Arts and Letters

In August 1978 a unique concert took place in Lucerne, Switzerland. It presented the works of three generations of composers in one family: the grandfather, Nikolai, and the son, Alexander, both dead, and the grandson, Ivan Tcherepnin, who conducted one of his own compositions. The central figure in this program was the composer Alexander Nikolaevich Tcherepnin, whose memory we honor today. At the age of 78 he died suddenly on a street in Paris on September 29, 1977.

Endowed with an exceptional musical gift, he was born in 1899 into a musical family and an ideal environment—into the very midst of the spectacular age of Russian music. His father Nikolai, a composer and a conductor (and incidentally, a teacher of Prokofieff), was a member of that group of composers which brought Russian music out of its centuries-old provincial obscurity into the world arena. Under their spell, the next generation of composers burst into the twentieth century. Alexander Tcherepnin was one of them. With his passing, we have lost one of the last links with that circle of musicians who were denied the opportunity to carry out their revolutionary musical ideas in post-revolutionary Russia. Yet through them and their fellow exiles, artists such as Balanchine, Vladimir Nabokov, and Diaghilev, et al., the vocabulary of the arts gained a Russian accent.

Tcherepnin has written so eloquently of his development as a composer that I shall let him speak directly to you:

During World War I, Russia was completely isolated from the western world. There was no radio. No less isolated was Georgia and the Caucasus during the three years of my stay in Tabilisi where my father became a head of The Conservatory in 1918…. So it happens that from the age of 15 until the age of 22… whatever I thought about music and its progress, I did in my own private meditations….

When I came to Paris in the fall of 1921 with a suitcase of manuscripts and a small dog named Touchkan, I found that my way of thinking… was somehow identical with the views of the western composers of my generation… and this probably is why I settled in Paris…. Most of the composers… had the same problems... my generation was opposed to Impressionism in music… I was not alone, and who of us was "first" is of no importance. The essential thing is to be honest….

In the next decade he formulated and demonstrated in over fifty compositions certain organizational principles based on the circle of nine-step scales of his own design. He also evolved the concept of "Interpoint"—an ingenious and flexible principle of polyphonic writing. It was a fruitful and inventive period and included instances of prophetic ventures into some musical fashions of the future.

One of these ventures brought him in 1927 a scandale d'estime. During the premiere of his first symphony, the police had to be called to contain the riotously protesting audience. They were objecting to the second movement of the symphony in which only percussion instruments were used. In the same composition there is evidence of the early use of dodecaphonic principles, and medieval polyphonic artifices. In his first Cello Sonata (circa 1924), there was also clearly pre-Messiaen thematic use of bird calls.

However, Tcherepnin goes on to say that: "In the late twenties, I… became tired of my own technicality, of the nine-step scale, of ‘interpoint.' I began looking for a new means, for a deeper meaning of Art… I meditated on Russian music… about the Russian people, the Russian Weltanschauung…."

Tcherepnin goes on to say that by means of these meditations he scratched his Russian self and discovered "the East and an Eurasian Weltanschauung.'' He became preoccupied anew with folk music materials of Russia as well as with those from the Near East, China and Japan, the two countries in which he travelled and resided for several years. And so many works of the next fifteen-year period reveal a masterly synthesis of these materials, quite unlike the chinoiserie and fake orientalia we are running across in some fashionable music writing today.

Whatever Tcherepnin wrote, the work possessed a wonderful clarity, no matter how complex the language, and an elegant and forceful style. He showed an unfailing surety in determining the proper form for his works. In all he wrote four symphonies, seven concerti, six of these for piano and orchestra, over forty other large orchestral and chamber music works, over 250 piano compositions, four operas, nine ballets and film and television scores. The astonishing number of 32 different publishing houses brought out most of his works.

In 1949 Tcherepnin entered American life by accepting a teaching position in DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois; he retired in 1964, thereupon returning to his full-time vocation of composing and performing. These last 28 years of his life showed undiminished vigor and a remarkably sustained quality in his music. Some of his best works were written during this period. In 1967 he visited the Soviet Union, and was warmly received as a Grand Master that he was.

The hand that shook the hand of Rimsky-Korsakoff is no more, but the musical tradition of the Tcherepnin family continues in the United States. Alexander Tcherepnin is survived by a musician wife Lee Hsien Ming, whom he met in China, and by three sons. Two of them are young composers working predominantly in the electronic music medium, encouraged it would seem by their father's remark, "Had I been born in 1949, I most certainly would have turned to electronic music in search of the exact reproduction of what I heard in me."