https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/104065
Title: A study of Nikolai Kapustin's 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 82
Author(s): Yorgason, Alie Anne
Title: A study of Nikolai Kapustin's 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 82
Author(s): Yorgason, Alie Anne
I'm not aware that it is a published work or anything like that but as I have linked to dissertations on Kapustin's work in the past this one is one I very much want to read should it ever get published! I was thinking of blogging through Kapustin's cycle over the years but if someone has already done a dissertation on it, well, why would I blog about Kapustin's preludes and fugues now if I can point people to Yorgason's work?
If you want to hear Kapustin's 24 Preludes and Fugues as played by Kapustin himself here's where you want to go.
Earlier work on Kapustin's music can be found at:
Poised between two worlds : Nikolai Kapustin's Piano Sonata No. 1 and the classical and jazz tradition
Fusion of Classical Virtuosity and Jazz Techniques in the Etudes of Nikolai Kapustin: Eight Concert Etudes, OP. 40, and Five Etudes in Different Intervals, OP. 68
A Comprehensive Analysis of Jazz Elements in Nikolai Kapustin’sViolin Sonata Opus 70 and String Quartet Number 1, Opus 88
Fusion of Classical Virtuosity and Jazz Techniques in the Etudes of Nikolai Kapustin: Eight Concert Etudes, OP. 40, and Five Etudes in Different Intervals, OP. 68
A Comprehensive Analysis of Jazz Elements in Nikolai Kapustin’sViolin Sonata Opus 70 and String Quartet Number 1, Opus 88
As I get older and further away from my undergrad level music study years I realize that in the late Cold War and immediately post-Cold War era there was a type of modernism that held that the prelude and fugue was perfected by Bach and dabbled in by other lesser composers in subsequent centuries and that while you might have to learn counterpoint to get through advanced studies in music history the prelude and fugue was somehow a relic of an earlier age when people thought you could write tonal music. Jerks like Adorno had something to do with this academic supermyth in the West.
Because I got into composers from the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet bloc regions I learned that that whole myth was a particularly pernicious one.
There were plenty of composers in the Soviet Union who were writing preludes and fugues informed by what were the styles of their times.
Georgi Mushl, for instance, who studied composition with Myaskovsky (yeah, that one, if you know the name)
or Alexander Fliarkovsky
Sergei Slonimsky
Rodion Shchedrin
Book One
Book Two
and, of course, there's Zaderatsky's 24 Preludes and Fugues that he wrote out on telegraph cards while in the Gulag in the 1930s (37-39).
He didn't have access to a piano in the prison system, obviously, and so had to rely on his mastery of the piano and its literature to write the cycle. Zaderatsky's cycle is due for a thorough scholarly analysis, for that matter. Being but a guitarist I don't know that I'm really the best person to try to go through that dauntingly big score to try to explain everything going on.
To, once again, bring this back to my campaign against Romantic ideologies about art religion, the prelude and fugue has never died out or become obsolete because pedagogues with a fixation on German music thought Bach could never be equaled (let alone bettered) and that everyone had to know about his music and learn to write fugues but to always bear in mind that "for you" this is some way of writing music that somehow vaguely can't be done any more because tonality is "used up" or because the only way to handle dissonance treatment is 18th century or because post-Schoenberg dissonance became discord and didn't have to be conformed to the syntactic customs of tonal music so why write that way anyhow?
There's a century or so of contrapuntal music from central and eastern Europe (or, if you will, Asia, to make this point more acerbically) that shows this has never been the case. One of many reasons I'm glad the Cold War ended is that it has allowed for musical exchange and new vistas in music scholarship. One consequence of that was to reveal that jazz had become a global urban form of popular song and dance music by the 1920s, with jazz concerts cropping up in Estonia, for instance. But another consequence has been to reveal that besides jazz having a global reach that came to be tailored to regional and national styles, it turns out there was a long and strong tradition of contrapuntal writing on the other side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
Now I'm not trying to present all this as if I've gone and listened to every one of these cycles. I have Shostakovich, Shchedrin and Zaderatsky for instance, but haven't picked up the Slonimsky, or the others.
And for the guitar, of course, there's Igor Rekhin's cycle for solo guitar from the 1990s. It's been partly recorded by Vladimir Tervo and the scores were in print in the past but I'm not so sure where you would go to find them now.
Nikita Koshkin's cycle from this century. I have, of course, been blogging through those and you can find links to that over at this page. They're very good pieces!
Gerard Drozd has a cycle that has neither been recorded nor made available in published form in the West and he's been working on a cycle of preludes and fugues for guitar duet.
German Dzhaparidze has a lovely cycle of 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar that has been recorded by Esteban Colucci you can find over here. I hope to blog about that cycle somewhere down the line and really hope a publisher picks up Dzhaparidze's preludes and fugues cycle and runs with it!
You might, of course, never hear in undergrad music studies that preludes and fugues have a centuries long history that has run continuously across the northern hemisphere of this planet. i sure didn't! It's not that I'll stop loving the preludes and fugues of J. S. Bach but I do, as I get older, wish that I was given a bit more of an introduction to the prelude and fugue that said that this is a tradition, yes, but it's a tradition we in the present can build upon, build from, and continue. Fortunately I reached that conclusion on my own through decades of study, listening, composing and learning how to play some Bach and Hindemith at the piano. I have also, obviously, spent the last couple of decades on the look out for any and all guitarists and guitarist composers or composers who wrote for guitar (Castelnuovo-Tedesco, for instance) who wrote preludes and fugues.
If J. S. Bach had taken the stance that the prelude and fugue was a centuries old art form to which he could scarcely hope to make any salient contributions we wouldn't have had centuries of musicians admiring Bach.
2 comments:
This music is new to me and is super super cool
Cool.
A big chunk of the music I've linked to was recorded in Russia but isn't commercially available in the U.S. The Kapustin cycle IS available in both score form and via Kapustin's own recordings. Rodion Shchedrin recorded his own cycle, too, and the scores are in print. I found out about him via an ArtsFuse series on the history of the jazz-influenced piano concerto (Kapustin shows up there and had at least five piano concerti). Zaderatsky's cycle is also available in score and recording.
The others, not so sure about.
I just realized in all of that post above I forgot to mention Henry Martin's 24 Preludes and Fugues. The recordings are available and half the cycle was recorded by Martin himself and the other half by Sara Davis Buechner (David Buechner on the recordings)
http://www.gmrecordings.com/gm2049.htm
https://www.amazon.com/Henry-Martin-Preludes-David-Buechner/dp/B00NMIHE10
Martin's recording of Part Two is at Bridge Records
https://bridgerecords.com/products/9140
The SCORES are very hard to find. Theodore Front has the first half of the cycle but good luck finding the second half. I am thinking of blogging about the Ragtime and Fugue in G flat major some more down the line as a follow up to Ragtime and Sonata Forms.
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