Alexander Tcherepnin
Oxford Grove Music Encyclopedia:
Top
Alexander (Nikolayevich) Tcherepnin
(b St Petersburg, 21 Jan 1899; d Paris, 29 Sept 1977). American composer of Russian origin. His father Nikolay Nikolayevich (1873-1945) was a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov who wrote ballets for Dyagilev (Le pavillon d′Armide, 1908) and settled in Paris in 1921. Alexander completed his studies there and became associated with Martinů and Beck, experimenting with new scales in a Franco-Russian neo-classical style (including one sometimes known by his name: C-D♭-E♭-E♮-F-G-A♭-A♮-B-C). In 1934-7 he travelled in the Far East, which brought about additions to his range of materials. In 1950 he settled in the USA. His large output, spirited in style and cosmopolitan in manner, includes ballets, four symphonies (1927-57), six piano concertos (1919-65), chamber and keyboard music. His sons Sege (b 1941) and Ivan (b 1943) are also composers.
Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:
Top
Alexander Tcherepnin
Alexander (Nikolayevich) Tcherepnin (1899-1977) was a Russian-French and later American composer of ballets, operas, and instrumental music.
Alexander Tcherepnin was born on January 21, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Descended from a family of musicians, Alexander benefitted from the experience of his father, Nikolay Tcherepnin (1873-1945), a conductor and composer who studied with Rimsky-Korsakov. The family house in St. Petersburg was a place where many well-known musicians and artists liked to meet. In this privileged atmosphere, the gifts of Alexander Tcherepnin were confirmed at an early age. At 14 he had already written an opera, a ballet, and several pieces for piano. In 1918 the family moved to Tbilisi, where Alexander continued his studies at the music conservatory. At the same time he gave concerts as both pianist and conductor.
In 1921 the political situation forced the family to leave Russia. They settled in Paris, where Alexander completed his studies with Paul Vidal (composition) and Isidor Philipp (piano). Later he became the co-founder of L'Ecole de Paris with Bohuslav Martinů, Conrad Beck, and Marcel Mihalovici, a group of foreign composers close to the neoclassical movement, although at the same time very interested in the music of their respective homelands. He made his Western début in London (1922), and a year later his ballet Ajanta's Frescoes, written for Pavlova, was performed at Covent Garden.
Although he began a professional tour of America in 1926, it was in 1927 in Paris that he suddenly attained fame after the premiere of his first symphony, which was a succès de scandale. (An entire section of the work is performed exclusively by percussion instruments.) Between 1934 and 1937 he travelled in several Far-Eastern countries. He taught in Tokyo, where he settled down for a while and founded a music publishing corporation to promote the works of his pupils. It was in Shanghai that he met the pianist Lee Hsien Ming, whom he married a few years later. Returning to France in 1938, Alexander Tcherepnin was unfortunately forced to limit his activities during World War II.
In 1948 he returned to the United States to teach at De Paul University, Chicago, becoming an American citizen in 1958. From 1964 to his death in 1977 he divided his time between Paris and New York. An invitation from the Soviet government in 1967 allowed him to tour his native country extensively.
His Music
A highly cosmopolitan figure, Alexander Tcherepnin moved easily from St. Petersburg to Paris and New York. Even before World War II some of his compositions revealed the influence of the Far East. His intense intellectual and musical curiosity found expression in compositions which can best be described as eclectic. As early as 1913 the Pièces sans titre op. 7 for piano contain examples of bitonality. During his stay in Paris (1921-1950), his compositions show the impact of the French esthetic (simplicity of textures, clarity of melodic lines), at the time vigorously demonstrated by the members of the Groupe des Six (Darius Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, and Francis Poulenc). In addition, he used the percussive rhythm that Prokofiev preferred in his music. Russian and Georgian music appear in Rhapsodie Géorgienne for orchestra (1922) and Suite Géorgienne for piano and strings (1938).
Apart from those diverse outside influences, he experimented with his own new techniques of counterpoint and of rhythm. The French composer Alexandre Tansman (born in Poland) remembered that Tcherepnin in Paris notated the rhythmic flow of the sound of people reading a newspaper. In addition to those experiments, Tcherepnin used his own melodic scale of nine notes in most of his compositions.
