Word, Music and Gesture in Piano Opus “Volokos” by Ivan Sokolov
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Keywords: word and music, gesture, Ivan G. Sokolov, “Volokos”, instrumental theatre, cryptophony.
Author: Elena V. Melnikovа
About the author
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8907-9071
SPIN-код: 8282–3453
e-mail: lit_opera@mail.ru
Graduate student of the Department of Music Theory of the Ural State Mussorgsky’s Conservatoire
26 Lenina Ave., Yekaterinburg 620014, Russia
Head of Literary and Musical Department of the Yekaterinburg State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater
46A Lenina Ave., Yekaterinburg 620075, Russia
Submitted on: 20.11.2019
Published on: 15.05.2020
Abstract
The article is devoted to Ivan Sokolov’s piano opus “Volokos” (1988), which demonstrates one of the possible variants of the unconventional correlation of word and music. Gesture as an element of theatricality, this noticeable trend of the modern music is also reflected in this work, as the means of the instrumental theater gain an important role in the implementation of the author's idea here.
In “Volokos” Ivan Sokolov also offers a special form of musical encryption, which
results in the sequential conversion of the verbal text into the musical (“cryptophony”). Despite the composer’s critical assessment of his early compositions and the technique of encoding extra-musical meaning used therein, it was this method of organizing musical material that was in demand at that time by other composers in search of new forms of musical expression.
The opus “Volokos” became a landmark for the last quarter of the twentieth century and for the creative activity of Ivan Sokolov, as well as kind of a Manifesto of the author and one of the examples of the experiments with the word, music and gesture, which continue in the modern musical practice.
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For citation: Melnikovа, Elena V. “Word, Music and Gesture in Piano Opus ‘Volokos’ by Ivan Sokolov.” In Оpera musicologica, vol. 12, no. 2 (2020), pp. 25–41 (in Russian). DOI: 10.26156/OM.2020.12.2.002.