Ru
EnD. Dedyukhin
“A Symphony in Songs”, the 21st century: The notes on Yu. Mashin’s “Beatles Symphony” for brass band
The presented article is devoted to the genre of symphony for a brass band, formed in Soviet music shortly before the Great Patriotic War. It demonstrates a considerable potential for musical-dramaturgical and compositional development in the modern era. The author of the article notes that at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries this potential was successfully realized in line with the genre and stylistic synthesizing tendencies typical for the “third direction” and associated with intensive dialogues between academic and popular musical culture. An obvious corroboration of this is the music by the famous Rostov composer Yuri Mashin (born 1956), who repeatedly turned to creating music for a brass band in the late 1990s and 2000s (the musical fairy tale “The Wizard of the Emerald City”, “Beatles Symphony”, the suite “Tanais: Music in Stones”). Based on the issued covered, “Beatles Symphony” (2002), composed for the Concert orchestra of wind instruments “Don” and repeatedly performed by the mentioned collective is of particular interest. Based on the composer’s remarks about the origins of the Symphony’s concept and the thematic analysis of the orchestral score, the author comes to the conclusion that examined work is fundamentally dialogic in nature. On the one hand, the composer refracts some features of the stylistic synthesis inherent in orchestral fantasies and potpourris on the themes of “evergreen hits” (jazz, rock and pop music), combined with the fundamental principles of classical romantic symphonism. On the other hand, in Y. Mashin’s interpretation of the genre of this work, one can trace the inclination towards the synthesis of two varieties of symphony which were established in the late Romantic and post-Romantic eras: a one-part program symphony, symphonic poem and a symphony-cantata (or “symphony in songs”, as G. Mahler said), which interact in in the “Beatles Symphony” in a very peculiar way and determine the apparent originality of this work concept.
Key words
Russian brass bands on the boundary of the 20th and 21st centuries, concert repertoire, genre and stylistic synthesis, the genre of symphony for brass band, Yu. Mashin, “Beatles Symphony”.
For citation
Dedyukhin D. “A Symphony in Songs”, the 21st century: The notes on Yu. Mashin’s “Beatles Symphony” for brass band // South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2023. No. 3. Pp. 13-24.
