Alexander Tcherepnin

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Alexander Tcherepnin Life

A prolific and much performed composer who left four operas, thirteen ballets, four symphonies, numerous large orchestral and chamber works, and over 200 piano pieces (his concert programs were almost exclusively made up of his own works), he felt that music's ultimate goal was to unite people, a mandate he accomplished within his own creative output.

Living in Paris, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Chicago, and New York, and concertizing in hundreds of cities in between, he assimilated the music he found, welding it into a distinctive voice anchored in the Russian expression of his childhood.

Modernist, Russian, Chinese, polyglot, his music translates Eastern language to western ears, and vice versa.

No wonder Aaron Copland called him "an honorary American composer" and that to Toru Takemitsu he was "a father figure of Japanese music."

Tcherepnin's rich, undogmatic childhood set the stage for his openmindedness.

His father, Nicolai, was a composer, conductor at the Marinsky Theater, and professor of conducting at the St. Petersburg Conservatory; his mother, Marie Benois, was an amateur singer and the daughter of the painter Albert Benois and niece of the stage designer Alexandre Benois.

Artists - both the traditionalists and the flower of the avantgarde - flocked to their home.
Family intimates ran the gamut from Rimsky-Korsakov to Prokofiev (Nicolai's pupil), Benois, Bakst, Fokine, and Diaghilev.

As an adult, Tcherepnin was a humanist, respectful of all spiritual traditions; in his childhood, various family members exposed him to Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Lutheran liturgies.

Music was in his blood, and he knew music notation before he learned the alphabet.
But as he had no formal theory training to speak of until he was eighteen and entering the Conservatory, his ability to invent and improvise was entirely uninhibited.

Enthralled by the dynamism and rhythmic ferocity of Prokofiev, the teenaged Tcherepnin turned out piano concerti, fourteen sonatas, and also dozens of miniatures, which his father referred to as "little fleas" because of their wide leaps.

When Tcherepnin arrived in Paris in 1921, his piano teacher, Isidore Philipp, assembled sets of these small works for publication.

The first ten, Bagatelles, Opus 5, have become a staple of the modern repertoire for students and concert pianists alike.

Tcherepnin described them as "absolutely anti-impressionistic and anti-eclectic, rather like Prokofiev, but with chromaticism."

The Tcherepnins fled the Russian Revolution for the Georgian city of Tiflis (now Tbilisi) in 1918, and Alexander was exposed to the music and unusual scales used by the ethnic communities living there.

He had always been an individualist, fascinated in particular by the combination of major and minor triads, which represented consonance for him, the simultaneous expression of happiness and sorrow.

In Tiflis, Tcherepnin formalized his instinctive experiments into his nine-tone scale, which is built on three overlapping tetrachords.

Another aspect of Tcherepnin's search for formal order was his own brand of polyphony, which he called "interpoint."

In Paris, Tcherepnin was an immediate sensation as an avant-garde composer and performer.

Anna Pavlova commisioned and danced his ballet, Ajanta Frescoes, at London's Convent Garden and continued to perform it throughout her career.

His first symphony, premiered in Paris in 1927, touched off a near-riot: its second movement, scored for unpitched percussion, provoked at once jeers, applause, and critical comment ranging from "indescribable noise," "cacophony," and "Bolshevism in music" to "the apotheosis of rhythm."

Tcherepnin's preoccupation with rhythm and "interpoint" is similarly evident in the dramatic Message, Opus 39.

Its irregular phrases, wilde leaps, and subtle gradations of percussive playing are welded into a large architectural structure that culminates in three sharp knocks on the piano lid.

The humble scale and relaxed character of the Wishes, Opus 39b, written around the same time, show a more intimate, humorous side of Tcherepnin.

By the time Tcherepnin arrived in China in 1934 on one of his worldwide concert tours, he was weary of his technical experiments and ripe for what he later called his "folk cure."

Tcherepnin was so taken with China (and with a young Chinese pianist, Lee Hsien-Ming) that he canceled the rest of his tour and remained there for several years, even after Ming left to study in Brussels and Paris.

Concerned about the impending dilution of Chinese music, he became assistant to the Minister of Culture.

As a professor at the Shanghai Conservatory, he educated a generation of composers in techniques of expressing their native styles in modern forms, and set up competitions to encourage its creation, publication, and dissemination: he was to do this again in Japan.

Tcherepnin's own work became imbued with Chinese techniques and sensibilities.

The Five Concert Etudes, Opus 52, use the pentatonic scale, and gracefully translate Chinese ideas for Western ears.

"The Lute" is based on a Chinese tale for the friendship between a woodcutter and a mandarin and the lute that symbolized their bond; it recreates the resonating strings of the Chinese instrument, called the kou chin, by sustaining a single chord throughout the piece to create a sea of sound.

"Homage to China", dedicated to Lee Hsien-Ming, whom he married in 1938, mimics the sound the mandolin-lie pipa, which is played with picks or fingernails, while "Punch and Judy" is based on a traditional Chinese puppet-theater air.

In 1949, Tcherepnin and his wife took up an invitation to teach at DePaul University in Chicago.

Once again, he was captivated by a country, and in 1950, he and Ming agreed to extend their one-year appointment indefintely.

Tcherepnin became an American citizen in 1958, taught in Chicago until 1964, and thereafter divided his time between New York and Europe.

In America, Tcherepnin was invigorated by the composers and his students.
The excitement of the early years in America made for an especially fertile compositional period for him.

Spurred by many commisions, he composed numerous works for large forces.

The Songs Without Words, Opus 82 (1949) display his formal daring in their avoidance of repetition, extremes of dynamics and range, and orchestral tone colors, yet they are also expressive and pianistic.

Tcherepnin never gave up his search for a new formal means of expression.

The Sonata n. 2, Opus 94 (1961), commissioned by the Berlin Festival and premiered by the composer, is the culmination of yet another series of experiments: the eight-step scale (two non-interlocking tetrachords) and a formal linkage of movements through the pitches D and E.

Internal influences proved as powerful as the cultural ones that inspired Tcherepnin over the years.

That two-note central idea was actually the result of a disconcerting inner ear ailment.

For more than two years before he wrote the Sonata, Tcherepnin had two pitches a whole tone apart ringing in his ears, a symptom which vanished upon the completion of the work.

Tcherepnin returned to his native Russia only once before his death: he was invited by the government in 1967 to give a special concert, which drew the cream of the Soviet musical establishment.

In 1991, the Art Center of Moscow formally recognized all three generations of Tcherepnin composers - Nicolai, Alexander, and his sons Ivan and Serge - celebrating their reinstatement with a major Moscow concert, and acknowledging at last this remarkable international, yet finally Russian voice as a continuation of a brilliant musical history.