Notes from the Periphery: Mykola Roslavets
A new series and some news
It has been several months since I have been able to sit down and share my thoughts with those of you who subscribe here. Apologies for my silence. The first few months of the year were overwhelmed by a very full job interviewing season that took me all over the country followed by the sixth season of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival. Although this distracted me in some ways from the blog, my interview experiences ultimately inspired today’s post.
Between the end of January and the middle of March, I was lucky to have the chance to present my research at a number of campuses across the United States. I talked about Ukrainian music and how I think about this repertoire in relationship to Ukrainian history, to global politics, and to the broader discussions about music history today. After each presentation, I was particularly struck by the fact that at least one person asked me specifically about the musical works I had shared in my examples: Where did these pieces come from? Why aren’t they played more frequently? Are the scores available? These questions have led me to start a new series, which I am calling Notes from the Periphery. These posts will provide information about long-overlooked Ukrainian composers, including a selection of their works, information about their composing style, and links to recordings and musical scores in the hopes of increasing their visibility.
I have chosen Nikolai—or Mykola—Roslavets as the first composer for this series. Born in Dushatin, now in a region of Russia’s Bryansk Oblast, the composer was known for his pioneering approach to tonality, through which he replaced traditional keys with groups of pitches he called “synthetic chords.” Not only was he one of the most innovative composers of the early Soviet Union, he was among the most prolific, writing in a variety of genres from song cycles to chamber music, symphonies to ballet. He also penned entertaining and insightful polemical essays addressing philosophies of music, contemporary politics, and even the contributions of Arnold Schoenberg.
Roslavets was one of the first composers I began to study. One of the reasons I was able to begin with him is that he has been claimed by Russian music, and therefore has received more attention from scholars globally. There are several widely published books and articles about him, some of his music has been recorded. But he was also among the composers that was discussed at the very first Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival by music theorist Inessa Bazayev. (The composer’s Meditation for cello and piano was also performed.) It is true that Dushatin is located within the borders of contemporary Russia, but during Roslavets’ lifetime, the region was not a monolithically Russian part of the empire. In fact, according to the composer, it was not Russian at all. In his autobiography, Roslavets referred to his childhood home as a “half-Ukrainian, half-Belorussian town.” What is more, at the age of twelve, the Roslavets family moved to Konotop—the site of a famous Ukrainian witch—and he finished his elementary studies in Kursk. The composer left for the Moscow Conservatory for the first time at the age of 21.
You may recognize the sites of Roslavets’ adolescence if you are familiar with the work of another figure of cultural history, currently being rightfully reclaimed by Ukraine: the painter Kazimir Malevich. In fact, the composer and painter grew up together, first in Konotop and then Kursk, when both families were moved as part of their employment for the Moscow-Kyiv-Voronezh Railway administration. The two young men were much more than neighbors, developing their early artistic languages in one another’s company. In one of Malevich’s recollections, the artist wrote: “My life in Kursk flowed tirelessly over my work on painting, while Kolia Roslavets developed his work along musical lines.” In 1908-9, Malevich painted Songs to Blue Clouds, which depicted a naked man playing a violin. The artist’s notation identifies the figure as Roslavets.
The friendship between the two persisted into adulthood and became a professional alliance as both men turned increasingly towards revolutionary artistic and musical aesthetics, respectively. In 1916, Malevich wrote to the painter and composer Mikhail Matiushin about starting the journal Supremus to extol the values of the Suprematist movement in the fields of “painting, decorative art, music, and literature.” Among the names of those “people honest to Art,” as Malevich identified them, was a single composer: Roslavets. In the first issue, Roslavets’ essay “On ‘Non-objective’ Art” appeared prominently as the second entry of the journal’s contents. (Malevich would publish his own manifesto a decade later under the title The Non-Objective World.)
Roslavets’ new ideas about musical composition developed following the completion of his conservatory education in 1913. Like many early twentieth-century composers, Roslavets felt that the traditional harmonic system had reached its full potential. In place of the seven notes of a major or minor scale, which dictate not only the pitches available to the composer but a hierarchical relationship between them, the composer developed what he called “synthetic chords.” These “chords” contained sets of six to eight notes and were to be the basis for both the music’s melody and harmony. By 1919 when the composer returned to Ukraine, he had largely perfected the system and it governed much of his music for the next decade.
In the early 1920s, Roslavets taught at the Musical Institute of Kharkiv, in the first capital of the Ukrainian SSR, where he enjoyed his greatest success and popularity. During the three years he spent in the city, he composed his Cinq Preludes, which offer a mature example of his innovative musical system. These five piano pieces occupy a compelling, original space between the post-Romanticism of Scriabin and the aural esotericism of Schoenberg, two contemporary composers with whom he was linked during his lifetime.
Not only do these pieces exemplify his synthetic chord system, they also feature notable motivic repetition. The repeated use of certain melodic motives, a form of monothematicism, appears throughout Ukrainian composition, from ancient folk music to 21st century opera.
