ANS Part II

ROVNER: Was the Electronic Music Studio an interesting place for
composers to meet and communi-cate? What pieces were written for the
ANS synthesizer by such composers as Schnittke, Denisov and
Gubaidulina?
KREICHI: In December 1966 the Electronic Music Studio was finally
opened. This was an official orga-nization, in which it was possible
to work on a daily basis from morning to night. Before the Studio was
opened up in the Scriabin Museum, the work with the ANS was done on a
very fragmented level, since the main burden of the museum was
tending
to the visitors, which came to the Museum every day and walked around
the rooms of Scriabin's apartment and where tours of the apartment
were held continu-ously, so the only time we could work at the ANS
wholeheartedly was Wednesday, which was when the Museum was closed to
the general public. When the Studio opened up working conditions
impro-ved tremendously. We were given practically a limitless amount
of time from morning until very late in the evening, and this is why
many composers came to the Studio, whenever they had time - not only
the ones who experimented with the ANS but many others. I had the
experience of working with a number of older-generation Soviet
composers, such as Andrei Eshpai and Yuri Levitin, who wrote a
numerous amount of movie music, so they often had need of unstandard
effects in their music. With-out bothering to get into the technical
side of working with the ANS, they merely expressed their wi-shes
verbally concerning the sounding fragments, which they wanted to
obtain. I tried to carry out their wishes by following their words
and
trying to get close to what they wanted, by drawing different
"sco-res" and then sounding them out. Sometimes they approved of the
sounds that I offered them at once, while at other times I had to
change some things, but at the end we came to mutual agreement that a
certain musical episode would do well in the film. I had many
meetings
of this kind with a wide assort-ment of composers of movie music.
There was also a group of composers who were trying to find new means
of musical expression not merely in popular genres but in music of a
more serious plan. These were Schnittke, Denisov, and Gubaidulina,
who
regularly came to work in the Studio. Another interes-ting musician
who came, was Pyotr Meshchianinov, who worked at the USSR State
Orchestra under Evgeny Svetlanov; he was a very good pianist and also
worked very intensively in the realm of music theory. One of the
musical achievements of Meshchianinov was that he intensely studied
the intervallic systems, including various modal constructions,
systems and pitch sets. the bases of their construction as well as
the
different means of elaboration of Murzin's seventy-two-tone
temperament. I know that he has written a numerous amount of
theoretical works on this subject, and at a certain period of time
there were even some talk about the publication of his major book
which had all of this research. I have attended a number of music
theory seminars at the Composers' Union Building, in which
Meshchiani-nov presented his treatises about his system.
Unfortunately
I don't know what was the fate of his book and if it was published. I
only know that he lived in Germany for a certain time, though I do
not
know whether he returned to Russia or not. Schnittke, Denisov and
Gubaidulina each wrote one piece for the ANS - that was probably as
much as the instrument could be of use to them, as they were much
more
busy composing orchestral, chamber and vocal music. Nevertheless the
ANS was undoubtedly an im-portant part of their musical development,
which, most likely, has exerted a certain amount of influence on them
and on other musical compositions of theirs. Each one of them
approached very seriously the work on the synthesizer and on
realizing
the musical conception which they set up for themselves. Schnittke
wrote one piece for the ANS, which he titled The Torrent, which was
all built upon the over-tones of the pitch C. Moreover, the
overtones,
which were used there, extended over a hundred in their total amount.
They were all calculated and compiled on the ANS, and each of the
overtones carried an important function: it was not merely present in
the sound, but it also played the role of a polyphonic voice in the
overall sound construction. There were no other sounds in the piece
other than overtones, nevertheless, certain particular overtones
could
expand, nevertheless maintaining its primal pitch corres-pondingly,
or
to contract back into its original form. In its overall form the
piece
was built on the prin-ciple of two expanding waves of sound, hence
the
title The Torrent. It really creates the impression of a torrent of
water or avalanche, approaching from afar, which subsequently
resides.
