Intermediate
Six Prières
9:08
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Browse piano sheets by Nikolay Obukhov on Zen Virtual Piano. Nikolay Obukhov was born in Ol’shanka, in Kursk Governorate, Russia, into a family of hereditary musicians; while he was still a child the family moved to Moscow and had him taught piano and violin from an early age. In 1911 he began studies at the Moscow Conservatory, and from 1913 to 1916 he continued at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where his teachers included Maximilian Steinberg and Nikolai Tcherepnin. Two instruments learned in a musical family make a childhood spent with sound before any conservatory classroom. Piano and violin as a child and two conservatories give a thorough path from the family’s music to formal study. His early music, composed after 1910, attracted sufficient attention that the periodical Muzykal’niy Sovremennik organized a concert of his compositions in 1915 and another in Saint Petersburg in 1916, the latter using a new method of notation he had developed the preceding year. According to the composer, on 15 July 1915 he invented a method of notation that eliminated the need for accidentals by replacing noteheads with crosses for tones raised by one half step. A new way of writing the notes can be read as treating the notation itself as part of the music. In 1918 he fled Russia with his wife and two children to escape the hardships following the Bolshevik Revolution and the civil war, and after a period of travel they settled in Paris. A flight from hardship followed by travel and then Paris sketches an exile that took time to settle. In France he met and studied with Maurice Ravel, who showed interest in his music, provided financial assistance for the refugee family and set Obukhov up with a publisher. A teacher who also helps with money and a publisher makes the Ravel connection practical as well as musical. In 1926 Serge Koussevitzky became interested in his massive and incomplete liturgical cantata Kniga Zhizni (The Book of Life) and conducted a performance of its Prologue in Paris. He worked on the croix sonore, an electronic instrument similar to the theremin but built in the shape of a cross, with Pierre Dauvillier and Michel Billaudot; a prototype was demonstrated in 1926 and a refined version was made in 1934, and many of his concurrent and subsequent works use the instrument. He evolved a technique of using all twelve tones not in rows but as defining harmonic areas through twelve-tone chords, and he was one of the first composers to require singers to make sounds other than singing, including shouts, screams, whispers, whistles and groans. An instrument shaped like a cross and a notation built from crosses show a composer whose ideas and objects follow the same design. He published his treatise on harmony and notation, Traité d’harmonie tonale, atonale et totale, in 1947, with a foreword by Honegger, and he made a living as a bricklayer. A treatise on harmony beside a living made as a bricklayer shows a composer whose ideas lived apart from his paid work.
Browse piano sheets by Nikolay Obukhov on Zen Virtual Piano.
Nikolay Obukhov was born in Ol’shanka, in Kursk Governorate, Russia, into a family of hereditary musicians; while he was still a child the family moved to Moscow and had him taught piano and violin from an early age. In 1911 he began studies at the Moscow Conservatory, and from 1913 to 1916 he continued at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where his teachers included Maximilian Steinberg and Nikolai Tcherepnin. Two instruments learned in a musical family make a childhood spent with sound before any conservatory classroom. Piano and violin as a child and two conservatories give a thorough path from the family’s music to formal study.
His early music, composed after 1910, attracted sufficient attention that the periodical Muzykal’niy Sovremennik organized a concert of his compositions in 1915 and another in Saint Petersburg in 1916, the latter using a new method of notation he had developed the preceding year. According to the composer, on 15 July 1915 he invented a method of notation that eliminated the need for accidentals by replacing noteheads with crosses for tones raised by one half step. A new way of writing the notes can be read as treating the notation itself as part of the music.
In 1918 he fled Russia with his wife and two children to escape the hardships following the Bolshevik Revolution and the civil war, and after a period of travel they settled in Paris. A flight from hardship followed by travel and then Paris sketches an exile that took time to settle. In France he met and studied with Maurice Ravel, who showed interest in his music, provided financial assistance for the refugee family and set Obukhov up with a publisher. A teacher who also helps with money and a publisher makes the Ravel connection practical as well as musical. In 1926 Serge Koussevitzky became interested in his massive and incomplete liturgical cantata Kniga Zhizni (The Book of Life) and conducted a performance of its Prologue in Paris.
He worked on the croix sonore, an electronic instrument similar to the theremin but built in the shape of a cross, with Pierre Dauvillier and Michel Billaudot; a prototype was demonstrated in 1926 and a refined version was made in 1934, and many of his concurrent and subsequent works use the instrument. He evolved a technique of using all twelve tones not in rows but as defining harmonic areas through twelve-tone chords, and he was one of the first composers to require singers to make sounds other than singing, including shouts, screams, whispers, whistles and groans. An instrument shaped like a cross and a notation built from crosses show a composer whose ideas and objects follow the same design. He published his treatise on harmony and notation, Traité d’harmonie tonale, atonale et totale, in 1947, with a foreword by Honegger, and he made a living as a bricklayer. A treatise on harmony beside a living made as a bricklayer shows a composer whose ideas lived apart from his paid work.
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An electronic instrument similar to the theremin but built in the shape of a cross, on which Nikolay Obukhov worked with Pierre Dauvillier and Michel Billaudot; a prototype was demonstrated in 1926 and a refined version was made in 1934.
Maurice Ravel, who showed interest in his music, provided financial assistance for the refugee family and set him up with a publisher.
According to the composer, he invented a method of notation on 15 July 1915 that eliminated the need for accidentals by replacing noteheads with crosses for tones raised by one half step.