A full score can be accessed through International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)/Petrucci Music Library website here.
In 1923, he returned to Moscow. There, in addition to composing, he authored several polemical essays for Soviet journals. These included a wonderfully vivid, political reading of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. which he called “revolutionary, breaking all bonds and blazing a new trail.” In 1926, the composer penned the provocative “On Pseudo-Proletarian Music,” in which he rejected the prevailing idea that “proletarian music must be simple, clear and comprehensible to the broad masses.” Roslavets instead made the argument that an abstract and progressive music, which transcended political borders, was the only true musical language of the proletarian of the future.
To that end, in 1928, he composed the large-scale symphonic poem Komsomoliya. Written to mark the tenth anniversary of the Young Communist League (Komsomol), the title suggests a work of agitprop—a genre in which Roslavets had composed extensively. But the work is simultaneously bombastic and aspirational, evoking a mechanical sound world that is propelled forward by the collaboration of instruments and voices. The score calls for an enormous orchestra including textless choir and large wind and percussion sections, reminiscent of the ensembles used by Gustav Mahler. The music is built from meticulously chosen units of melody and rhythm, whose combination and cooperation was for Roslavets a sonic representation of the ideal political community.
Once again, a full score is available through IMSLP.
By 1929, his progressive compositions became the subject of severe criticism by the powerful Russian Association of Proletarian Music. In 1930, he escaped increasing restriction by moving to Tashkent, where he focused his efforts on writing music that captured Uzbek folk music and completed the first Uzbek ballet, titled Pakhta (Cotton). Roslavets returned to Moscow in 1933, where he worked mostly under the radar, limiting his use of the controversial (a)tonal system he pioneered a decade earlier. After suffering a crippling stroke in 1939, the composer died from a second attack in 1944.
Several elements of this story have worked together to allow a Russian narrative to lay claim to Roslavets and his work. He was educated in Moscow, he wrote in the Russian language, and early on, he was an enthusiastic member of the communist party. As a result, he has been given the erroneous moniker, the “Russian Schoenberg.” Two problems are on display here. The first is, of course, the characterization of Roslavets as Russian. This is not a new problem. Ukrainian figures like Malevich, Ilya Repin and Nikolai Gogol have received this treatment, not to mention Jewish, Belarusian-born French artist Marc Chagall or Georgian-born Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. It is important to always check the biographies of cultural figures described as Russian—and to make note of the prevalence with which such “errors” occur and are defended.
But perhaps the bigger problem is one that we have seen a lot in new efforts to incorporate marginalized composers, a characterization that I call "the something of something” justification. “The Russian Schoenberg” (or “the Schoenberg of Russia”) suggests that essentially what makes the figure in question important or valuable is that they are another version of a composer we already value—and essentially that they are derivative of the original genius. It reduces their contributions to an equivalency with a canonical figure we have already deemed important. And almost without exception, the composers with whom they are being compared are generally not from marginalized groups that many contemporary efforts are now oriented towards platforming. Despite its intent, this kind of inclusion of overlooked voices comes by virtue of reifying the very judgements and traditions that have prompted a reevaluation of the canon.
For example, there has been a lot of conversation about the problems of referring to Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, as “the Black Mozart” (or the Mozart of Black composers). This includes the fact that many of Chevalier’s most important contributions predated Mozart—and that the latter was more likely influenced by the former than the other way around. Similarly, in his lifetime, H. Lawrence Freeman was regularly referred to as “the Black Wagner.” Despite this “honorific,” a fully-staged (and sorely-warranted) production of his 1928 opera Voodoo has still yet to be produced by a major opera house. These descriptors, intended to emphasize the value of these lesser-known figures, still foreground the hegemonic tradition. The value of the former only exists in relationship to the latter. My feelings about these kinds of characterizations can be summed up with a personal anecdote: When I decided to pursue my doctorate at McGill University in Montreal, a friend shared with me a clip from The Simpsons. In it, Marge assures Lisa that she can “still go to McGill, the Harvard of Canada.” Lisa responds, “Anything that is the ‘something’ of ‘something’ isn’t really the anything of anything.”
Roslavets (and Chevalier, and Freeman, among others) deserve better. Mykola Roslavets is not the Schoenberg of Ukraine (and certainly not of Russia). He is a unique and complex composer with a rich and innovative musical language and a fascinating life that engaged a revolutionary political and musical moment, and whose works chart these changes. I invite you to explore his music.
I would also like to share the outcome of my aforementioned interview tour: I am very pleased to share that I will be starting a full-time position as an Assistant Professor and Area Head of Music History at Montclair State University in August 2025. I am excited to get started in this new position, to contribute to the John J. Cali School of Music’s vibrant community, and to continue thinking about the future of music with the next generation of students. You can be sure my curriculum will include some of these long-overlooked, but richly innovative works.
Great blog, thank you for introducing or reintroducing us to Roslavets. Congratulations on the job!!
Congrats on the job!