Nikolai Obukhov

Nikolai Borisovich Obukhov (Russian: Николай Борисович Обухов; Nicolai, Nicolas, Nikolay; Obukhow, Obouhow, Obouhov, Obouhoff) (22 April 1892 – 13 June 1954)^[1] was a modernist and mystic Russian composer, active mainly in France. An avant-garde figure who took as his point of departure the late music of Scriabin, he fled Russia along with his family after the Bolshevik Revolution, settling in Paris. His music is notable for its religious mysticism, its unusual notation, its use of an idiosyncratic 12-tone chromatic language, and its pioneering use of electronic musical instruments in the era of their earliest development.

Nikolai Borisovich Obukhov

22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1892
Olshanka village, Kursk Governorate, Russian Empire
(now Chernyansky District, Belgorod Oblast, Russia)

13 June 1954(1954-06-13) (aged 62)
Saint-Cloud, Paris, France

composer

Life[edit]

Russia[edit]

Obukhov was born in Ol'shanka, in Kursk Governorate, Russia, about 80 km south-southeast of the city of Kursk. While still a child, his family moved to Moscow. They were attentive to his musical development, having him taught piano and violin from an early age. In 1911 he began studies at the Moscow Conservatory, and he continued at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory from 1913 to 1916, where his teachers included Maximilian Steinberg and Nikolai Tcherepnin. In 1913 Obukhov married Xenia Komarovskaya; they had two sons before they left Russia.^[1]^[2]

His early music, composed after 1910, attracted sufficient attention to inspire the periodical Muzykal'niy Sovremennik to organize a concert of his compositions in 1915, and another in Saint Petersburg in 1916, in which all the music performed used a new method of music notation he had developed the preceding year.^[3] In 1918 he fled Russia with his wife and two children to escape the hardships following the Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing civil war; after a period of travel in the Crimea, by way of Constantinople they settled in Paris, a common destination for artistic and intellectual refugees due to traditional cultural ties between the two nations.^[1]^[4]

Works[edit]

Overview[edit]

While Obukhov is most notorious for his gargantuan The Book of Life, he also wrote numerous miniatures, several of which have been published. His output includes works for piano; songs for voice and piano; works for electronic instrument and piano, usually the croix sonore or sometimes the ondes Martenot; chamber works for combinations of voices, instruments, and Obukhov's invented instruments; works for orchestra; and enormous oratorios or cantatas for voices, croix sonore, piano, organ, and orchestra. Most of his works include parts for a piano, and the croix sonore figures prominently in his output.^[11]

Obhukov's music was experimental and innovative from the start, with similarities to the tonal and harmonic language of Scriabin in his early work. Other early influences were the writings of philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and the mystical, apocalyptic poetry of Konstantin Balmont, whose verse he set to music. Obukhov evolved a technique of using all twelve tones, not in rows as Schoenberg was developing in Vienna, but as defining harmonic areas or regions through twelve-tone chords. This was one of the first, if not the first attempt to develop a dodecaphonic compositional method, predating Schoenberg's by several years.^[9] Additionally, he developed a scheme for non-repetition of tones until the other eleven had sounded, along with a similar method of controlling intervals. Obukhov was one of several composers at the time working on 12-tone methods; others in Russia included Roslavets, Lourié and Golyshev.^[12]

In addition to the novelty of his 12-tone method, Obukhov was also one of the first composers to require singers to make sounds other than singing, including shouts, screams, whispers, whistles, and groans. An important part of his aesthetic was the idea of religious ecstasy expressed through sound, and later through the other senses. His early songs, composed in Russia, include unusual directions to the singers. The Berceuse d'un bienheureux au chevet d'un morte ("Berceuse of a blessed one at the bedside of the departed") (1918, published in 1921) includes, for detached short utterances, markings such as "suffering furiously", "whistling", "suffering, regretting with a harsh voice", "with an insane smile", "enthusiastically threatening", and "with malignancy".^[13]

Original notation[edit]

On 15 July 1915, according to the composer, he invented his new method of notation, which eliminated the need for accidentals by replacing noteheads with crosses for tones raised by one-half step.^[14] The symbol he used was similar to the standard symbol for the double sharp, except that it was used in place of a notehead. Only C, D, F, G, and A – the white keys on the piano with a black key adjacent to the right – could be replaced with a cross. In addition to his notehead symbol, Obukhov employed a symbol similar to a Maltese Cross to indicate barlines in his scores, and he often placed these divisions at phrase boundaries, resulting in bars of enormous length. The crosses, both in the noteheads and at the phrase divisions, were symbolic of the crucifix, and Obhukov often inserted tempo markings and rehearsal numbers in his manuscripts in his own blood, as a symbol of Christ's sacrifice.^[9]

Original instruments[edit]

Obukhov invented three musical instruments: the "Ether", which was an electronically powered wind machine, which made an inaudible humming sound, allegedly both above and below the range of human hearing, intended to have a subliminal effect on the listener; the "Crystal", a keyboard instrument in which the hammers struck crystal hemispheres, producing a sound rather like a celesta; and the croix sonore, or "sonorous cross", an instrument similar to a theremin in which the pitch of the heterodyning oscillators is controlled by body capacitance – pitch would rise and fall depending on the position of the performer's arm with respect to the device.^[10] Unlike the theremin, the performer of the croix sonore controls volume with a simple knob rather than with her other arm. Of these three instruments, only the croix sonore is known to have been constructed, and he used it often, writing parts for it in more than 20 separate compositions.^[10]

The croix sonore consisted of a brass cross 175 cm high, planted on a globe 44 cm in diameter with a flattened base. The center of the cross contained a star, which was around chest-height for a standing performer. The electronics were inside the globe, with the cross acting as the antenna, so that the player's hand controlled pitch by moving towards and away from the star. The name of the instrument was engraved on the globe in Russian and French.^[10]^[15]

Performance on the croix sonore was a visual as well as an auditory experience. Obukhov intended the performer to be like a priestess performing a religious rite, and no public performance is known to have taken place in which the performer was male.^[10] A partial performance of the Book of Life in 1934 was reviewed by a New York Times critic in Paris: