Rabinovitch-Barakovsky

Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky (born 30 Mars 1945) is one of the frist composers of minimalism (from 1969), "La Belle Musique N.3" (1977) is the first work for orchestra in the minimalist field.He also started connecting the minimalist vision with spiritual quest. <>

<> and it expresses the beauty and the compassion while uniting the oriental philosophy and the occidental psychology, having recourse to the hypnotic repetitive patterns structured by Symbols Numerology.

Some critics define his music conception as "musical anthropology".

Too "dissident" for soviet institution, he emigrated in Paris from Moscow in 1974. Now he lives in switzland.

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The composer

"Rabinovitch-Barakovsky's music poses – and goes beyond – the most significant musical questions of the end of the 20th century. It makes one feel the weight of history, which has never been as obvious as in this age of headlong rush, and at the same time abolishes it by revealing a reinvented tonal world. It mingles the rhythmic vitality typical of this century with a rediscovered mysticism, beyond progress in art.All those intertwined tendencies are expressed through a taste for beauty, a hedonistic aspiration freely stated…" (B. Duteurtre)

Indeed Rabinovitch-Barakovsky's music draws its vocabulary from the history of philosophy and religions. It is more than an acoustic phenomenon; it unfolds on at least two orthogonalaxes: an "emotional" level and a dimension that is "vertical", metaphysical and intelligible, which links it to the history of philosophies and religions in a mystical unity beyond time and space. Like the architecture of an Alberti or a Palladio, his music is conceived as a form of philosophy, pura cosa mentale. His music refers to an extra-musical content, and the sound language reaches the intangible realities of spirit through a symbolic rapport. This is why Rabinovitch-Barakovsky makes use of numbers and arithmosophy, as so many did before him, from Philippe de Vitry to J.S. Bach. In a way, the composer is a Pythagorean, but his Pythagoreanism is stateless and without denomination. He is interested in it only insofar as it serves his art.

His absent referent is the ancestral idea (common to many extra-European cultures) of music as harmony, i.e., as discordant concordance of antagonistic clashing forces. Harmony is universal: by an induction process it can explain the combination of low and high tones in the intervals as well as the rapport established by opposite couples as dissimilar as order and disorder, life and death, stability and movement, form and matter, soul and body. Harmony appears following the action of the whole number, which sets a mathematical limit to the unlimited flux of matter. The number acts and the matter suffers. And when antagonism develops in man between soul and body, the sheer quantity bridles the unstable reality of obsessive psychological states, subject to deterioration and dissolution. Music thus becomes a form of therapy, as Rabinovitch-Barakovsky tirelessly maintains.

To search for the universals present in the human being with the help of archetypes common to all musical cultures so as to found a musical anthropology of the spirit: that is the program that the author accomplishes through composition, pushed by a "visceral necessity". For the purpose of self-knowledge, he goes back to metaphysics and arithmosophy

Rabinovitch-Barakovsky's process cannot be reduced to orthodox Pythagoreanism; it draws from this tradition insofar as it shows points common to most traditional cultures. The number is sonorous and symbolic.

Brenno Boccadoro

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Selected Works

Rabinovitch-Barakovsky's main works are all part of a global work-in-progress called "Anthology of Archaic Rituals - In Search of the Center".

*Les mots de Andrei Biely (1969) cantata

*Le point d'appui trouvé (1970) chamber music

*Happy end (1972) electro-acoustic piece

*La Belle Musique n°2 (1974) chamber music

*Musique populaire (1994) 2 amplified pianos and orchestra

*Les Chants-Spirales (2006) for amplified vibraphone solo, amplified clavinova, amplified piano.

Selected Discographies

*Tantric Coupling (2006)2006 MEGADISC Classics, Belgium MDC 7802
*Pura Cosa Mentale (2004) 2004 MEGADISC Classics, Belgium MDC 7812/11
*Die Zeit (2000)2001 MEGADISC Classics, Belgium MDC 7822
*La Triade (1998) 2000 DORON Music, Switzerland DRC 3033
*Incantations1999 MEGADISC Classics, Belgium MDC 7831
*An Introduction to Alexandre Rabinovitch 1996 MEGADISC Classics, Belgium MDC 7846
*"'Alexandre Rabinovitch Oeuvres pour Piano"' 1994 VALOIS-Naive, France V 4694

Quotations

* Music is also an instrument for knowledge; self-knowledge, principle of individuation
*"In my music the principle of repetition is used to convey those obsessions, and the number plays the role of analysis by structuring this repetitive motion. This method is therapeutic in a way, and can turn out to be an instrument of self-knowledge." (A. Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, Courants d’air, Liège, October 1996).
*I developed an interest in the metaphysics of single numbers after reading the "Yi-king", the Chinese book of changes, published for the first time in Moscow in 1964, if I remember well. And for at least 30 years now, I have been trying to give numbers a chief role in the unfolding of the musical discourse, with all of its connotations, be they symbolic, metaphysical or even psychological. For numbers can, through a system of methodical repetitions, reveal and bring to awareness pathological or obsessive states of the psyche.
*As for the essential purpose of the treatment of numbers in my music, I aim at making their symbolic and intelligible aspect spontaneously audible and perceptible to the ear. Music arose from magical and ritual practices. This purifying function of music, directed towards the quest for the sacred that is located inside of ourselves, could also prove to be ecological in the era of the Homo Sapiens' self-destruction, which makes Brueghel's allegory so surprisingly realistic today.

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External link

*http://www.rabinovitch-barakovsky.com/