Nikolai Roslavets: The Russian Schoenberg

Nikolai Roslavets: The Russian Schoenberg

Roslavets, a truly unique and innovative Russian composer, and apparently a musician who is more popular in this subreddit than I would’ve imagined. Below I will briefly discuss his life and his writing style for those who are interested in learning more about him.

The Man

Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets (1881-1944) was born to a poor rural peasant family in the Ukraine. He was mostly self-taught in music, though he did take some violin lessons as a child, which explains his propensity for writing violin music. He left his family in 1902 to attend the Moscow Conservatory, and finally graduated from there 10 years later. During his first few years out of school he worked as a freelance writer and composer, creating quite a name for himself in Russia. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution he co-founded the Association for Contemporary Music (ACM) and held several prestigious music professorships. By the early 1920s he became one of the most revered figures of the Russian avant-garde.

By the mid to late 1920s however he came under severe pressure from the Soviet authorities. While the Soviet revolutionaries were originally very much in favor of the avant-garde styles of composers like Roslavets, they later switched their views, thanks mostly to the efforts of Joseph Stalin. Music that did not glorify the Soviet Party was suppressed. Consequently, Roslavets was stripped of his position at the ACM in 1931 and was forced into exile in 1933. He suffered a mild stroke in 1939 and was left mostly bedridden until his death in 1944. Upon his death Soviet authorities ransacked his house and destroyed any and all documents they found. This included all forms of correspondence, which is why little is known of Roslavets’ personal life. Many compositions were also lost in this raid.

His Work

Although Roslavets’ music was officially repressed following his death, Western scholars discovered his work in the 1980s, and his music has enjoyed a slow but steady increase in popularity over the last 25 years.

Most of Roslavets’ music is written in a serial style, which explains the comparisons between him and Arnold Schoenberg. Like Schoenberg, Roslavets created a system of organizing pitches into tone rows. However, instead of using all 12 pitches like Schoenberg did, Roslavets instead created synthetic chords consisting of between 6 and 9 notes, a compositional technique he most likely adapted from Alexander Scriabin’s synthetic chords. Roslavets organized these synthetic chords into ‘tone complexes’ wherein the horizontal and vertical order of the notes in each tone complex was unregulated. Roslavets created his synthetic chords in such a way that most elements of conventional tonal harmony (major, minor chords, augmented and diminished triads) could be extracted from them, much like Scriabin’s Mystic Chord (which contains all four types of triads in it) – the fifth of his Five Preludes of 1919-1922 is constructed almost entirely of triads. In this way Roslavets subtly creates a link between music of the past and future.

Now, let’s have a look at an example, shall we? Here is the second of Roslavets’ Three Compositions of 1914. In the first half of the first measure, we find the synthetic chord in its entirety, in this case a 7-note chord spelled C#, E, F, G, A, Bb, C. In the second half of the measure the chord is transposed up a perfect fourth to F#, A, Bb, C, D, Eb, F. In the second measure it is transposed twice more. At the end of the piece we find the chord has returned to its original position (C#, E, F, G, A, Bb, C), which gives the piece a hint of tonality by giving importance to a particular position of the chord. I have analyzed a number of Roslavets’ piano pieces and have found this pattern in all of them. Although this example doesn’t include any, some of tone complexes in many of his pieces include non-chord tones, which somewhat complicate a technical analysis.

Roslavets apparently hated enharmonic spellings of his chords, so you will often see double and even triple accidentals in most of his works. One particularly ghastly example is this section from the second of his Three Etudes of 1914. Pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin, who has championed much of Roslavets’ music, was apparently so intimidated by this that he re-notated many passages to make them easier to read.

The most extraordinary thing, I think, about Roslavets’ musical style is that he envisioned it as early as 1907, and it appeared in fully developed form in 1914, a full 11 years before Schoenberg’s first 12-tone piece (his Piano Suite Op. 25) was published. Not only did Roslavets develop his serialism independent of Schoenberg, he also formulated it when Schoenberg was only beginning to experiment with atonality. Although Roslavets was not apparently influential on any subsequent composers, he certainly deserves to be recognized as one of the pioneers of the post-tonal movement.

For further listening, here is a Youtube playlist of his music.