Mikhail Chekalin INTERVIEW

The history of experimental music from the East European countries for the most part is based primarily on which music and musicians managed to escape their individual countries via clandestine channels. The sporadic release of such music in the West, and low level of publicity it garnered marginalized it for the most part. There were but a few exceptions. Interviews with musicians from those parts are still rare even today.

Now that the East/ West barriers have come down literally, the Internet has made everything and everyone more accessible, theoretically. The underlying irony being that the flood of information itself offers so much in some ways that it serves to obscure all but the most promotional and savvy in terms of the technology of exposure. Left out in both cases then and now were/ are often the most creative and ground breaking artists.

Mikhail Chekalin is one of those. Arguably he is the most influential modern composer of the last 35 years in the former USSR, now Russia. His work was experimental; in fact his creative intent was specifically to break new ground stylistically. He worked outside the boundaries of established culture, while at the same time breaching its borders when possible to make his point and music heard.

Over the span of his career Chekalin has produced some 30+ works that range the sonic spectrum for Post Pop, to free-jazz, electronic, and Post Symphonic. While his music was known to me since the 1980s, it was only recently that through word of mouth he contacted me via the Net. In the past year he has sent me most of his albums, and I have been amazed by the spirit and high level of creativity embodied in the sum of his work. From that contact followed a series of conversations, and at last this interview. What appears here is an abridged version of a very long manifesto of sorts that he wrote in response to my questions.

The resulting narrative history offers a fascinating overview of his passionate East European ideas and mindset grafted into the English language. Chekalins words and music which reflect a personal and philosophical grasp of the cultural dynamic I found to be absolutely fascinating in so many ways. The text was translated for him from Russian to English over there, and I made a few interpretive changes in places attempting to clarify what he was saying as I understood it.

The piece as a whole makes for challenging reading, as well as a stunning personal analysis of the dynamic contrast between the mainstream and Second Culture. In the end, I think he is not only one of today's leading tuned in artists in the truest sense of the term, but his story powerfully illustrates the universal truism - if you do not learn from the past, you truly are doomed to repeat it. And no matter the circumstances, art will find a way to persevere.
 

Archie Patterson

Q: Was it quite difficult to get exposure to Western pop culture and experimental music, and who the artists that were more known?

It is really sad, that it seems hard to imagine that to get oneself exposed to the Western culture in the USSR was not difficult at all. It was even less difficult then it is nowadays. I will try to express my point more clearly. If we are talking about the USSR at all we should draw some lines of distinction first. The USSR of the 1970s was one thing. The USSR of 60s was a USSR of the thaw. Art engaged should stand for Official Art of the USSR as opposed to the Unofficial Art I suppose, though I am aware that is not quite the same thing.
 

Back then people managed somehow to hear new music from the West. I can think of no far-away Siberian corner (as it happens I had an opportunity to travel up and down the USSR) not to speak of Moscow and its surroundings, where they were not listening to some recent Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin or Beatles album. It is true, it used to be some umpteenth tape-recorded version, so what. People used to come from another city just to listen to these stereo-sound recordings. In the 70s and 80s it was the same story with video.
 

The reigning atmosphere here was liberal indeed (with all due reserved for the Soviet Deputy Powers). Maybe in comparison with the Western countries it did not seem so, but there was nothing of the same order of things with us in Moscow. This liberality was exercised even more in the Soviet Baltic Republics: Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Lithuanian rock-groups were permitted then, or rather they had been granted permission to have their discs released on the Melodiya label much sooner than some perfectly insipid, feebly unoriginal Western beat-style song from Moscow managed to navigate the barriers of obstruction to be issued as well. And, if and when, eventually, it got released, after having been arranged and pawed at by the representatives of contemporary Soviet music trend (Soviet Composers Union being the embodiment), it usually was released in such an awful arrangement that no traces were left of initial attempts at beat or rock.

Q: There was a state owned record label named Melodiya. Was it possible for artists to get signed to contracts to record their music and get paid like in the West?

