Nikolai Roslavets
Nikolai Roslavets was a Russian and Soviet composer, music theorist, violinist, and teacher. He was born in 1881 in Surazh, then in the Chernigov Governorate. His father worked for the railway, and his grandfather was a prosperous village carpenter who owned a workshop.
After moving with his family to Kursk in the late 1890s, Roslavets studied violin, piano, music theory, and harmony in Arkady Abaza’s music classes. From 1902 to 1912 he attended the Moscow Conservatory, studying violin with Ivan Grzhimali and composition with Sergei Vasilenko, as well as counterpoint, fugue, and musical form with Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov and Alexander Ilyinsky. His graduation work, the 1912 mystery Heaven and Earth, based on Byron, earned a large silver medal and the qualification of free artist.
Roslavets attracted attention in the early 1910s with music that developed ideas associated with Alexander Scriabin while establishing a distinctive style of its own. He created a system of sound organization based on what he called the “synthetic chord.” His approach combined strict treatment of chromaticism with greater flexibility than serial technique. Early works that illustrate it include Sad Landscapes (1913), the First String Quartet (1913), and the First Violin Sonata (1913). He also explored new instrumental color in chamber works and the symphonic poem At the Hours of the New Moon, probably written around 1912–13.
In the 1920s Roslavets continued to develop his system, extending its ideas to rhythm, form, and counterpoint, and devised his own method of teaching composition. His works from this period include the First Violin Concerto (1925), the cantata October (1927), the symphonic poem Komsomolia (1928), and several chamber and vocal compositions. He also wrote about music theory and contemporary composition and taught in Yelets, Kharkiv, and Moscow.
From 1931 to 1933 Roslavets worked at the music theater in Tashkent, then returned to Moscow, where he held editorial posts and taught. His later compositions include the ballet-pantomime Pakhta (Cotton), written in 1931–32, and the Chamber Symphony for 18 players (1934–35), a major example of his later sound-organizing system. He suffered a stroke in 1939 and died in Moscow on August 23, 1944, after a second stroke.
Roslavets’s manuscripts and music gained wider circulation through later archival work and publications. His First Violin Concerto, long thought lost, was found in 1989, and his symphonic poem At the Hours of the New Moon received its world premiere in Saarbrücken in 1990. His works have since been published, recorded, and performed internationally.