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With a first name that smacks of scientific positivism and a last name that almost forms its anagram — hinting at some kind of combinatorial game — Edison Denisov, born 6 April 1929 in Tomsk, Siberia, seemed destined for the scientific studies he would eventually pursue at his hometown university. His strong mathematical interests, oriented toward functional analysis and backed by diplomas earned with highest honors, no doubt contributed to his reputation in the West as the most structuralist figure of the Soviet musical avant-garde. Alongside someone like Alfred Schnittke, who merely dabbled in dodecaphony before moving on to postmodern polystylistic expressionism, or Sofia Gubaidulina, who embraced spirituality earlier and more loudly than he did, Denisov, marked by the Viennese dodecaphony and Boulezian serialism that he studied in secret, could easily pass for a constructivist. Yet his music complicates the picture, as it clearly reflects the humanism that Denisov aimed to revive. While carefully designed, it only partially follows strict and complex pre-compositional systems. Instead, it is largely driven by melody and even lyricism, and favors programmatic, narrative structures.
Denisov’s musical and scientific interests went hand in hand from an early age. He taught himself mandolin, clarinet, and then piano, taking formal piano lessons only at the age of fifteen, in Tomsk. Glinka was his idol, and opera provided his first musical education. Between 1947 and 1949, he wrote piano preludes as well as his first attempts at lieder on poems by Heinrich Heine, Alexander Prokofiev, and Avetik Isahakyan — all of which were more exercises in pastiche than original compositions.1 By the time he obtained his first music degree in 1950, he was torn between two vocations. That same year, he mailed some scores to Dmitri Shostakovich, who replied with highly positive feedback. After a first, premature attempt, Denisov enrolled in 1951 at the Moscow Conservatoire, where for the following eight years he would study composition with Vissarion Shebalin, orchestration with Nikolai Peiko, and piano and analysis. The recent Western music to which Shebalin exposed him made a strong impression, but while his compositions from the conservatoire years (excluded from his official catalogue) display a range of influences, Shostakovich is most prominent, followed by Igor Stravinsky. Despite a certain formal academicism, seen for example in the four-movement Symphony in C Major (1955), Denisov’s music was already beginning to show signs of melodic and harmonic freedom.
Another key factor in Denisov’s stylistic evolution was his participation in the “folkloric” expeditions organized by the Theory Department. These trips took him to the Kursk region of western Russia in the summer of 1954 and to the regions of Altai and Tomsk in the following summers. Materials gathered from these excursions — both textual and musical — soon appeared in Denisov’s compositions and later returned in a more stylized fashion in Les Pleurs (Tears, 1966), for soprano, piano, and percussion. This piece demonstrates an interesting synthesis between a style inspired by early Stravinsky and a serial approach influenced by Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître. The polyphonic textures Denisov would developed some years later also recall the heterophony he encountered in Kursk.
After earning his diploma in the spring of 1956 and staying on at the conservatory for three extra years, Denisov decided his academic training was still too patchy. He undertook his own study of forbidden composers — Stravinsky, Bartók, Debussy, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Webern — during a year of semi-retreat in which he wrote little.
After this phase of intense assimilation, Denisov seems to have wavered between various approaches. He experimented with the twelve-tone system of Schoenberg, as heard in Music for Eleven Wind Instruments and Timpani and Variations for Piano (1961), while also exploring Bartók-inspired intervallic logic and a motoric aesthetic in the spirit of Shostakovich. This stylistic indecision persists in his Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion (1963). However, Le Soleil des Incas (The Sun of the Incas, 1964), which Denisov regarded as his first true opus, marks a turning point in both his artistic language and his growing reputation.
This cantata, composed for soprano and instrumental ensemble, unfolds over six movements, alternately with and without voices and varied in instrumentation. It demonstrates Denisov’s capacity for synthesis and adaptation, its most illustrious ancestors being Le Marteau sans maître and Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. In Le Soleil des Incas, Denisov combines dodecaphony in the spirit of Schoenberg — though liberated from strict non-repetition and therefore equality among the notes in the series (often incomplete in any case) — with pointillistic textures and vocal lyricism springing from a strongly melodic imagination. This lyricism is related to Denisov’s predilection for vocal writing, including Sprechgesang and his attunement to the intonations of the Russian language.
