Dear colleagues,

I would like to present my major project, on which I, my colleagues in Europe and Russia, and my students at Peabody Institute were working for several years. The project working title is Music en image. It has four parts: I Gospel and Spiritual; II Piano Etudes-Tableaux, III Church Hymns and Anthems, IV Folk Music Arrangements, and V Jazz Revisited. The idea of music in image, or rather, image generated by music, came to me when I was in France, giving a paper at the conference "Musique en image" at the Paris Conservatoire.  Ever since, I have been working in connetion with SFAM (Société Française d'Analyse Musicale) and, lately, with the faculty ofÉcole Normale de Musique de Paris "Alfred Cortot" (ENMP). The latter, in particular, participates in our project for students on both sides of the Atlantic entitled Baltimore-Paris-Letters (FB group link:https://www.facebook.com/groups/374616410292906 ).  Our students make court metrage in the same fashion as my Samples on this page. Musique en image is a promising trend in education and research.

In general, classical composition and performance have lost the original context (say, 19th-century Klavierabend tradition, saloon music, opera and ballet scenes, etc.). Today, in order to promote music of any kind, it is necessary to connect it with the image--with the moving image. After long hours of discussions with my friend M. Bruno Monsaengeon on the essence of filming a musician, and numerous conversations with my students--young professionals seeking the field of application of their talents, I came up with the idea of this project.

So, Project I deals with the innovations in arrangement and interpretation of African-Americal musical heritage. I focus on ancient genre--spiritual, early Gospel music, praise songs, marching tunes, etc. In addition to the sample that I have already uploaded ("If I can help somebody") I post here, as a sample, famous spiritual "Everytime I feel the spirit." Today, in the modern Gospel style, it is performed in an upbeat tempo with the clear vertical alignment of voices, intended for  high quality of performance, recording and commercial distribution. I have experience of fieldwork in folk music and ethnomusicology (in Russia) and an invaluable knowledge of local tradition of spiritual that I gained working at the First Emmanuel Baptist Church (East Baltimore, Park Avenue) and St. Paul AME Church in Santa Barbara. In these smaller churches, the spiritual is performed very differently. It is  intentionally very misaligned and loose in tempo. I call it "heterometry," by anaolgy with heterophony--folk version of polyphony. My recording has been done track-by-track on SoundTrap during the pandemics. It came out as a good reconstruction of the original spiritual style (as far as my professional ethnomusicological sense can tell me). I added the accompaniment, using a VST instrument, reminiscent of the B3 Leslie organ that I have played for many years. The text of this spiritual is very simple--folk poetry, after all--yet its metaphors remain as strong as ever. In my accompaniment I have tried to express the  idea of a train car swinging on the tracks--the most prominent metaphoric gesture in the spiritual. The visual row is made up from available materials. However, I have tried to follow the principles of contrasting montage of Sergei Eisenstein.

This project is a part of a larger work--musique en image. As a conservatory-trained Russian pianist and the professor of harmony and form, I have the habit of playing piano just for myself.  My friends call it "tickling the keys." A musical far niente. I would compare it to a chess player moving the pieces on the board without the intention to play a game. I begin a well-known melody but, for some reason, cannot complete it. Even some harmonic progressions "that require resolution of the terminal dominant" are thrown off course. Did that happen to Schumann in his Kreisleriana? No particular compositional technique is of interest for me at this point, no established form or genre. I cannot repeat what has happened to me at the keyboard; cannot write it down. Try to write it and you will find how crude and awkard is our five-line notation! It failed me, because I have tried to write a letter to my father, who is not with us for almost 15 years. A night letter prelude. I regret that I called my three pieces "preludes." Prelude is a different genre. More precise definition would be an étude-tableau. A beautiful term, coined by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Etude has the meaning of an exercise. In painting, etudes means exercises in plain air, in nature, sketches of landscapes. Etude as a picture (tableau). Musique en image.

Then, there is the unforgettable atmosphere of an evening at a musical event. Or in an opera house. Better--ballet, say, Mariinsky old stage. Sapienti sat! OK, may be, the Opera Garnier. Or, something viennese and decadent. Mahler's adagietto?