Denisov's piece car-ries the title Singing of Birds. He approached
the
ANS from the position of musique concrete, which in this case,
comprised the basis for all the parameters of the composition. The
musical, or to be more exact, the sound material, which he built the
composition, was derived from a record, which was publi-shed by the
renowned traveler Veprintsev, carrying the same title. Out of this
recording Denisov chose those sounds which were to be used in his
composition, and then searched for those types of timbres on the ANS,
which would be close to them timbrally. All of these bird sounds
conglomerated into one whole unified work of art, without any of them
contradicting one another. In addition to that he utilized a prepared
piano in the piece, as many birds created percussive or cracking
sounds. For these reasons, the sounds of the prepared piano blended
very well with the total conglomeration of sounds and that was what
the whole composition was based upon. Subsequently the idea to
include
the piano into the piece gave means for the concert version of the
piece with a solo pianist. I know that the first performer of this
piece was Alexei Lubimov, who played this piece of Denisov in his
concerts. I do not know if the piece had any other performers,
though,
according to Denisov, the composition could be performed not only
with
a pianist but with other solo instruments, the choice of which would
be determined du-ring the course of the life of the composition
itself. As far as Gubaidulina's The Living - the Non Living, she took
the human voice as a basic conceptual element of the piece - not the
singing voice but the in-tonational sound of speech. She invited one
actress, who was a friend of hers, and asked her to create an
assortment of contrasting emotional sounds, which comprised
different,
contrasting elements of hu-man speech, that were able to express
various emotions and interjections and be prominent in living speech,
but were not in themselves complete words. The actress pronounced a
wide assortment of such sounds and then, similarly to the case with
Denisov's Singing of Birds, a certain amount was selected for the
composition and sounds similar to them were created on the ANS. As it
is possible to draw on the ANS by means of the coder not only pitch
relationships and definite rhythmic durations (in this sense any
musical score, notated conventionally, could also be transcribed to
the language of the ANS, in which case it would likewise sound out),
but any other possible free drawings, which also would be transformed
into sounds and all types of human exclamations, including those not
containing words, it follows that they can be conveyed quite
precisely
by means of a "drawing" on the ANS. The greater amount of the sounds,
created by Gubaidulina for this piece, were written in a way as to
try
to obtain a certain similarity of this kind of human voice sounding.
Moreover, there was also a distinct contrast pre-sent between those
sounds that resembled more overtly the human voice with those, which
had a more definite electronic sound to them. Most likely these
components to the piece served as a basis to the programmatic content
in Gubaidulina's piece. The Living - the Not-Living - is the
juxtaposition of two musical perceptions. One could say that there
was
not a literary program for the piece, which was stated explicitly,
nevertheless, when you hear the piece, you have a sense that a
certain
hidden program or lite-rary subject does exist in the piece. The work
also featured timbral imitations on the ANS of real bells of a medium
size: they were brought into the studio and were sounded out there
and
recorded on a tape recorder. One final feature of the composition was
a depiction of a church choir sounding in a some-what transformed
manner, which is modified in sound almost to the level of not being
recognizable. It did not contain any audible words, of course, but
nevertheless the sounds carried the audible connota-tion that this
was
definitely a church choir and it serves a certain important function
throughout the whole composition as a timbral element of color.
ROVNER: How would you describe your own compositions for the ANS,
especially those that were recorded on the first record?
KREICHI: I had three of my compositions recorded on the first ANS
record - the film music, which I wrote together with Artemiev, then a
short piece titled as An Echo of the East, in which I experimented to
a limited degree with the microtonal intervals of the 72-note
temperament. I took two intervals of a perfect fourth and divided
them
in half, which resulted in a new, strange type of mode - a pentatonic
scale constructed out of equal-tempered intervals of 5/4 of a tone,
which contained three perfect fourths. These were the intervals on
which the piece was built and it had a strong Eastern flavor. When
the
piece was written. I left it untitled, but when the opportunity arose
to have it recorded on the LP re-cord, Murzin suggested the name. The
third piece, Intermezzo was written in a more light, popular vein. In
the piece I wanted to come as close as I possibly could to
recognizable instrumental timbres. I was successful to a certain
degree, but still the piece sounds for the most part as an electronic
piece, though occasionally one can discern a few instrumental timbres
- at times a hint of a flute passes by or at other times that of a
clarinet.
ROVNER: Did you or any of the other composers who were working at the
Electronic Music Studio in Moscow have any Western electronic music
at
the time that you started to work with the ANS, or did you achieve
the
musical results of your work totally by yourselves?
