Nikolai Roslavets

There are differing accounts of Roslavets' birthplace, some indicating that he was born in Dushatyn[3] to a peasant family,[2] while he actually was born in 1881 into the family of a railway clerk (of Ukrainian origin, according to Detlef Gojowy) posted in Konotop and Kursk, where Roslavets began to study violin, piano, theory of music and harmony in Arkady Abaza's musical classes.

[4] In 1902 Roslavets was accepted as a student at the Moscow Conservatory where he studied violin under Jan Hřímalý, free composition under Sergei Vasilenko, counterpoint, fugue and musical form under Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov and Alexander Ilyinsky.

After 1917 the composer became one of the most prominent public figures of "leftist art" in Russia, together with Arthur Lourié, Kazimir Malevich, Vsevolod Meyerhold and others.

Roslavets was accused of being a "counter-revolutionary" and "bourgeois" artist, "alien to the proletariat", as well as "formalist", a "class enemy" and in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a "Trotskyist", "saboteur"; etc.

In 1930 Roslavets was accused of being a "protector" of the Association of the Moscow Authors which according to the group "Proletarian Musician" was promoting "light music" and "spreading of the counter-revolutionary literature".

The "Roslavets case" was led by Viktor Bely, Alexandr Davidenko, V. Klemens, Yuri Keldysh, Semion Korev, Zara Levina, Georgi Polyanovsky, Alexey Sergeev and Boris Shekhter.

[12] Though the "new system of sound organisation" regulates the whole twelve-tone chromatic scale, most of Roslavets’ "synthetic chords" consist of six to nine tones.

In the 1920s Roslavets developed his system, expanding it to encompass counterpoint, rhythm, and musical form while elaborating new principles of teaching.

The mature forms of this "new system of sound organization" are typical for the pieces composed between 1913 and 1917, such as Sad Landscapes (1913), Three Compositions for Voice and Piano (1913), String Quartet No.

[13] After the Bolshevik revolution, Roslavets made an important contribution to the "revolutionary propaganda in music" in such compositions as the cantata October (1927) and numerous songs.

However, his symphonic poem Komsomoliya (1928), demonstrates an extraordinary mastery, a very complex and highly modern compositional technique, far from the simplification typical for "propaganda works".

The works of his last years in Moscow show a simplification of his characteristic language to admit an expanded conception of tonality (for instance in the 24 Preludes for violin and piano), but are still highly professional.

After the first publication about Roslavets's original theoretical concept, based on archival materials (Lobanova 1983) had appeared, M. Lobanova's lecture on Roslavets's musical-theoretical system, declared in the program of the international conference "Musica nel nostro tempo" (Milan) was forbidden in 1984: leading functionaries of the Composers' Union of the Soviet Union had accused the researcher of "illegal contacts to the West."