally oriented philosophy of law, taking into account European experience but favoring its own themes and problems, materials, and methods. This study, conducted using the humanitarian archaeology of key factors influencing the scientific and educational processes of the mid- 19th century, explores these factors: higher education, church and state, ideology and education, and the renewal of academic techniques and practices while preserving the values inherent in the national cultural narrative. To achieve these objectives, the principle of «intellectual investigation» is employed, based on historical and philosophical reconstruction and cultural and civilizational hermeneutics. The study presents a set of key factors (institutions, individuals, texts, and situations) that contributed to the formation of a «philosophy of truth». The reconstruction of a set of legal ideas is based on philosophical and historical research in educational, scientific, ideological, and political contexts. The results provide an empirical, conceptual, and contextual basis for further research in philosophy and law, as well as material for educational programs in higher education.

The relevance of the research is determined by the increasing importance of studying natural sciences and STEM subjects both in general and professional educational institutions, as well as the need to refer to the experience of building the educational process in Russia at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries. The study of the content aspects of education and upbringing in pre-revolutionary Russia makes it possible to identify the priority tasks of the state policy in the field of education, to determine the place and role of the main academic disciplines in schools. The purpose of the research is to study the features of teaching Natural Sciences and STEM subjects in primary educational institutions of the Ural region within the specified chronological framework. The research objectives are to study the content of the curricula of elementary schools in pre-revolutionary Russia (the case of the Urals) on the basis of predominantly archival materials and scientific literature, to show the place and role of Natural sciences and STEM subjects, the features of their teaching and the factors that increase their importance in the educational process. The research methods are source study, historical and typological methods, comparative and historical methods. During the research, we have come to the following conclusions. Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries there was a significant increase in the importance of studying the STEM subjects due to the dynamic economic growth of the country and the region we are considering, the strengthening of the applied nature of education in general, as well as the increased dependence of achieving success in life on the knowledge and skills acquired at school. In the primary educational institutions of the Ural region, there was a noticeable improvement in the methodological methods of teaching Natural sciences and STEM subjects. There was an active process of teaching children various crafts and agricultural work. In turn, the level of training and professional skills of teachers grew; there was a professional consolidation of teachers of primary and secondary educational institutions - teachers' communities arose and various congresses and forums were held.

Статья посвящена исследованию накопления интеллектуального капитала как ключевого элемента инновационного процесса. В работе проанализированы формальные институты – законодательные акты, патентное право, которые способствуют или замедляют реализацию интеллектуального капитала, а также его потенциал; неформальные институты – стремление к прибыли, организованность, готовность к риску, коллективизм как факторы, стимулирующие накопление интеллектуального капитала. Приведён ретроспективный анализ инновационного процесса в России XVIII–XX вв., и выделены ключевые факторы, определяющие уровень накопления интеллектуального капитала. The article is devoted to the study of the accumulation of intellectual capital as a key element of the innovation process. The paper analyzes formal institutions - legislative acts, patent law, which facilitate or slow down the implementation of intellectual capital, as well as its potential; informal institutions - the pursuit of profit, organization, willingness to take risks, collectivism as factors stimulating the accumulation of intellectual capital. A retrospective analysis of the innovation process in Russia in the 18th – 20th centuries is given, and the key factors that determine the level of accumulation of intellectual capital are highlighted.