Lurie Artur Sergeyevich

Main article: History of music in Russia

Biography

Born on May 1 [13], 1892 in Propoisk, Mogilev province of the Russian Empire. Real name - Naum Izrailevich Luria.

Arthur Lurie is known in Russia rather than philologists than musicians: Lurie is one of the addressees of the lyrics of Anna Akhmatova. They met for the first time in 1914 in the "artistic basement" of "Stray Dog" and this meeting determined the entire future fate of the composer. According to Lurie himself, "Anna Andreevna ravaged his nest like a kite, and destroyed everything in his young family life."

Meanwhile, a native of the town of Propoisk, Mogilev province, went down in history as one of the leaders of Russian musical futurism, working closely with Kulbin, Khlebnikov, the Burlyuk brothers, Bruni, Punin, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, Lurie was a co-author of their famous manifestos.

A fan of cubism, quarter-tone music and dodecaphony, Arthur Lurie anticipated the work of Schoenberg, Cage and Crumb in the free handling of sound space and time (most of his avant-garde works were created around 1916).

Under the Bolsheviks, Lurie from 1918 to 1921 worked as the head of the music department of the People's Commissariat of Education. In this strange field for him "responsible" for music in the first government of Soviet Russia, he managed to help quite a few talented Russian musicians.

In August 1922, Lurie left for Berlin, and in the spring of 1941, after Stravinsky, with whom he became very close, emigrated to the United States. Composer and music writer, theorist and critic, Arthur Lurie, without a doubt, was one of the largest figures in the Russian musical avant-garde of the twentieth century.

Compositions

Greek songs

"Greek Songs" to verses Vyacheslav Ivanovasochenie in the fall of 1914. St. Petersburg already changed his "German" name and began to be called Petrograd, Russia lost more than two million soldiers killed at the front, the world collapsed, and those who still wanted to decisively "throw off the ship of modernity," Pushkina Dostoevsky and. " Tolstoy Greek Songs" surprises with an extravagant combination of serious modernist searches and quite traditional and even salon intonations. Composer finds lie here and in the field of various archaic frets, consonant with Ivanovo translations from Sappho. Some songs abound in exquisite, on the verge of atonality harmony. Lurie deals very freely with the rhythmic structure of works, his fantasy is sophisticated to the limit. Laconism, due to the form of the poetic primary source, is quite in the spirit of Lurie himself. It seems that Lurie, like an architect or sculptor of antiquity, does not compose, but only distributes sound forms in space.