Rethinking the traditional concert format through the lens of Russian mystic composer Nikolai Obukhov

Carlota Carvalho

Born in 1892, composer Nikolai Obukhov belongs to the Russian avant-garde generation and was one of the pioneers in experimenting with twelve-tone systems, notation, and electronic instruments. He stands out from his contemporaries having inherited not only some aspects of Alexander Scriabin’s musical style, but, most prominently, the Russian symbolist belief in transcendence and collective spiritual uplifting through the performative act as well. The metaphysical substance and religious symbolism of Obukhov’s body of work reveals itself as a very rich and exciting source of inspiration for performers today. In this exposition I analyze the most relevant features of Nikolai Obukhov’s aesthetic, from his conception of the total work of art, to his harmonic language and annotations on the score, contextualizing them in the broader cultural and philosophical panorama of Russian Symbolism. I focus on understanding the social function of musical performance, and by conceptualizing certain basic principles, I shape my own performative approach to Nikolai Obukhov’s solo piano works. In the creative process of building a more holistic performance practice inspired by Russian Symbolism, the role of the modern performer expands from one of mere executor to the curator of an experience both for themself and for their audience. With this research I intend to encourage the musical community to reflect on our current relation with performance, to experiment with different concert formats, and to realize that we too, like the artistic community of Russians mystics, can project our own hopes about the future of civilization in our performance practices.

Information about his life and work in English language stills remains quite dispersed between various sources. Most of the easily accessible sources of Obukhov-focused studies consist of small chapters or parts of chapters, in compilation books or books about broader topics, such as Larry Sistky's Music of the Repressed Russian Avant-Garde, 1900-1929 (1994) and Jonathan Powell's article in Grove Music Online(2010) where one finds mostly biographical data and general considerations about his style. These sources provide a broad view of the subject, but invariably reproduce the same type of information between them. English sources that have stood out the most throughout this investigation, because they provide a more relevant aesthetic and philosophical contextualization, are the ones that address the notion of the total work of art in modern Western music, such as Shaw- Miller's Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (2002) and David Roberts's The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (2011), which shows how much impact Le Livre de Vie had on this dimension of music history.

For this research project, French language sources were by far the most relevant. This includes sources such as: a 1972 special edition of La Révue Musicale dedicated solely to Nikolai Obukhov and his contemporary mystic composer Ivan Wyschenegradsky, with articles by Boris de Schloezer, Raymond Petit and Obukhov himself (L’emotion dans la musique from 1927), and probably the most reliable, complete and recent study, based only in archivals sources, Le message de Nicolas Obouhow: Reconstruction d’une biographie by Elena Poldiaeva and translated directly from Russian by Michèle Kahn.

Extremely relevant to mention is the amazing work of Rebecca Mitchell Nietzsche's Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (2015), which allowed to me cross-reference all the information obtained in the above-mentioned sources and properly relate it to Russian Symbolist aesthetics.

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