In Le Soleil des Incas, Denisov treats tone-rows as funds of notes from which shapes can emerge; they define harmonic fields and can be continually rearranged to highlight a certain interval class, modal coloration, or motivic connection at key moments. His use of tone-rows has as its dominant correlate not counterpoint but rather accompanied monody. Instead of aiming for total serialism, Denisov approached the series in a more artisanal manner, projecting it into the dynamics and instrumentation. His writing also incorporates a degree of indeterminacy, in the form of unspecified rhythms or groups of notes to be repeated ad libitum, which relate to what Denisov later (in 1986) termed “semi-mobility” and echo the “controlled randomness” introduced by Witold Lutosławski in Jeux vénitiens (Venetian Games, 1961).
Equally significant, though less obvious, is Denisov’s functional approach to rhythmic notation, which allowed for effective manipulation of musical planes — sometimes separated, sometimes fused. This technique marked a breakthrough, as Denisov in later years increasingly used the pictorial metaphor of blending color blotches to describe his musical process.
Though its official reception in the USSR was chilly and would lead to a ban on performances of Denisov’s subsequent works, Le Soleil des Incas became emblematic in Europe. Its premiere the following year in Darmstadt, conducted by Bruno Maderna, followed by a performance at the Domaine musical under Boulez, garnered international acclaim, and Denisov quickly became a symbol of artistic resistance to totalitarianism.
A series of works followed in quick succession, propelled by Denisov’s newfound expressive power. In the Chansons italiennes (Italian Songs, 1964), for voice and ensemble, his flexible serialism facilitates a blend of pointillism with stylizations of popular music — described by Célestin Deliège as sitting “between Webern and Stravinsky.” The piece concludes with a bruitist ending without posterity in Denisov’s oeuvre.2 Crescendo e Diminuendo (1965), for harpsichord and twelve strings, is pervaded by melodic chromaticism, a feature that would become a hallmark for Denisov. Aside from occasional clusters of chromatic saturation, the piece also includes partially undetermined notation, again involving modules repeated ad libitum.
The opening of the electronic music studio at the Scriabin Museum in Moscow in 1966 provided Denisov with an opportunity to tinker with the ANS synthesizer developed by Yevgeny Murzin. This experience left traces in Chant des oiseaux (Song of the Birds, 1969), for prepared piano and tape, but no others until the much later Sur la nappe d’un étang glacé (On an Icy Pond, 1991), a mixed piece for instrumental ensemble and tape commissioned by IRCAM. Denisov’s first venture into quarter-tone writing appears in Romantic Music (1968), for oboe, harp, and string trio, in which a generally twelve-tone vocabulary is enlivened by the effusive expressivity suggested in the title. In contrast, Ode (1968), for clarinet, piano, and percussion, is more sober and concentrated, though just as lyrical.
Denisov closed the decade with the 1969 String Trio, a work featuring free atonality and full, homogeneous textures with a touch of pathos, evoking the melancholy of Shostakovich. In the same year, Denisov started using metrical indeterminacy on a local scale in the Woodwind Quintet. At this point in his evolution, Denisov’s approach to serialism — more faithful to its spirit than the letter — began to merge with the traditional Russian lyricism that had previously run in parallel opposition. The outlines of a new, distinctive idiom were now beginning to take shape .
In the early 1970s, Denisov developed a systematic approach to material and texture that might be called “predominantly athematic chromatic counterpoint.”3 Its interweaving chromatic figures are similar to the modal, polymodal, or atonal patterns used by Bartók, but frequently crystalize around short motifs such as B-flat–A–C–B (BACH), D–E-flat–C–B (DSCH), or E–D–E-flat (EDS, for “Edison Denisov”). Later on, another such cell emerged, this one with no literal meaning and appearing at the expressive climax of several of his pieces: D–E-flat–A-flat–F-sharp–G–A. This conception of the motif relates to the serial fragmentation used by Webern, allowing small melodic entities to evolve from each other.
