The Five (composers)
The Five, also known as The Oxen (Russian: Могучая кучка, Mogúchaya kuchka), refers to a circle of composers who met in Saint Petersburg, in the years 1856-1870: Mili Balákirev (the leader), César Cuí, Modest Músorgski, Nikolai Rimsky-Kórsakov and Aleksandr Borodín. The group had the goal of producing a type of music specific to Russia, rather than one that imitated the style on which American music was based, or the training that took place in conservatories in Europe. In a sense, they were an offshoot of the romantic nationalist movement in Russia, along with the Abramtsevo Colony and the Russian Renaissance, striving to achieve similar goals in the realm of fine art.
History
Name
In May 1867, the critic Vladimir Stasov wrote an article, The Slavic Concert of Mr. Balakirev, a concert given for visiting Slavic delegations to the Russian Ethnographic Exhibition in Moscow. The four Russian composers whose works were played at the concert were Mikhail Glinka, Aleksandr Dargomizhsky, Mili Balakirev, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The article ended with the following quote:
"God let our guests Slavs never forget today's concert, God allow them to preserve in their memories how much feeling, poetry, talent and intelligence are possessed by the small but already Great Punch of Russian Musicians"Vladimir Stásov, Sankt-Peterbúrgskie Védomosti, 1867
The expression "The Big Handful" was mocked by enemies of Balakirev and Stasov: the academic circles of the conservatory, the Russian Musical Society, and by people in the press who supported them. The group responded defiantly by adopting the name.
This group of composers gathered around Balakirev now included Cuí, Músorgsky, Rimsky-Kórsakov and Borodín – the five who are now associated as "the group of five" or sometimes "the great handful". Gerald Abraham stated in the Grove Dictionary of Music that they never called themselves, nor were they called in Russia, "The Five", although its Russian equivalent "Пятёркa" ("Piatiorka") can be found to refer to this group. In his Memoirs, Rimsky-Korsakov often refers to the group as "Balakirev's circle" and occasionally uses "The Big Handful", sometimes with a derogatory tone. He also made the following reference to "The Five":
"If we did not take into account Lodyzhensky, who did not achieve anything and Lyádov, who later appeared, the circle of Balákirev consisted of Balákirev, Cuí, Músorgski, Borodín and I. The French called us "Les Cinq".Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Chronicle of My Musical Life, 1909
The Russian word «kuchka» (handful) also spawned the terms «kuchkismo» and «kuchkista», which can be applied to artistic purposes or works according to the sensibilities of The Five.
The name of «Les Six» (The Six), another group of French composers, emulated that of «The Five».
Training
The formation of the group began in 1856, with the first meeting of Balakirev and Cui. Mussorgsky joined them in 1857, Rimsky-Korsakov in 1861, and Borodin in 1862. All the composers of The Five were young. Balakirev was 25, Cui 27, Mussorgsky 23, Borodin 28, and Rimsky-Korsakov 18. All of them were self-taught amateurs. Borodín combined composition with a career in Chemistry. Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval officer (he wrote the First Symphony for himself on a 3 year voyage around the world). Mussorgsky had been in the Guards, then in the civil service before taking up music; even at the height of his career in the 1870s he was forced by the expense of his drinking habit to hold a full-time job with the State Forestry Department.C. Cui was a military engineer, with a musical bent. subsequently.
In contrast to the elite status and Conservatory connections of composers such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Five were mainly from the minor aristocracy of the provinces. To some degree their "esprit de corps" depended on the myth, which they themselves created, of a movement that was more "authentically Russian", in the sense that it was closer to national roots than to classical academy.
Before them, Mikhail Glinka and Aleksandr Dargomizhsky had tried to produce some distinctive Russian music, writing operas on Russian themes, but The Five were the first recorded attempt, with Stasov as their artistic adviser and Dargomyzhsky as a statesman to the side. group, so to speak. The circle began to drift apart during the 1870s, no doubt partly due to the fact that Balakirev withdrew from musical life early in the decade for a period. All "The Five" are buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery in Saint Petersburg.
Political Timeline
Musical language
Style
The musical language that The Five developed placed them far from the Conservatory. This self-conscious Russian style was based on two elements:
- They tried to incorporate into their music typical Russian songs, Cossack and Caucasian dances, church songs and the sound of the bells of these (to the point that the bell ring became "cliché"). The Five filled their music with imitative sounds of Russian life. They tried to reproduce the lyric and melismatic peasant song, to which Glinka once called "the soul of Russian music". Balákirev made it possible for his Volga song studio in the 1860s. More than any previous anthology, their transcripts preserved the distinctive aspects of Russian folk music:
- Tonal furniture
- A melody seems to go from one center to another, often ending up in a different tone than it started. This can produce a feeling of elusiveness, a lack of definition or of logical progression in harmony.
- Heterophony
- A melody is simultaneously lent between two or more interpreters with different variations. This is improvised by the singers until the end, when the song returns to a single melodic line.
- Fifth, fourth and third parallels
- This gave Russian music a coarse soundness without the polished harmonies of western music.