Church music exists. Let us begin with that. I remember the part of music history, when Sergei Rachmaninoff composed the Vespers, in Russia in 1915. As the sourses say, the first wounded soldgiers started coming to St. Petersburg and the princesses from Romanoff family went to hospitals, working as nurses. On this wave, to hear the piece that calls to Bless my soul, oh God, was the experience outside of the normal. 60 times Vespers were performed in Moscow within a month!
Church music is the last refuge for contemporary musician. Well, you can get in the shoes of J. S. Bach and realize that your daily professional contributions are needed! On the other hand, it is very easy to turn a piece of church music into dust-covered piece of museum exhibit. Walter Benjamin warned us against that in his Arcade project. How many more historically-informed performances of Quia respexit you can handle? What if, for a change, an experienced African-American Gospel music performer Bertha Bright-Marke will interpret it for you? As in my Sample 1? She sings about "anciliae suae" knowing, from her heritage, what it means!
Every musician has an urge to write a large composition for the church. I am no exception. Could I write a piece on the text from the Liturgy of John Chrycostom for the Episcopal Church? If Baruch Spinoza was right about God's existence as a kind of res extensa, then our denominational quarrels are futile. Hence, my Sample 2, Yektenia Malaya, a deacon's call for prayers and the people's prayer for those who travel, in need, deceased... 
If someone before me wrote music for the church, I feel excited and obligated to continue its life in new interpretations. A magnificent choral song by Vaughan Williams has become my favorite (Sample 3). It was a kind of fluke--I introduced a canon within a cadence! This music needs a visual row with women gathering flowers in the fields, or harvesting the wheat in the Fall. I leave it for your imagination.

Folk music entered the academic discourse in the 18th century, first in Germany and Russia. The music had no problem propagating and existing alongside academic composition. However, composers were always preoccupied with the idea of closer interaction with folk music, most of which is monodic and resists embedding into large-scale polyphonic textures. Balakirev harmonized folk songs in a noble D flat major with the Lisztian accompaniment figuration. What should we do today with it? And what if the task is harmonization and arrangments of, say, Tatar folk songs?  Should it be atonal, minimalis, experimental? We have seen all that. How about, for a change, brining the arrangement closer to the original milieu? How to harmonize a song "Into the Forest I will Walk?" I have a strange feeling that other voices should be independent, even imitative by times. The overall texture should be a kind of heterophony, or ribbon polyphony. Harmony has mellow Tatar cadences, with the repeated tonic note. The body of the progression relies on the fourth--as a part of natural pentatonic intonation. I included two longer interludes--as a time to meditate on the thoughts, expressed in the lyrics. "I cannot tolerate the life in the society anymore; I have to escape into the forests: first into the shiny white birch tree grove; then into the darkest part. I can only communicate with the baby nightingale." These words need some time of a musical soliloqui, to put some thoughts together.

And, as in Tchaikovsky's symphonic finale, the last song is light and cheerful: "your gaze, ah, drips the dew from your eyelashes into my heart. Mighty forests gave you all your beauty, morning breezes caresse your skin, and even the field flowerd bend and bow for you." It is a table song, intended to lift the spirit and to cast away the shadows of sorrow.

It is easy to run out of words praising the culture of Jazz. It is human and humane, lively, full of energy, uplifting, and rational; it epitomises everything positive that is there in life. Yet, as many excellent achievement of the past, Jazz can also become ossified, academic, blank, emaciated and stripped of its original vital force. It needs constant rethinking, reinterpretation, fusion with other ideas.  My wife and I have played Jazz in an unusual ensemble of piano and harp for several decades. I did not hesitate to add some aspects of Russian piano tradition, Wagnerian harmonic language, transparent yet rather sophisticated, some elements of expressivity from Russian and Gypsy music, figuration appropriate for various genres and formes. For us, "Misty" is a radio signal from remote galaxy. It is very similar to the atmosphere of the planet Nutcracker.  On that planet, we have discovered a soulmate by the name Eroll Garner. Even the way he looks into the future on the picture in our short film tells us much about his complete love for music. Jazz, in this sense, is open for the synthesis with a miriads of other cultural phenomena. That flexibility and opennes to diversity is it greatest strength.