His counterpoint introduces a rhythmic style based on elements that do not align vertically, creating floating textures that resemble the heterophony that Denisov encountered in the rural singing traditions he heard in his student expeditions. However, his descriptions of those musical traditions as “village songs based on the whole-tone scale,” where “the peasants sing several variants of the same melody at once, sometimes with minor seconds, sometimes with major seconds, but never with triadic harmony” — suggest he did not take a deep analytic or ethnomusicological approach to them, and invite a certain caution in crediting them with real influence.4
In his Piano Trio, Denisov uses microtonality — not a structural element but rather a “secret window onto a much more intimate expressive world.” This microtonality is associated with a gentle luminosity that suggests interiority and corresponds to his most condensed yet sober writing.5 It contrasts with the chromatic proliferation that recalls György Ligeti’s Second String Quartet, as well as with a more nervous, fragmented character infused with twelve-tone coloration.
The “predominantly athematic” chromatic material arises from a more holistic structure, which gives a sense of both object and envelope. Though melodic lines exist, they are treated as Hauptstimmen,6 guides to be filled out into a counterpoint of textures or objects, which Denisov sometimes characterized as “blotches of color toward which [he] must move.”7 The work shows clear influences from Ligeti’s micropolyphony and the Polish school’s orchestral masses, though Denisov often downplayed these connections.
This holistic writing is prominent in his concertos, which he began writing in the early 1970s. His Cello Concerto (1972), in one continuous movement, brings together microtonality, saturation with the BACH motif, and modular structures, including a canon with floating rhythms (starting at measure 117). A fixation on the note D in this piece reflects Denisov’s personal symbolism for Deus (God), hinting at a unique spirituality that he rarely discussed.
Two years later, his Piano Concerto introduced a level of soloistic virtuosity unmatched in his subsequent works. The chromatic foundation is decorated with sections of twelve-tone pointillism, as well as an adagio with vibraphone reminiscent of his film music, and a jazz-inspired section with drum set that likely influenced Gubaidulina’s kitschy Concerto for Two Orchestras (1976). Among Denisov’s concertos written before 1989, standouts include the Concerto piccolo (1977) for four saxophones and six percussion instruments, which brings back the partial rhythmic indeterminacy Denisov experimented with in the preceding decade, and the homogeneous, strongly directional Clarinet Concerto (1989).
Tod ist ein langer Schlaf (Death Is a Long Sleep, 1982) is a variation cycle on Haydn’s canon of the same name. The piece showcases how a tonal theme can emerge from a chromatic context. Similarly, though more in the tradition of a chorale with variations, the fourth movement of the Viola Concerto (1986) is an orchestration of Schubert’s Impromptu, D. 935. The piece likewise illustrates Denisov’s ambiguous stance toward quotation, which he claimed to dislike (except in the music of Bernd Alois Zimmermann) but nevertheless sometimes indulged in, insisting that his own quotations were “necessary to the internal program of the music.”8
Denisov’s symphonic works showcase his holistic writing even more prominently, using effects of mass alongside oppositions and gradations between lines and timbres, alternately fused and separated. After Peinture (Painting, 1970), a piece inspired by a painting by his friend Boris Birger, Denisov composed Aquarelle (Watercolor, 1975) for twenty-four string instruments. This piece features an almost graphic interplay of convergence and divergence, with musical elements interacting through transitions that roughly correspond to film cuts and dissolves, colored by microtonal writing that reaches peak sophistication.
In comparison, his Symphony, written in 1987 on commission from Daniel Barenboim, feels more academic alongside his other works. It evokes Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony in a disconcerting fashion before taking a more post-Romantic turn.