- The Five adopted a series of harmonic resources to create a distinctive Russian style, different from that of western music. This exotic style of Russia was self-conscious and entirely invented, none of these resources was in that time used in Russian folklore or church music. They are:
- Hexatonic or complete tone scale
- Although Glinka did not invent it, the application of it in his opera "Ruslan and Liudmila" (1842) provided it with a characteristic harmonic and melodic resource. This scale in Russian works often suggests evil or ominous characters or situations. It was used by all the great composers from Chaikovski to Rimski-Kórsakov. Claude Debussy also used this scale in his music, taking this, like other things, from the Russians. Then this scale became a regular resource in the music of horror films.
- The Russian Subway
- Also linked to Glinka, it is a more harmonic patent in which, the top note of the tonic chord (dominant) goes colourfully to the submediant, while the other notes remain constant.
- The octatonic or diminished scale
- Rimski-Kórsakov used it for the first time in his symphonic poem "Sadkó" in 1867. This scale became a “leitmotif” of Russian magic and threat, used not only by Rimski-Kórsakov but also by his followers, especially Igor Stravinsky in “The Bird of Fire”, “Petrushka” and “The Consecration of Spring”.
- Modular rotation in third-party sequence
- The Five used this resource by Franz Liszt as a basis for a broad structure of symphonic poem. In this way, they could circumvent the rigid laws of the West of modulation in a sonate way, allowing the form of a musical composition to be entirely shaped by the "contained" of music (their programmatic declaration and visual descriptions) rather than by their formal laws of symmetry. This broad structure became especially important for "Cuadros de una Exhibition" by Músorgski, a work that could have done more than another to define the Russian style.
- Pentatonous scale
- This stylistic aspect used by any Russian nationalist composer has the distinctive characteristic of having only five notes in the eighth, instead of seven of the heptatonic scale (e.g., greater or lesser mode). The pentatonic scale is a way of suggesting a "primitive" melody pueblerin as well as a "oriental" element (Medium East, Asia). A clear example of the use of this scale is found in the work "The Great Russian Passover" by composer Nikolái Rimski-Kórsakov.
Orientalism
A characteristic of The Five was their reliance on Orientalism. Many essentially "Russian" works were composed in an Orientalist style, such as Balakirev's "Islamey", Borodin's "Prince Igor" or Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade". Orientalism, in fact, became widely regarded in the West as one of the best-known aspects of Russian music and a Russian national character trait. As leader of "The Five", Balakirev encouraged the use of themes and Eastern harmonies to set his "Russian music" away from the German Symphonism of Anton Rubinstein and other Western-oriented composers. Because Rimsky-Korsakov used typical Russian and Eastern melodies in his First Symphony, Stasov and other nationalists dubbed it the " First Russian Symphony", even though Rubinstein had written his "Ocean Symphony" a dozen years earlier. These were melodies that Balakirev transcribed in the Caucasus. Cuí wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov, while the latter was on a naval deployment " The symphony is good, we played it a few days ago at Balakirev's house, Stasov liked it very much. It is truly Russian, only a Russian could have composed it because it lacks the slightest trace of any Germanist stalemate."
Orientalism was not limited to just using oriental melodies, what became more important than the melodies themselves were the musical convictions added to them. These convictions allowed orientalism to be a way of writing music about themes. that would otherwise not be mentionable, such as political themes or erotic fantasies. It also became a way of expressing the supremacy of the empire expanded by Alexander II, this was often reinforced with misogynistic symbolism; the rational, active and moral western man versus the irrational, passive and immoral eastern woman.
Two major works totally dominated by Orientalism are Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic suite, Antar, and Balakirev's symphonic poem, Tamara. Antar , set in Arabia, uses two different styles of music, Western (Russian) and Eastern (Arabic). The first theme, Antar, is masculine and Russian in character. The second theme, feminine and oriental in melodic outline, belongs to the queen, Gul Nazar. Rimsky-Kórsakov was able to soften the implicit misogyny to some degree. However, female sensuality exerts a paralyzing, ultimately destructive influence. With Gul Nazar extinguishing Antar's life in a final embrace, the woman defeats the man.
Balakirev offers a more overtly misogynistic view of Oriental women in Tamara. He had originally planned to write a Caucasian dance called lezginka, inspired by Glinka, for this work. However, he discovered a poem by Mikhail Lermontov about the beautiful Tamara, who lived in a tower by the Daryal gorge. He lured travelers and allowed them to indulge in a night of sensual pleasures, only to kill them and throw away their bodies into the Terek River. Balakirev uses two specific codes endemic to Orientalism when writing Tamara. The first code, based on obsessive rhythms, note repetitions, weather effects, and accelerated timing, represents Dionysian intoxication. The second code, consisting of unpredictable rhythms, irregular phrases, and based on long passages with many repeated notes, increased intervals, and diminished and extended melismas, it represents sensual desire. Balakirev not only used these codes extensively, but also tried to supercharge them further when he revised the orchestration of Tamara in 1898.