KREICHI: When we started to work with the ANS in 1960 we had
absolutely no knowledge of what was achieved in this realm by our
colleagues in other countries. Much later, in the late 60's,
Schnittke, Denisov, and Gubaidulina shared with us on an individual
basis those recordings of European compo-sers, which they had
available, which they were able to obtain from musicians, who had a
chance to vi-sit Europe or those who came from Europe on tours. This
way I was finally able to become acquainted with the compositions of
Boulez and Stockhausen, but that was already after I mastered the
musical and technical peculiarities of the ANS and wrote a few
important pieces utilizing it.
ROVNER: Under what circumstances was the Electronic Music Studio
closed in I975?
KREICHI: The first direct steps in attempting to close down the
Studio
began immediately after Mur-zin's death. Since he was an
authoritative
figure, he was able to keep its prestige intact, and during his
lifetime nobody had dared to utter a word about even a remote
possibility of closing it down. The big-gest problem from the start
was that the Electronic Studio has been opened as a branch of the
Melodiya record company, which was extremely reluctant to contain
within itself an additional structure that did not bring it the least
bit of profit, since the company was a purely commercial one and its
main activity was the edition and the sales of records. The people
who
ran it received certain awards for their busi-ness endeavors. These
people started to declare that the existence of such a Studio, which
does not bring in the least amount of profit to the Melodiya company,
was spoiling their financial records and that with the opening up of
the Studio they have been receiving less profit and less financial
awards. Despite this fact, they, nevertheless, had to put up with the
Studio's existence, since it existed under the patronage of the
Ministry of Culture. But when the three composers, Schnittke,
Denisov,
and Gubaidu-lina appeared in the Studio, the offensive attitudes
towards the Studio increased even further. These composers, whose
names at that time were already well known, were constantly
undergoing
persecu-tion from the Soviet authorities for their avant-gardistic
musical tendencies. The only place where they had a certain amount of
freedom was in the realm of movie music. The greatest amount of
censure was exerted on their orchestral and chamber music, which did
not go in accord with the prescribed Soviet "norms." I know that all
concert organizations were virtually forbidden to include into their
repertoire the music of these composers, even if some of the most
famous performers wanted to perform it. When in the beginning of the
1970's a selection of compositions was prepared for the second LP
record of compositions written on the ANS and shown on the artistic
council of the Melodiya company, the artis-tic council hesitated to
make any definite decision about releasing the record, out of fear
that these three composers were included, but appealed to its general
director for his final word. The general director at that time was
Mokhov, who later became the assistant to the Minister of Culture. He
did not do more than to read the names of the composers on the
program
of the record and retorted: "If the program inc-ludes Schnittke, I
will not even listen to it!" So the artistic council decided to wait
until the release of the record. This waiting period turned out to be
very long as the record came out only in the late 1980's, most
likely,
due to the support of Artemiev. By that time he had already become a
famous composer, due to the music he wrote for the films Solaris and
The Mirror and as far as I know he also took part in the films of
Tarkovsky. So by the late 80's it was already impossible to disregard
the authority of Arte-miev and he was able to push through and help
release the record, which was released under the name A Musical
Offering. From the time that the material for the second record was
rejected, the people who wished the Studio to be closed, went on an
open offensive position, motivating their actions that the studio has
become a haven for avant-gardists, and this does not tie in with the
official party politics, en-dorsed by the Ministry of Culture.
Attempts were made to take more decisive steps to close it down and,
finally, a very simple solution was found on how to close it " the
Electronic Music Studio was offi-cially renamed as one of the minor
recording studio departments. As soon as the Electronic Music Stu-dio
stopped being an independent organization and was turned into a
department, closing this depart-ment was merely an elementary action
for the director. At the end everybody already washed their hands
concerning this matter - both the Ministry of Culture and the
Melodiya
company. The director took the simple final step of issuing the order
"this department is to be closed down" since it did not bring any
profit and was of no use, and so forth. And that was it. As a result
the Electronic Music Stu-dio ceased to exist. The year was 1975.
ROVNER: What was the subsequent fate of the ANS synthesizer and your
own musical activities after the Studio was closed in 1975? How did
you manage to save the ANS and to transfer it into the Lin-guistic
Department of Moscow State University?
KREICHI: Back in 1972 I was offered an additional job at Moscow
University - to work with synthesis of sounding speech on the ANS.
Three educational institutions - Moscow University, the Institute of
Foreign Languages in Moscow (which is now called the Linguistics
University) and the Institute of Re-mote Communication in St.
Petersburg - appealed to the director of the Studio for permission to
use the ANS synthesizer to conduct experiments in synthesis of
sounding human speech and have received approval. This paved the way
for new experiments, utilizing the ANS in a new way. That was the
first time that I had encountered the domain of research of
construction of speech. It was very intriguing for me, just as in the
beginning, when I first approached the domain of electronic music and
the ANS. The most important and most interesting phenomenon in the
instrument was that that it could recreate a sound, which was not
initially recorded on a microphone. For instance a flute is sounded,
which never existed, on which no one ever played, which nobody ever
held in his hand or has never blown into it - it was merely drawn on
the score of the synthesizer and it started to sound. That was the
most impor-tant element in the work which was the most intriguing for
me. So when the opportunity arose for me to take part in the work on
synthesis of human speech, I accepted it immediately, as it was a
very
essen-tial and intriguing phenomenon for me that a voice of a person
will be heard, who has never existed. I started to experiment widely
in this domain, and what greatly aided me was that the people, who
had
studied the construction of speech for a longer time than I have,
have
by that time developed certain va-rious rules for conducting this
kind
of work. The elements of language and sounding speech have been
already expressed in purely mathematical terms - in mathematical
categories and even according to physical measurements of electric
and
acoustic signals. The ANS synthesizer was just the ideal instru-ment,
which could be used to realize all of this into sound. Using these
established rules one could syn-thesize speech, which has never come
from the mouth of a living person. It was all very interesting for
me;
I started to pursue this field actively and to achieve definite
results - at the beginning they amounted to certain simple phrases
like "Mom went to market." Afterwards the phrases created became more
complicated and the work was getting more exciting.
At that time I still worked in two places - at Moscow University and
at the Electronic Music Studio up to the moment that it was entirely
closed down. It was this circumstance that helped me at that critical
moment to preserve the ANS synthesizer by relocating it to the
Recording Studio of the Laboratory for Structural Linguistics of the
Philology Department at Moscow University. There it has remained up
to
the present day and has been actively in use. I myself work on it
frequently and other composers come here to work on it too, they leam
how to use it and then compose music, most importantly composition
students of the Russian Gnessin Music Academy. Occasionally
specialists from other countries come to Russia to become acquainted
with the ANS.

ROVNER: What kind of musical activities did you pursue within the
realm of electronic music during the last ten years? It is known to
me
that you became a member of the Association of Electro-Acoustic Music
in Moscow and that your compositions are regularly performed at the
Alternativa and Moscow Autumn contemporary music festivals in Moscow
and you also had a number of performances in Bourges, France.

KREICHI: I continued my activities in music composition mostly in the
sphere of music for theater, of-ten composing music for dramatic
theater. Since during those years that I worked at the Electronic
Mu-sic Studio, I had to deal much with theater directors and with
students who were graduating from Thea-ter and Cinema Departments in
universities, and also wrote music in collaboration with Artemiev,
Levi-tin and Eshpai. Dramatic theater had always appealed to me and
whenever I received offers from uni-versity graduates to take part in
a theatrical production, which they had to set up as their final
diploma presentations or in any other theatrical production, I never
turned them down. I have written music to a theatrical production of
the Lvov Theater of a play by Konstantin Simonov, Friends Remain
Friends, and then for a Moscow regional dramatic theater to the
production of a play called Restless Old Age. There, according to the
plans of the director, there had to be a sound atmosphere created of
the time and scene of action, and here, upon taking the job, for the
first time I had experience with musique con-crete, since I wanted
not
only to present a background of city noises, but something much
greater and more expressive, tying it with the scene of action. I
suddenly understood that each sound of this see-ming chaos has its
own
pitch, duration and dynamic. If there is a possibility to dissect
this
"chaos" with scissors (at that time that was the only way they worked
with magnetic tape), then the separated ele-ments could be
reassembled
following one's own construction and, in this manner creating a
musical composition. I know that Schaeffer has a composition called
Railway Station. I was able to create a composition similar to that
in
its effects - it featured factory sirens and church bells tolling
(interplays between those that were closer and further off), tower
bells, some kind of footsteps, marching foot-steps, horses and,
finally, all of this concluded with sounds of a wind orchestra,
coming
as if out from the corner, out of a nearby street and then gradually
marching away. This resulted in a piece in the genre of musique
concrete, called The City.