In Denisov’s works from the 1980s and 1990s, Celéstin Deliège identifies a nineteenth-century style — one that Denisov would likely have rejected earlier when he was seen as a Western sympathizer within Soviet music. Deliège interprets this shift as a hunger for recognition in the much less hostile political context of Gorbachev’s Russia. While this criticism, with its Adornian historicism, applies fairly enough to some of Denisov’s concertos, Deliège may be over-simplifying in saying that Denisov’s “regression to the past” applies to his religious music and especially the Requiem (1980). Deliège substitutes genre for what would seem to be its true unifying factor, dramaturgy.9
In the Requiem, the scoring both draws on traditions in the genre (by calling for orchestra, two vocal soloists, choir, and organ) and departs from them (with soprano and alto saxophones, four percussionists, electric guitar, and bass guitar). Similarly, the cycle of poems by Francisco Tanzer used in it, though considerably modified and combined with other texts (fragments from Psalm 32 and the requiem mass), combines three languages (French, English, and German) and enlarges the spiritual remit of the requiem to the secular domain. The tonal scheme repeatedly returns, after audible processes of obscuring and re-emerging, to the symbolic key of D major (D for “Deus” again). This tonal focal point connects the work’s five thematic phases — birth, childhood, love, family, and death. Throughout, Denisov maintains a background of neutral, polyrhythmic, chromatic material, sometimes proliferating and spun out microtonally.
The connection between Denisov’s Requiem and his opera L’Écume des jours (Froth on the Daydream, 1981, premiered in Paris in 1986) began in the early 1970s and is particularly interesting. In a sort of compositional sidebar, Denisov drafted the Requiem in eighteen days between writing the acts of the opera. Interrupted in its conception by this creative outburst, the opera shares with the Requiem certain unexpected religious references, despite being based on Boris Vian’s book, a text from which Denisov excised “all remarks hostile to religion or disrespectful to the person of Christ,” as Deliège notes.10 The libretto, created by Denisov from Vian’s novel and song lyrics, incorporates, among other things, fragments of the Credo and Gloria from the mass ordinary.
Though Denisov does not approach the polystylism of Schnittke, he does use quotations, such as Wagner’s “Tristan chord” and Duke Ellington’s Chloe in Tableau 3. In Tableau 2 (“La Patinoire Molitor”), he transforms a waltz into polyrhythmic texture and then back again, in a striking example of his ability to reshape borrowed material for dramatic purposes. The voice parts, sometimes integrated almost like instruments into holistic textures, for the most part move in flexible recitative. Denisov, who greatly admired Debussy, later orchestrated Debussy’s unfinished opera Rodrigue et Chimène for the Lyon Opera in 1993. This French influence continued in other works, including Confession (1984), a ballet in three acts after Alfred de Musset, and Les Quatre Jeunes Filles, an opera based on a play by Picasso, with a French libretto incorporating poems by René Char and Henri Michaux.
The cycles for voice and piano, written mainly between 1970 and 1982, reveal a more intimate side of Denisov, with a sparer yet denser style. As Deliège notes, a “poetics of image and content” is evident in these works, likely influenced by Denisov’s love for Russian poetry and the vocal music of Glinka. At the top of his pantheon were Pushkin, Alexander Blok, and Alexander Vvedensky — whom he placed even above Pasternak, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Tsvetaeva even though hardly any of Vvedensky’s poems survive.11
In the Two Songs on Poems by Bunin (1970), which evoke night, cold, and sadness, the song “Autumn” displays a texture in which the lyrical voice serves as one strand within a contrapuntal web. Written ten years later, Your Sweet Face, setting ten poems by Pushkin, exemplifies a more vertical writing, with simple rhythms reminiscent of Mussorgsky’s songs; in fact, the ninth song briefly alludes to the first of the Enfantines, one of three Mussorgsky cycles that Denisov orchestrated.
The Bonfire of Snow (1981), a set of twenty-four songs on poems by Blok, nods to Schubert’s Winterreise. This unified cycle perfects the balance between sober, fluid vocal lines and piano writing that shifts according to expressive needs. The piano may act as a simple harmonic support, engage in dialogue with the voice in polyphonic textures, or become more effusive, image-filled, and virtuosic.
Denisov began teaching at the Moscow Conservatory in 1959, after completing his own studies there. However, he was not entrusted with a composition class until 1992. Instead, he taught theory, analysis, score reading, and orchestration classes, which for some students became unofficial composition instruction. Despite this, he played an important role as a conduit and aesthetic guide.
