Горизонты инобытия. К 85-летию со дня рождения Альфреда Шнитке

Abstract

Alfred Schnittke in his music had prognosed the future on numerous occasions. And one of his most important prognoses consisted in the increasing danger of the absorption of the human element by the cosmic. The paths of approaching towards modeling the processes of cosmization traversed through the ascention towards various types of abstractions and through the “globalization” of sound material. The fluids of cosmism are also clearly perceptible in the pantheistic pictures created by the composer. Stemming from such artistic solutions, the composer had frequently risen towards the heights of extratemporal categories, which undoubtedly marked his immersion into the sphere of cosmogony. As such, the transformation of earthly civilization into a cosmic otherness is presented with the greatest tangibility in two compositions. Schnittke’s electronic piece created by him on the famous “ANS” synthesizer which received the title of “The Stream” (1969) demonstrates the impendent situation of total absorption of all manifestations of the human element, making the music a sound-noise analogy of the matter of the universe, its enigmatic Something and Nothing and suggesting an apocalyptic feeling of the inevitability of global catastrophe. The examined issue received all-encompasing elaboration in the Second Symphony (1979), where in a metaphorical form the path of European civilization is traced out from its sources from Medieval times and up to its inevitable outcome in the hypothetic future by means of the transition of earthly matter into a certain cosmic dimension, which makes the present composition a manifest of the already begun process of metamorphosis of human existence into a dimly perceived otherness. Keywords: ideas of cosmism in the music of Alfred Schnittke, the Sceond Symphony of Schnittke, the electronic music of Schnittke.