Well, yes, it was not difficult at all... what do you call difficulties, it depends. It is a fact that there was no publicity going for the most recently recorded Beatles album, that kind of thing, all the way around... how to get informed was problematic. Now there was that Catch-22 of ours: you could buy a recording by a mignon bearing the caption Vocal & Instrumental Music Ensemble (this rendering sounds lame, but it was not as a matter of fact quite the same as a western rock-band). So, you buy this mignons LP and on the back cover you find: Music & Lyrics by J. Lennon and P. McCartney, printed in non-pareille. It was a bad interpretation of that music.
 

At record shops under the Melodiya trademark you could buy Schoenberg or Stravinsky and Bartok LPs. These could have been issued either by the Melodiya itself or by a Polish or a Hungarian label. The other Eastern European Republics exhibited at times a good deal of liberality as well as fine sensibility existed. In countries of Eastern Europe there existed a highly sophisticated modern culture, of which point the Polish jazz and Polish cinematography are just one of the proofs.

Q: Perhaps there was an underground scene or maybe you had to get a license to play in public like in some of the other East European countries?

The unique phenomenon of unofficial Soviet art has absolutely nothing to do with this sad thing much-acclaimed as a Soviet underground scene, if we speak of art as a craft and a profession and if we call a spade a spade.
 

It is a matter of prime importance to divest oneself of this phenomenon that any underground scene existed, as say in New York City of 60s. Especially if we are to speak of underground in relation to Eastern Europe, then, you know it is not a big deal. If you are to compare this with the Western world, truly liberal at that time before it became as it is today, a cross between an enforced police law and enforced therapy. But in comparison with the Soviet Union the latter does not exist here by comparison.
 

I identified myself quite early as one determined to choose a music career for myself, not just as a performer, but rather as a composer. In this sense, I steeped myself in the 20^th Century at large. It made no difference for me whether it concerned philosophy, or art in general, or music in particular. Sure, I had different priorities at different periods of time, and this or that influence might be traceable in connection with this or that age. But if I loved to show off throwing in all the citations and reminiscences which I have managed to amass when playing beat on the piano at a kvartyrnick (a session at some private flat) where I performed either as a rock-musician, or as, how should I put it correctly (the phrase free jazz was not in common use then) free music improviser; whenever I went to classes of composition I left all this stuff outside the doors. It would be correct to say that I fell under the influence of Hindemith, or Ligeti and Bartok. To be sure I submitted myself to influences, how could it be otherwise. And what is more, I still do not know whether I collected them all; I reckon I have been affected by too few.

Q: I first heard your music when a friend in the Estonia sent me an LP called Post Pop/ Non Pop on the Melodiya label. Did you always release your music on Melodiya, or did you have other  previous underground releases?

Recordings are underground-made; releases could have been effectuated only at Melodiya. That was a State-owned firm-monopoly, there did not exist any other. It is exactly the reason why to have ones works released at Melodiya was official recognition. By conquering this institutional stronghold of the Soviet Empire one conquered a place for themselves among those of a recognized rank.
 

As a matter of fact, that subterranean recording studio of mine was not some stationary affair, it was a movable feast, quite literally it was the very first of its kind in Russia as early as the end of the 1970s.
 

When you did that you were in for real prosecution from the Law for having committed an illegal act, having produced a sound-recording without sanction by the proper authorities. If a score of people copied someones music (unreleased in particular) with the aid of a domestic tape-recorder, that also qualified as illegal, either as an abuse of the State-owned recording facilities in order to gain a private profit, or for the spreading of unauthorized information. So it is either a civil case or a criminal offense.

As for my music, if we speak of an effectual demand in absence of real engagement, it used to have an audience of 70 to 90 thousands; such were the number of visitors who frequented the famous annual Exhibition of The Twenty Moscow Painters during the 80s where the music was used as soundscapes played during the exhibition of those famous painters works..
 

Today modernity has been all but abolished. The well-known words of Solzschenitzyn to that affect that were, do not forget to wipe clear the face of your watch has drawn a bottom line under the process. A modern culture had been carried on in the USSR, and then all of a sudden it just ceased to be, sometime during the 70s. Today one has got to carry on incognito, as it were, to go into hiding, but not into any sort of real underground.