It was in the United States that Alexander Tcherepnin coordinated the best elements of his research. Although he avoided using serial elements, he did not hesitate to use electronic techniques (see The Story of Ivan The Fool, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC] in 1968). His works include several ballets and operas (Die Hochzeit der Sobeide op. 45, story from Hofmannsthal, 1930; The Farmer and the Nymphe op. 72, 1952). In his chamber music, Alexander Tcherepnin often wrote for unusual instrumental combinations (see Sonata da Chiesa op. 101 for viola da gamba and organ, 1966, and Caprices Diatoniques for Celtic harp, 1973), thus revealing his particular interest in musical timbre.
This cosmopolitan composer reflected in his music the variety of cultures in which he had resided.
Further Reading
W. Reich, Alexander Tcherepnin (Bonn, 1959, rev. 1970) provides insights on the man and his work.
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
Top
Alexander Tcherepnin
Alexander Nikolayevich Tcherepnin (Russian: Александр Николаевич Черепнин) (21 January 1899 – 29 September 1977) was a Russian-born composer and pianist.
His father, Nikolai Tcherepnin (pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov) and his son, Ivan Tcherepnin were also composers, as are two of his grandsons, Sergei and Stefan. His son Serge was involved in the roots of electronic music and instruments. His mother was a member of the artistic Benois family, a niece of Alexandre Benois.
|
Contents
|
Biography
He was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and played the piano and composed prolifically from a very early age. He was stimulated in this activity by the atmosphere at home, which--thanks to his family's Benois-Diaghilev connection--was a meeting place for many well-known musicians and artists of the day. By the time he began formal theory and composition studies in his late teens, he had already composed hundreds of pieces, including more than a dozen piano sonatas. Among his teachers in Russia were composer Victor Belyayev (pupil of Anatoly Lyadov and Alexander Glazunov), who prepared Tcherepnin for St. Petersburg Conservatory; Leocadia Kashperova (renowned pianist, protégée of Anton Rubinstein); and his professor at the Conservatory Nikolay Sokolov (pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov). Notably at that time Tcherepnin’s mentor was famous musicologist Alexander Ossovsky, who also was a friend of his father. His works were influenced by composer Alexander Spendiarov.
After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the family fled St. Petersburg and settled for some time in Tbilisi, Georgia. In young Tcherepnin's luggage were some two hundred short piano pieces, quite a number of which eventually reached print (notably in his Bagatelles, Op. 5). In Tbilisi he continued his studies at the conservatory, gave concerts as both pianist and conductor and wrote music for the Kamerny Theater (Palmer 1980, 18:637; Korabelnikova 2008, pp. 16-40). Because of the increasingly hostile political environment in Tbilisi after Georgia was sovietized, the Tcherepnins chose to leave Russia permanently in 1921. They settled in Paris, where Alexander completed his studies with Vidal and Isidor Philipp, who was the head of the piano department at the Paris Conservatory, and became associated with a group of composers that included Bohuslav Martinů, Marcel Mihalovici and Conrad Beck. Philipp secured the publication of several groups of short piano pieces that Tcherepnin had composed in Russia. From Paris Tcherepnin launched an international career as a pianist and composer. In 1925 he won the Schott Prize with his Concerto da Camera, Op. 33. He began yearly visits to the United States in 1926 and later went to the Far East, making several extended visits to China and Japan between 1934 and 1937. He promoted composers in Japan (Akira Ifukube, Fumio Hayasaka, Bunya Koh, and others) and China (He Lüting and others), even founding his own publishing house in Tokyo for the purpose. While in China, he met the young Chinese pianist Lee Hsien Ming, and the two later married in Europe. They had three sons together: Peter, Serge and Ivan.
