The
Red Book of Cultures
Europe-Asia
Contemporary Music Festival
Karzan, Russia, April 2004.
Reviewed by Alexandre A. Ovsyannikov;
L.Komissarova, Translator
At a distance of eight hundred kilometers
from Moscow there is a city, Kazan, on
the Volga River. The fates of many famous
people who contributed much into world
science and art are connected with this
city: the mathematician N.Lobachevsky,
the writer M.Gorky, the singer F.Shalyapin,
the ballet-dancer R.Nuriev, the composer
S.Gubaidulina, and others.
In 2005 Kazan celebrates its millennium
under the patronage of Russian President
V.V.Putin. What does the capital of Tatarstan
look like now on the world cultural map?
Our region is a meeting place of great
civilizations——East and West,
Europe and Asia. The problem of mutual
understanding of these poles has been
discussed in the world at all levels for
a long time. Kazan has brought its contribution
to this process by the establishment of
an international musical forum called
"Europe-Asia" that reflects
the idea of spiritual communication of
its different peoples and traditions.
Held in this spring for the sixth time,
this event is as popular as the Shalyapin
opera singers festival and the Nuriev
ballet dancers festival regularly held
in Kazan.
The Europe-Asia Contemporary Music Festival
started in 1993. Festival events took
place not only in Kazan, but also in other
cities of Tatarstan Republic——Naberezhni
Chelni (1993, 1996), Almetyevsk (1998),
Nizhnekamsk (2000, 2002), Bugulma (2002),
and Zelenodolsk (2000, 2002, 2004)——giving
a view of New Art to many people. Composers
and performers from almost 30 countries
have taken part in Euroasian music dialogue
during these years, and music of Tatar
authors has joined in the world art process.
The guests of the festival were composers
and performers of contemporary, professional
vocal, instrumental and traditional music,
as well as those who experiment in the
sphere of electronic soundings and multimedia
devices, untraditional instruments and
new forms of performance. The fact that
the phenomenon of New Music, which originally
addressed rather "advanced"
connoisseurs of art, has won a broader
audience denotes a gradual disappearance
of conservative views toward music. Otherwise,
many of these musical exercises, which
were performed sometimes with the aid
of exotic ancient drums, sometimes with
the latest models of computers, would
scarcely gather many sympathetic listeners.
A preliminary musical education of the
audience has been conducted by the chief
founder and constant participant of the
International Festival of Contemporary
Music Europe-Asia in Kazan, Chairman of
the Union of composers, Chairman of Tatarstan
section ISCM in the Russian Federation——R.F.Kalimullin
and his team.
The festival program included numerous
discussions, lectures on problems of multimedia
and modern composers’ practice, excursions
to the Kazan studio of light-music "Prometheus",
to the exhibitions of avant-garde art.
One of these picturesque expositions——"Children
Draw Music of Sofiya Gubaidulina"——was
presented to the city by the studio "Prometheus",
and at the moment is being held in the
Kazan Centre of contemporary music of
S.Gubaidulina, which was opened in 2001
in honor of the 70th birthday
of the outstanding composer. The Centre
is one of the organizers of the festival
this year, together with the Ministry
of Culture and the Union of Composers
of the Tatarstan Republic. On a level
with traditional, contemporary vocal and
instrumental music, a special program
of electro-acoustic and interactive compositions
was performed at the 6th festival.
"Termen-Centre" also demonstrated
its art. This centre was founded on the
base of Moscow Conservatoire in 1992 and
named in honor of the famous inventor
L.S.Termen. Director of the Centre A.Smirnov
and the soloist D. Kalinin performed an
Interactive concert for Japanese flute
syakuhati and spatial termen-sensors,
using computer program MAX/MSP. Also the
opus "Immatra" by a young, talented
Kazan composer, Radick Salimov, was "sounded".
His work was favorably received by the
audience, who responded to a refined facture
of a musical exposition in a counterpoint
with choreography and the video-projection
images.
The final chord of the festival was philosophical-lyrical
show, "Items from the Red Book",
by composer Alexander Bakshi. Its plot
addresses the purpose of the Euroasian
musical forum. As the authors of this
work say: "There is an idea in the
air, to compile the Red Book of Peoples.
In spite of wars, catastrophes and terrorist
acts, the world’s population is growing,
but the number of nationalities is becoming
smaller in number. It is not that people
are dying out, but cultures they belong
to are. The archival records of folk music
created by Selcups and Crimchaks (small
nationalities once lived in Russia) are
heard in our performance. Few people know
about them. The native bearers of traditions
have nearly vanished. But there is another
interesting point. Approximately at the
same time when these nationalities began
to die out, something wrong started to
happen to great cultures of the West.
Suddenly they began to talk about crisis,
death of the Author, about the end of
Modern epoch . . . . "
The scenarist and the artist both were
involved in what one of the subtitles
of the performance called "[t]he
game of imagination for the pianist and
six characters." The video-projections
of still and dynamic images of texts,
pictures, and portraits created a counterpoint
in the actors’ acting. A vacuum cleaner,
electric furnace, electric drill, children
balls, live parrots comprised the arsenal
used by the actors to build the complex
and ambiguous scenic image, growing as
a lump of snow to the final part. The
spectacle started with kaleidoscopic episodes
involving such characters as a virtuoso
cellist, a musician with hurdy-gurdy,
a shrill-voiced Punch disturbing the pianist
(A.Lyubimov) to play his etudes, a yard-keeper
with a broom grumbling ‘I’m
bored with you walking up and down’,
and a singing female ballet-dancer. And
then, all of a sudden, they gave way to
the portraits of J.Bach, A.Chekhov, G.Ulanova.
The final words taken from A.Chekhov’s
Cherry Orchard had produced directly,
with no allusion, a melancholy feeling
of the elapsing beauty——disappearance
of cultures, which, like Chekhov’s
Cherry Orchard, are on the verge
of destruction now. The touched and enthusiastic
public didn’t let the authors and
actors to leave the stage for a long time,
and all spectators took away hope that
nobody else will be ever enlisted in "The
Red Book".
We hope that the Europe-Asia Contemporary
Music Festival, which takes place in the
centre of original Russian region, where
the Islam and Orthodox Churches are in
close proximity and where the unique communities
of Turks, Slavs, Jews, and people of other
national cultures exist, will gather to
Kazan jubilee concerts in 2005 with even
more admirers of modern art from all over
the world.