Q: When Glasnost came about did it help you and other more experimental musicians, and does it still exist today?

In those days the real giants were right over ones shoulder, here was Shostakovich and over there was Solzhenitsyn; everybody realized that things were changing, the change was almost upon us; those monsters present had been left nothing to do but go along with the tide. People such as me were just the first wave hitting the beaches. It was I, us, who achieved Perestroika, not Gorbachov.
 

Today it has been eliminated. This current situation is a sort of state like cultural decay, and culture of crisis. It is really quite the reverse from before. Basically it is the case of turn-coats all over again. That was due to these very same people who one would expect to be held responsible at last for all those shameful indignities of the past, petty compromisers who were so eager to please, catering to the ideological demand in the 1970s in some manner for their employment by this corrupted intelligentsia. Formerly they acted as loyal attendants for the former Soviet authorities; they are again right there in the old place, now in coalition with those who lack any form of intelligence. This current situation appears to be one of total corruption.
 

Now fully employed and in a position to draw benefits are those representatives of the elder generation of cultural workers who were officially engaged during the Soviet period. Together with those of much a younger generation who happen to be their children, quite literally. Not in the figurative sense of the word however in which we all in the past have been successors to our fathers deeds and glory. Those singular persons, those recognized names of repute in the modern unofficial culture of the USSR of 70s and 80s, whose artistic masterfulness and expertise one would expect was going to come in handy during the 90s, have been completely hushed up.
 

Meanwhile we observe a flourishing of such a thing as a culture of functionaries backed up by a newly established mass media of glamour magazines which manipulate the cultural news to the benefit of those officials functioning in the sector of culture, without regard for their competence or the lack of it, and to the exclusion of everything else. Not going into the particulars, I do not even mention the yawning absence of a national sound-recording company comparable to Melodiya in the scale of its national and world-wide activities.
 

As for attitudes towards artists, it is not different to any significant extent. I would rather say it is a counterpart of the former attitude notwithstanding its newer settings. In the words of one of the great Russian cultural workers (to use again that Soviet cliche) Pavel Florensky: what makes people leave Russia, why having suffered from bitter mortification.
 

I would not say that it is a subject peculiar to Russia; it is rather a Soviet peculiarity, and as I was born in Soviet times it strikes a deep note with me, a note of piercing anxiety, I just hate like hell to pedal it.

Q: Now that the USSR and CP are gone has the cultural climate improved to offer more freedom for artists in Russia?

That is the point; that is what the drama of solitude is all about. In fact, there is an anti-Glasnost of such monstrous dimensions now as we never knew during the time of Brezhnev. Back then freedom was present by implication, it existed within the rule since no one such particular thing did not exist, and then nothing else exists either. Things were so self-evident then that it revealed an infinity of possibilities; one held ones head high and having virtually no means invented means by which to win people to ones cause, to make them need and cherish something meaningful. Anything, everything was possible; a magical metaphysics just worked itself; or one worked their magic.
 

Now it just makes no sense; I realized. It is impossible to give an account of how one has been composing synthesizer music when they owned no synthesizer. I remember I was distraught when the US magazine Keyboard interviewed me in 1988, the occasion being having my LP released at Melodiya. I was totally at a loss, how should I answer the customary questions what synthesizers I have got, which I prefer. But I was not amazed in the least, that at my age of the twenty seven I'd won a position within this stronghold of Melodiya. I had found a way to establish a whole new rubrique, have a new genre approved. Even as I took account of my circumstances, I was sure on my own account that I did not just beat about around the bush, wasting my time. That is, come what may, having my guiding light, I was bound to come up with a result, no null and void, horror vacuum for me, in a manner of speaking.
 

Since I was sixteen years old I knew what it meant to impersonate an artist, especially in such a country as USSR, what part an artist has to play. Even then, every dirty rocker in USSR knew his part by heart, without ever bothering to put it into words. It is a pity that almost the whole lot of them lost their chance to mature, did not reach beyond that boyish-infantile social rock of theirs, and got trapped in simply second-hand music-making.

Q: When you began making music what was your emphasis, a sort of pop music, electronics, or?

