About the Works of Russian Minimalist Composers: The Idiomatics of the Musical Language

Abstract

The article examines two musical works written by contemporary Russian minimalist composers — Concerto capriccioso (1986) for cello, string orchestra, keyboards and percussion by Nikolai Korndorf and Liebliches Lied (1980) for piano four hands by Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky. Their analysis is carried out from the position of idiomatics. This term is derived from the conception developed by Russian scholar and linguist Igor Anichkov and is applied in the article as an attempt to reflect the originality of the two composers’ musical techniques. The most illustrative aspects of the aforementioned works — namely, intertextuality and repetitiveness — are determined as being the leading ones. Each of the two composers finds his own means of dialogue with musical tradition. In the case of Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, important reference points are formed by “the composer’s words” dealing with two artistic archetypes to which the intonational world of Liebliches Lied harkens back, while in the case of Korndorf, it is the source of musical quotation (an orchestral work by one of the Viennese Classicist composers) that is determined by the author of the article. Besides the means of interaction between the authorial and the derived lexis (one’s own words vs. somebody else’s words), separate attention is given to the peculiarities of the repetitive method. The compositional technique of each of the two composers possesses both common and individual features.

Keywords: idiomatics, style, repetitiveness, minimalism, intertextuality, quotation, Russian music, Nikolai Korndorf, Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms