Viktor Yekimovsky
Viktor Alekseyevich Yekimovsky (12 September 1947 – 6 January 2024) was a Soviet and Russian composer and musicologist. Born and died in Moscow, he wrote symphonic and chamber music and became known for an experimental approach in which individual works were conceived as distinct compositional projects. He was named an Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation in 2003 and received the Prokofiev Competition Prize and the Shostakovich Prize of the Russian Composers’ Union.
Yekimovsky grew up in a Moscow family with no professional connection to music: his father was a military officer and his mother a medical worker. He began music lessons at six at Children’s Music School No. 2 in Moscow’s Frunzensky District, now the Vano Muradeli Music School. Although he initially considered leaving music school, his early attempts at composition in 1960—including the piano pieces Polka and Nocturne, and the song “Ski Trip”—encouraged him to continue. After graduating, he entered the Gnesin College, where encountering Sergei Prokofiev’s music deepened his commitment to composition.
He graduated from the Gnesin College with distinction and then entered the historical-theoretical-composition faculty of the Gnesin Institute, studying composition with Aram Khachaturian. He also attended Konstantin Rosenshield’s musicology class. Music by Anton Webern, Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutosławski, and Arthur Honegger prompted a reassessment of his musical language. In 1969, Yekimovsky began numbering a new body of works as “Compositions,” with the stated aim that each should be founded on an original constructive idea and, where possible, experimental means. His first author concert took place at the Gnesin Institute’s Chamber Hall on 3 December 1970.
Yekimovsky’s musicological work focused on Olivier Messiaen. Under Rosenshield’s guidance, he completed a diploma thesis on Messiaen and later devoted his first monograph to the composer. In 1983 he defended his Candidate of Arts dissertation at the Leningrad Conservatory, entitled Olivier Messiaen: Problems of Aesthetics and Style, supervised by Grigory Filenko. His book Olivier Messiaen: Life and Work, written in 1979, was published in 1987. By the end of the 2000s, he had published more than one hundred articles on 20th-century music in Russia and Europe.
His graduation composition, the aleatoric orchestral work Sublimations (“Transitions”), was not accepted for performance by the student symphony orchestra. He substituted Lyrical Digressions for cello soloists and orchestra, a work using collages from Mahler, Barber, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, and graduated in 1971. After teaching in Oryol and completing a year of military service, he taught at GITIS for three years and worked in radio, producing the programme Musical Globe. In 1974 he wrote Balletto, an instrumental-theatre work for conductor and ensemble that became one of his most frequently performed compositions. He joined the Moscow branch of the Composers’ Union that year with support from Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, and Khachaturian.
During 1975–78 in Leningrad, Yekimovsky worked on his Messiaen dissertation and composed Jericho Trumpets for 30 brass instruments. From 1980, performances of his music became increasingly frequent in cities including Leningrad, Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Baku, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Tallinn, Vilnius, and Belgrade. He also wrote music for puppet productions and animated films for adults, and from 1984 led creative seminars for young composers. Important works of the 1980s include Mandala (1983) and In the Constellation of Canes Venatici (1986).
Yekimovsky considered the Moscow performance of his piano work Moonlight Sonata on 16 November 1993 to be the start of his wider recognition. His music was widely performed in Europe from 1991, and his first dedicated recording was released in France in 1993. He was active in the revived Association for Contemporary Music from 1990 and chaired it from 1996. Significant works of the 1990s include Symphonic Dances (1993), 27 Destructions (1995), Swan Song (1996), Doppler Effect (1996), and Vers libre (1999).
In 1997 he published Automonography, a hybrid of autobiography, monograph, criticism, and musicological study centered on the histories of his compositions; an expanded edition appeared in 2008. From 2000 he edited the 150-volume collected edition of Dmitri Shostakovich’s works undertaken by Shostakovich’s widow Irina and the DSCH publishing house, and he served as an editor for several European music publishers. His later works include the violin concerto Attalea princeps (2000), Rafflesia (2002), the Siamese Concerto for two pianos and orchestra (2005), and Requiem for Finnegan (2007). He completed Composition 100 in 2017 and declared it to be his final composition.
Yekimovsky described experimentation as his central artistic commitment. He associated different compositions with such techniques as athematicism, twelve-tone writing, atonality, aleatoricism, monophonic texture, collage, micropolyphony, instrumental theatre, graphic music, sonorism, modality, serialism, meditation, polyrhythm, and minimalism. His stated objective was to avoid repeating either other composers or himself, giving every work its own stylistic and technical character. His compositions were issued in print and on recordings and were regularly performed in Russia and abroad.