Elena Dubinets, PhD
Seattle Symphony Orchestra
elenadubinets@winisp.net
1225 151st ave SE
Bellevue, WA 98007
(425) 401-2220

Music in Exile: Russian Composers- Emigre and Their Search for National Identity in Music

My paper constitutes an inquiry into the field of self-identification and general perception of the Russian Emigre composers who escaped Russia in the last several decades. Emigration inevitably influences the composers' output. Sometimes their anxiety associated with moving to another country can somehow block their composing process (many Russian composers, such as S. Rakhmaninov, J. Schillinger, A. Volkonsky and others almost entirely stopped writing music when moved out of Russia). However, most of composers continue writing music in the new environment, try not to lose their national identity and form a strong national-oriented basis to their current music.

The problem of music identity can be approached with the tools of cognitive musicology. I hypothesize that there is an influence of ethnic sources of the knowledge base on the process of music composing. My approach seeks to understand music creating in terms of application the fundamental cognitive processes to the existing ethnic music knowledge structures, like specific music forms, genres, melodic and rhythmic patterns. I suppose that the Russian composers- Emigre are generally inclined to following the Russian compositional tradition, proving that their previous ethnic-rooted musical experiences influence their potential to organize sounds into pieces of music. I shall justify this statement analyzing the ideas and views of several Emigre composers whom I have interviewed, including Nikolai Korndorf, Ivan Sokolov and others.


The problem of identity in music is based on a very complex conglomerate of different inputs rather than on usage of single folk components. In the case of Russian contemporary music this conglomerate would include not only folk roots, but also artifacts of Russian church and sacral art music Soviet patriotic, tango of the pre-war era, attributes of pop- and urban cultures, music of bards and many other non-high-art and non-ethnic components. In this regard, I highly value a conception of underground music as a bias for the composers. This concept was formulated by Nikolai Korndorf (1 7-2001), one of the most important Russian composers of after-Schnittke generation, who emigrated to Canada in 1991. Under "underground music" Korndorf meant a certain "secondary" music culture, which lived in any artist. "It is something natural, primitive, spontaneous, instinctive, perceptible, physiological." Korndorf thought that a composer could write music which is inherent to him- or herself. I shall briefly describe Korndorf’s concept and music in my paper.

The process of composition thus often receives a certain cultural meaning and contextual symbolism, based on the individual ethnic models and social conventions. The "Russianness" of the compositions by Russian Emigre composers is obvious in most cases due to the many specifically Russian features, even if a composer has spent some considerable time abroad.