Thereafter my collaborative work with different theaters continued.
Starting from 1967, I established close connections with a group of
musicians, devoted to studying color-music, following Scriabin's
theories on the subject. The group, situated in Kazan, was assembled
under the name "Prometheus" and was led by musicologist Bulat
Galeyev.
I took part in all of the color-music festivals in Kazan with my
electronic compositions and also wrote the music to the film Cosmic
Sonata, produced by a film studio in Kazan. In 1968, I became
acquainted with an actress from the Moscow Concert Association,
Martha
Vladimirovna Tsifrinovich, a famous puppet actress, who worked in the
Obraztsov Theater and then started to work independently with dolls,
which frequently recited monologues and performed musical numbers in
her theatrical performances. She came to the Electronic Music in
search for new musical means, and we established close creative
connections with her and for a long time worked toge-ther
collaboratively at the Moscow Concert Association, where we prepared
a
solo concert in two parts. We still collaborate with her up to now,
though she does not act any more, still she has many theatrical
projects. At that time I composed music to many miniature puppet
shows
where she performed, among which I could name Fruits of Upbringing,
Variety Show 913, and The Frivolous Handkerchief. Finally our
collaborative work resulted in a theatrical performance entitled The
Fire of Hope after motifs of Pablo Picasso. It was presented by a
whole large group from the Moscow Concert Association and in this
production puppets were used, which were the size of a human being.
The production was put on in February 1985, came off with a big
success and for several years in a row was repeated in various
concert
venues. Recently it has been recreated by the Mytishchi Puppet
Theater. After a certain period of time I was accepted into the
Association of Electro-Acoustic Music, a branch of the Russian
Compo-sers' Union, since while working at Moscow University and doing
research of constructed sound, I con-tinued my compositional
activities. I kept up the ANS in a working and sounding condition, in
addition I never lost contact and continued communicating with those
people and composers with whom I was acquainted from the time of the
Electronic Music Studio. The members of the Association of
Electro-Accoustic Music were well acquainted with my music from
previous years, so when I applied for mem-bership in the Association,
they accepted me there at once without the least bit of delay. The
very fact that I was accepted into the Association was very positive
for me also in the sense that it turned out to be a certain
mobilizing
factor for composition of new pieces. Since the Association regularly
partici-pates in the Moscow Autumn contemporary music festival as
well
as the Electronic Music Festival in Bourges, France, where it is
mandatory to present a new electronic composition every year, so like
all the other members of the Association, I do my best to accomplish
this task, writing a composition at least once a year. Thank God that
there is such an association in existence, where the music which is
written could regularly be sounded. Now I am once again connected
with
a not very usual type of thea-ter, which is presented by a group of
enthusiasts in the Central Actors' Building. The group is directed by
a very interesting artist and scenario writer, Anna Koleichuk, the
daughter of the noteworthy archi-tect and designer, Vyacheslav
Koleychuk, and she is assisted by a talented computer designer and
ani-mator, Andrei Topunov and a wonderful dancer, Elena
Lukyanchikova.
They produce short multi-me-dia theatrical performances, where they
always find a great amount of interesting and unusual solutions in
the
scenic, light-dynamic, graphic and plastic spheres in their
theatralized musical numbers. Two such theatrical performances have
already been presented with my music on the scene of the Chamber Hall
of the Central Actors' Building. They were both presented in the Fall
of 1998: the first one was shown at the Alternativa Festival and the
second - at the Moscow Autumn Festival. These theatrical pieces carry
the titles of the musical compositions of mine, which were written
independently, not espe-cially for the theatrical group, but which
the
artists subsequently utilized for their theatrical performan-ces. The
first piece, written in the genre of musique concrete, is called
Music
of Wood and Metal, and the second piece, Confession, is written for
female voice and an "ovaloid." An ovaloid is a special, exo-tic kind
of musical instrument, which was constructed by Vyacheslav Koleichuk.
It consists of two big metallic discs, one having an oval shape and
the second - a half-oval shape, which are connected to each other by
one axis. The discs have a multitude of cracks of various depths,
which form into thin plates. Each plate provides for a sound with a
definite pitch. One could evoke sound from the sound from the plate
by
means of a string bow, a pluck or a strike of the mallet. The mallets
used could be me-tal, wooden or glass ones. All of this creates a
wide
variety of timbres and dynamics of sound.