|
If you are familiar with the family name
of Tcherepnin, it's either because you're a student of 20th-century
classical music and know the work of Alexander (a composer who combined
musical traditions of various cultures into charming and accessible
music), or you're a student of early electronic music, and you know
about the Serge Modular, one of the great toys of the analog synth
age, developed by Alexander's son Serge. It's still being built
and maintained by fanatical fans long after the age of Arp. But
if you were lucky enough to be a student in the music department
at Harvard University in the last three decades, or you hang around
the contemporary music scene in Boston (which I am often guilty
of), then you knew another Tcherepnin: Ivan.
The composer Ivan Tcherepnin (who, depending
on his mood and whom he was with, sometimes pronounced his name
the "American" way, EYE-van, and sometimes the Russian
way, ee-VON) was one of a kind. He was an analog guy in a digital
age, and an individualistic voice at a time when many composers
seemed to be emulating fashion, as well as each other. He was never
afraid to mix many disparate elements in his music during a period
when "pigeonholing," which makes it easy for record stores
to know where to put things, is the rule. While many "serious"
(or at least academic) composers still seem to judge their worth
by how much they can intimidate their listeners, Tcherepnin's music
was audience-friendly, yet always challenging and demanding the
attention of the listener; accessible, but never dumbed-down. And
every new piece of his that you heard sounded unlike anything you'd
ever heard, from him or from anyone else.
As might be expected of Serge's brother,
he was an early adapter of electronic techniques, and he was director
of Harvard University's electronic music studio for some 25 years.
But you would be hard-pressed to classify him as an "electronic"
composer: His use of the technology never drew attention to itself,
but instead his synthesizers and signal processors were always used
to serve a more universal compositional purpose, and he frequently
combined electronics with acoustic instruments in mutually complementary
ways. In Ivan's hands, the synthesizer was never an end in itself;
it was a processing tool as much as anything else, and the sounds
emerging from his system were just as likely to be instrumental
and concrète sounds as purely synthetic tones. As if to emphasize
the "organic" orientation of his music, his studio was
known for the abundance of green plants among the machinery.
His persona reflected a bit of the United
Nations--his father was Russian, and his mother was a well-known
Chinese pianist, and since he spent his early childhood in Paris,
he spoke with a distinct French accent--and his music did, too.
Besides combining widely varied sonic elements, he brought a diversity
of cultural elements into his music, drawing from his own multicultural
background and cheerfully adding other influences. For example,
one of his best-known works is an opera based on the sounds he could
get by processing a santur--a kind of lute he was given by an Iranian
student--through racks of electronics.
In his music, the listener could count
on a mixture of intelligence and humor, thoughtfulness and playfulness.
His compositions were always surprising and often delightfully so--what
came next was never what you expected, but it always seemed to make
sense after you got there. He liked to use familiar themes, like
folk tunes and references to other composers, not as samples but
as compositional elements, which could reveal themselves over time,
so that the listener felt not the instantaneous shock of recognition
but the calm joy of having arrived at some place known and comfortable.
Ivan was constantly looking for new ways
to add to his vocabulary, and he and I had a number of stimulating,
sometimes near-shouting conversations over whether this or that
new electronic gadget could do what he wanted it to. He never asked,
"What's cool about this?" as if a new hardware or software
tool could ever dictate to him what he would do; his question was
always, "How can I get it to do what I need?" He was always
getting the latest and greatest software toys for his students,
but for his own work, intolerant as he was for buggy or unfinished
software, he stuck with tried-and-true programs and, much to the
chagrin of his wife and colleagues, used the same notation program
for nearly 15 years.
Although he had a solid reputation among
contemporary music cognoscenti, because he never engaged in the
kind of self-promotion needed to become a "star" in even
the "classical" composition business, his fame was always
somewhat local. Nevertheless, in 1996 he won the prestigious (and
remunerative) Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville
for composition, in recognition of a Double Concerto he wrote for
two of his former students, violinist Lynn Chang and cellist Yo-Yo
Ma, and the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra.
But sadly, the award will not result in
more music from Ivan. In the summer of 1995, he was diagnosed with
liver cancer and told he had six months to live. He began a regimen
of Chinese medicine, meditation and herbs, and confounded his doctors
by maintaining, as a friend says, "a high quality of life"
for almost three years, which included a hiking trip to New Zealand,
recording some of his works in Moscow and a new marriage. This past
April, however, at the age of 55, he succumbed. A unique musical
voice, with something to teach everyone, has been stilled.
If you'd like to hear some of Ivan Tcherepnin's
music, there's a collection of vocal and instrumental pieces, including
selections from the "Santur Opera," available from CRI.
The Double Concerto is on an Olympia (UK) CD, along with compositions
of Ivan's father and his grandfather, Nikolai.
-- Paul D. Lehrman
Originally appeared in Mix Magazine, September,
1998, and used by permission of the author. Copyright 1998 by Paul
D. Lehrman and Intertec Publishing. All rights reserved.
<top>
|
