Roslavets - Three Etudes (1914) No. 1

Etude No. 1 "Affettamente" of Three Etudes (1914)

Nikolai Roslavets (1881-1944) is sometimes called the "Russian Schoenberg" and was certainly the first Russian composer to use a system of tone organization similar to Schoenberg's serialism. Before the 1917 revolution, Roslavets was regarded as a cutting-edge composer comparable to Scriabin. Interestingly, Marc-Andre Hamelin describes Roslavets's music as "Scriabin on acid." After the revolution and the formation of the RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), Roslavets was criticized and harrassed for his modernism. In the late 1920s, he left the Communist Party and in 1931 moved to Tashkent. There he conducted for a music theater and composed simple pieces in accordance with Socialist Realism. He died in obscurity and his name and music was mostly forgotten until the 1970s.

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[aesthetic1950]

I really like reading the music as it is played.

[Lars Nelissen van Gasselt]

Thanks! Very interesting music indeed...

[Snail Erato]

This channel is really a treasure box ..!!

These thre Eutdes are so strange and have a so magnetic attraction ...

I am discovering a new world of musical feelings which i would never have supposed i could like so much ...

[aesthetic1950]

Agreed!...I appreciate the efforts of John 11 inch, Hexameron.....This piece is hauntingly gorgeous. More sinister than Debussy.

[N. Prusquah]

I completely agree. I think Scriabin would've emigrated west immediately though, after Bolsheviks took power.

[Stephen Heller]

It's a really great question. Scriabin died too young, and had he lived a long life he might have ended up getting the shaft from the miserable Soviets like Roslavets (and many others), but if they had combined forces for something like the "Mysterium" imagine the possibilities.

[Stephen Heller]

If you've got the chops and the desire, what's to stop anyone from learning such music. Only a few people actually have both the skill and the desire though...

[Stephen Heller]

I do too. So much so that over the past 45 years I've nearly bankrupted myself buying scores I could never hope to perform. Yahoo for Youtube! It's saving me a lot and I keep on learning new music. Thanks to folks like Hexameron, John11inch, and many others for providing this service!

[pianoboypiano]

who the hell would bother interpreting this? or even try to figure out the timing?

[N. Prusquah]

Wonder what Scriabin would've thought of this.

[MusicaRicercata]

Keep in mind that while the ratios change the tempo is stationary. The bass line moves without temporal inhibition.

[MusicaRicercata]

Think of the bass line as constant and the first division of the measure in the treble line to be a rhythmic ratio of 6 semiquavers to 4 semiquavers (or 3 quavers to 2 quavers); in the second division, the ratio is reversed, but you can easily imagine this by appending dots to the end of each of the two quavers.