Though his students widely admired his acute pedagogical sense, his writings published through official channels show a fairly academic approach to musical study. Published in 1982, the book Percussion Instruments in a Modern Orchestra follows a historical trajectory from older composers such as Stravinsky, Bartók, the Viennese composers, Sergei Prokofiev, and Shostakovich to Western composers (Charles Ives, Carl Orff, Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, Niccolò Castiglioni, Gilbert Amy, Henri Dutilleux), and Soviet ones (including Aram Khachaturian, Andrei Eshpai, Andrei Petrov, Boris Tchaikovsky, Tigran Mansurian, Alexander Knaifel, Schnittke, Rodion Shchedrin, and the infamous Tikhon Khrennikov, Denisov’s censor and most obstinate and powerful detractor). The high number of examples in the book more resembles a catalogue than a synthetic doctrine.
His later work, Modern Music and Some Problems Arising in the Evolution of Compositional Techniques (Moscow, 1986), offers a deeper exploration through a series of essays. A notable one is on transience, which, again proceeding chronologically, moves rapidly from the eighteenth century to Boulez. Other key essays discuss “Some Types of Melodism in Contemporary Music” (covering composers from Max Reger to Henry Cowell and Boulez) and “Jazz and the New Music.” Denisov also diverges briefly to analyze Schoenberg’s opera Von Heute auf Morgen before applying his analytical skills to Webern’s Variations, op. 27.
The aesthetic and philosophical thought behind Denisov’s work is inseparable from its political context. He came of age in the aftermath of 1948, when a resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party had instituted the Zhdanov Doctrine and cracked down on musical “formalism.” It was a musical world in which there was no way to exist without accepting these aesthetic dogmas, unless one operated outside of official channels, without any support if not actually in hiding. His inclusion on the blacklist of “Khrennikov’s Seven” in November 1979, alongside his colleague Gubaidulina, hardly affected his day-to-day life, since he had already been banned from publishing and performing since 1966. Despite these restrictions, he recalled positive aspects of the Composers Union, to which he was appointed as one of seven secretaries in the mid-1980s. Through the Union, he gained access to dachas, including one in Sortavala, Karelia, where he composed much of his music.
The new humanism that Denisov advocated was, at its core, a form of resistance to the dehumanizing effects of a dogmatic and arbitrary bureaucracy. This humanism reflected a broader reaction among a handful of composers of his generation, opposing the secularization of art and thought in general. It emerged from a need to affirm a certain holiness of art and a personal spirituality.
Though Denisov’s engagement with spirituality is less explicit than Gubaidulina’s expression of religious faith, it might relate to the ideas of the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (though his importance for Denisov is hard to discern) and conceptions of Russian spirituality as a mystical, purely interior cognition of existence, inseparable from reality. In any case, Denisov never seems to have aspired to an ideal of “absolute music.” Rather, he openly attributed an underlying dramaturgy to his compositions. This often took the form of a simple narrative model of ambiguity (shadows) — crisis — cathartic resolution, reflecting an inward journey through darkness.
Translated from the French by Tadhg Sauvey
1. See Yuri KHOLOPOV and Valeria TSENOVA, Edison Denisov, Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995. To date, this remains the most complete book on the composer, especially for his life and early works. ↩
2. Célestin DELIÈGE, Cinquante ans de modernité musicale: de Darmstadt à l’Ircam, Sprimont: Mardaga, 2003, p. 336. ↩
3. See Pierre RIGAUDIÈRE, “Tradition et modernité chez Edison Denisov,” master’s thesis, EHESS/ENS/IRCAM, Paris, 1993. ↩
4. Jean-Pierre ARMENGAUD, Entretiens avec Denisov, Paris: Plume, 1993, p. 38. ↩
5. Ibid., p. 142. ↩
6. Unpublished interview with Pierre Rigaudière, Paris, 23 February 1993. ↩
7. Ibid. ↩
8. ARMENGAUD, Entretiens avec Denisov, p. 129. ↩
9. DELIÈGE, Cinquante ans de modernité musicale, p. 337. ↩
10. Ibid., p. 338. ↩
11. Ibid., p. 339. ↩
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