Vladimir Rebikov

Vladimir Rebikov is a founding physique among contemporary Russian music artists and a pioneer in the usage of the whole-tone level. He analyzed piano along with his mom, and finished a program in linguistics before getting into the Moscow Conservatory; there he analyzed music theory with Nikolai Klenovsky, students of Tchaikovsky. Despite Rebikov’s status as a author of piano miniatures, musical theatre would show the all-consuming enthusiasm of his existence; actually, his compositional profession began along with his opera V grosu, Op. 5 (In the Surprise), in Odessa in 1894. In Odessa, Rebikov started to train, and he’s known to possess taught in the Philharmonic College in Moscow, Kiev, and Kishinev by 1898. In 1898 – 1901 he journeyed to Vienna and Berlin, getting him into connection with music beyond Moscow, producing a problems of self-confidence in his personal function. Rebikov experienced that his music leaned much too greatly on salon preferences and the brief bits of Grieg and Tchaikovsky. Determined to create his own method, Rebikov willfully overlooked the music of his contemporaries and strove to re-invent the complete notion of musical theatre. Rebikov’s first main stride towards this end was Mélomimiques, Op. 10 (1898), some short parts scored for piano. “Melomimics” are relatively just like eurhythmy, except they have nothing in connection with dance. Rebikov prefaces each mini-drama with a short scenario that’s silently “enacted” towards the music itself. Inside the melomimic collection Les Rêves (Dreams, 1899) Rebikov contains the piece “Les demons s’amusent,” completely created in the whole-tone level. Throughout the following many years Rebikov would increase his harmonic palette to add seventh and ninth chords, unresolved cadences, polytonality, and tranquility based upon open up fourths and fifths. However Rebikov by no means strayed from within the limitations of tonality, and didn’t seek to test out atonality. Rebikov’s fresh style did earn some acknowledgement, including a vote of self-confidence from Grieg, although the majority of this encouragement originated from outside Russia, where Rebikov’s function was received with misunderstandings and contempt. In Moscow from 1901 – 1904 he went the first composer managed record label, issuing primitive phonograph information of singers from your Moscow Opera carrying out his own functions and the ones of others. Rebikov’s best-known function in Russia, The Xmas Tree (1901), employs another fresh technique, “melodeclamation,” a kind of rhythmic vocal composing that bears a resemblance to Sprechstimme. Rebikov resolved in Yalta in 1909, and in his last years attemptedto expand his dramatic ideas from the melomimic miniatures and into something even more substantive. His last theatrical function, Dvorianskoe gnezdo, Op. 55 (The Nobleman’s Nest, 1916), is usually a hyper-realistic establishing of the Turgenev play where in fact the vocal parts are speech-based as well as the music only underpinning to aid the action. People break into tune only as highly relevant to the storyplot, as in the way of a film musical. Every part of the creation, including emotional profiling of people and set style, is within the rating. The Nobleman’s Nest was a fearless test, but a failed one, as Rebikov styles the music therefore scantily that it’s struggling to stand alone merits. Rebikov had been a forgotten body by enough time of his loss of life at age group 54. He was bitter and disillusioned, confident wrongly that composers such as for example Debussy, Scriabin, and Stravinsky got made their method into open public prominence through stealing his concepts. Ironically Rebikov is most beneficial known by method of his insubstantial music in salon styles. Rebikov’s function as a significant early instigator of twentieth-century methods has a right to be even more widely recognized.