paperback, ca. 400  pp.,  Format 14,2 x 21 cm, (= studia slavica musicologica, vol. 28),
price 118,00 CHF / 59,95 EUR (D), 61,75 EUR (A), ISBN 3-928864-89-0

Edison Denisov’s art is one of the basic landmarks of Russian music. His name stands in the row of outstanding Russian composers of the 20^th century after Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Just Denisov told his own weighty musical word in the certain period of a history of Russian culture. Just Denisov opened a new page in Russian music and made it at such level of highest profes­sionalism and skill, which can be peculiar only to genius. The bright and absolutely individual style, created by Denisov, has no analogues neither in Russia nor abroad. This fact only does him already a rare phenomenon in the world music of our time. This style is recognised at once, it cannot be confused with any other.

Edison Denisov belongs to the generation of composers who came to the fore in the post-Stalinist era and were destined to change the course of Russian music. It would be hard to find a more impressive case of “running against the stream” in the history of Russian music. The post-war generation of composers grew up in the deadening atmosphere of totalitarism behind the Iron Curtain and the enforced precepts of so-called Socialist Realism. Their maturity in the late 1940s coincided with persecutions of the best writers and poets, Party resolutions on music, and the struggle against “formalism” and “cosmopolitanism”.

This generation took up the challenge and embarked on it way, proceeding from unconscious but mounting intellectual ferments to an open breach with official ideological doctrines, towards more and more daring and independent artistic concepts. The creative personality of Edison Denisov, one of the leading Russian avant-gardists, was shaped under these conditions. Starting in a Shostakovichian style, Denisov took sharp turn toward the New Music of Boulez, Nono and Xenakis. Denisov’s creative individuality, rooted in the past of Russian music and developed under the beneficial impact of 20^th century composers like Stravinsky, Bartók and Webern, revealed itself to its best advantage in his avant-garde compositions beginning with the cantata “The Sun of the Incas”. In this monograph, detailed analyses are given of Denisov’s compositional techniques and his musical and literary works in an attempt to reveal the inner world of one of the foremost representatives of the Russian avant-garde.

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