During World War II, he lived in France. The war virtually stopped his musical activities. The immediate postwar period, however, brought a resurgence of creative energies; the result was a number of important works, beginning with Symphony No. 2 (composed 1947, not orchestrated until 1951). In 1948, he went to the United States, settling in Chicago in 1950 and in 1958 acquiring United States citizenship. He and his wife taught at DePaul University in Chicago, where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered his second symphony with Rafael Kubelík conducting. His students there included Phillip Ramey, Robert Muczynski, Gloria Coates, and John Downey. In 1957, he completed two major American orchestral commissions: the Divertimento, Op. 90 (for Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) and his Symphony No. 4, Op. 91 (for Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra). In 1964 he moved to New York and subsequently divided his time between the United States and Europe. He died in Paris in 1977 (Palmer, 18:637).
The Singapore Symphony Orchestra has recorded his first-ever complete symphony cycle, conducted by Lan Shui. In 2008, these recordings were reissued together with Singapore Symphony performances of his six piano concertos (Noriko Ogawa, pianist), along with the Symphonic Prayer, Op. 93, Magna Mater, Op. 41 and other orchestral works.
He was a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.[1]
Style and techniques
His early works were fairly original and some of his pieces have enduring popularity. His output includes three operas, four symphonies, a divertimento (which is a symphony in all but name), six piano concertos, works for ballet, choral music, alto saxophone solo, and a large amount of solo piano music. His Symphony No. 1 (1927) is remarkable for including the first symphonic movement ever written completely for unpitched percussion (Benjamin Folkman, cited in Wender 1999, 6). One of two symphonies left incomplete at his death would have been for percussion alone (Arias 2001). Tcherepnin invented his own harmonic languages. The most famous of his synthetic scales, derived by combining minor and major hexachords, has nine notes and consists of three conjunct semitone-tone-semitone tetrachords. This came to be known as the "Tcherepnin scale" (Slonimsky 1968, 19–20), and may be classified with Messiaen's modes of limited transposition. 
He also worked with pentatonic scales, old Russian modal tunes, Georgian harmonies, and a nine-note "chromatic perfect" scale built upon half-step and step-and-a-half intervals. Tcherepnin discussed these techniques in his monograph "Basic Elements of My Musical Language" (Korabelnikova, Appendix 2, pp. 191–209, see also external links).
References
- Arias, Enrique Alberto. 1982–83. "Alexander Tcherepnin’s Thoughts on Music". Perspectives of New Music 21:138–43.
- Arias, Enrique Alberto. 1986. "The Symphonies of Alexander Tcherepnin". Tempo, new series, no.158:23–31.
- Arias, Enrique Alberto. 1989. Alexander Tcherepnin: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-25318-8
- Arias, Enrique Alberto. 2001. "Tcherepnin, Alexander (Nikolayevich)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
- Korabelnikova, Ludmila. 2008. "Alexander Tcherepnin: The Saga of a Russian Emigre Composer". Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-34938-5
- Palmer, Christopher. 1980. "Tcherepnin, Alexander (Nikolayevich)". New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie. London: Macmillian
- Slonimsky, Nicolas. 1968. "Alexander Tcherepnin Septuagenarian". Tempo, new series, no. 87 (Winter): 16-23.
- Tcherepnin, Alexander. 1979. "A Short Autobiography". Tempo, no.130:12–18.
- Wender, Julius. 1999. Notes for, Alexander Tcherepnin: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2, Piano Concerto No. 5. Noriko Ogawa, piano, with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Lan Shui. BIS-CD-1017. Åkersberga, Sweden: BIS Records AB.
External links
- Biography of Alexander Tcherepnin - The Tcherepnin Society
- Alexander Tcherepnin: Basic Elements of My Musical Language - The Tcherepnin Society
- Alexander Tcherepnin: The Saga of a Russian Emigré Composer
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:
Copyrights:
Oxford Grove Music Encyclopedia
The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
Read more
Gale Encyclopedia of Biography
Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Read more
Mentioned in
Nicolai Tcherepnin
(person)
Alexander Tcherepnin
(Classical Album)
Tcherepnin: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 3; Festmusik; Symphonic March
(Classical Album)
Sonatina for bassoon & piano
(Classical Work)
» More