Quite early on I was determined to make a music career for myself not just as a performer, but rather as a composer. An oratorio, a composition for a mixed chorus and an orchestra, which I wrote in 1975, was a landmark for me indeed. So I date my professional existence from that event.
 

It was at a later date that I did something more on a synthesizer. At the beginning of the 1990s there appeared press reviews, some dozen and a half of them, concerning my album Night Pulsation on the German Erdenklang label. That was a sort of breakthrough perhaps as the first disk of a Russian composer to be released on the international electronic scene. The reviewers are quite correct in pointing certain influences they chose to remark upon. If they wish to see those works of mine as being influenced by the heritage of Stravinsky and Rachmaninov, so let them. In fact, I am really grateful for their comments.

Q: What kind of music are you currently working on? And will you have a new album coming out in the near future?

Well, now, I work-around-the clock, non-stop since I am a composer, so all kinds of things may come to pass. Is there a demand for it? For sure, I am certain there is; the very thing that I create is in demand. Whether it is sought after from a commercial point of view, is still another matter. In order for my kind of work to actually get widespread recognition however perhaps a revolution would have to occur. And some form of revolution is pending in the world no doubt of it; that there is a change in the air is indisputable. That is why an artist is a great futurist by nature. In earlier days, when I delved into the past I was really reaching for the future. So then, I am of the opinion that over the span of all three decades of my career I have been engaged in a very serious piece of work, and I am not going to ever change that.
 

I have made my presence more known due to my electronic works. The music for one of them Last Seasons was executed in a most conventional way. Done as if I composed a traditional score, drawn from a vocabulary based on a mode of expression from a 19^th century heritage. It was an act of rebellion on my part I would say. It would be excessive, to enlarge on the meaning of this work. I do however consider it to be of importance as there is no other opus for all I know which played up this canon of a genre. There is still another work of that sort on CD, under the title Black Square.
 

Another, among my more recent ones, is Porughaniye Patsifika (The Desecration of a Pacific Sign). I doubt anyone in my country is going to come up with an offer to release it as an audio CD. I have already mentioned the abolishing of any national institutional recording label in Russia. Since Melodiya has been torn down there is no other label comparable to Deutsche Gramophone, for example, or even to BIS or Chandos which are meant to release new styles in classical or jazz. Here nothing exists that is even remotely recognizable as a national policy in sound-recording in terms of promoting our national culture. The late Melodiya recording operation is literally conspicuous by its absence. There is no market for music officially.
 

Today there is a pseudo culture of imitation playing a vile trick on the genuine rock-music-culture here which has now been forced out and doomed to a state of everlasting amateurism. This cultural wasteland has supplanted our music-scene which was stripped in the process of all value it might have possessed becoming now second-rate. There was nothing progressive about it and never could be. Things were very similar within electronic music in terms of being considered as art and part of a progressive-music-scene. That was non-existent in the USSR. In fact there were composers who having full sanction from on high, and I do not mean the High Heavens for sure, used to receive commissions to make electronic music. Only what kind of electronic music was that, when they summoned an orchestra to produce an orchestral-sound; then they summoned a rock-group to produce a rock-group sound. In reality that was just music where they played a synthesizer along with all the other instruments.
 

That is why I was not keen on electronic music, but, as fate would have it I have been set face to face with such a problem that if I were to achieve my ambition as a composer, to be able to realize my conceptions I should learn to perform this way myself. I racked my brains to find a way around that; but in the end became reconciled to use the method of electronic music compositions to achieve my desired creative and compositional goals.

Mikhail Chekalin: PORUGANIE PATSIFIKA (A Post-Symphony in 9 Parts) (CD)

Released now on CD by Mir Records PORUGANIE PATSIFIKA represents the first musical production in the USA by Mikhail Chekalin. The music was recorded in 2005 for a film shot during 2006 based on the paintings of a group of well-known Moscow artists known as founders of the Soviet unofficial art movement of the late 1960s-1980s, the famous Twenty (20 Moscow Artists at Malaya Gruzinskaya Street). Their original works are now stored in private museums and collections.
 

As the title implies the music is Post Symphonic in the sense that it echoes the symphonic form of the past perhaps, but goes beyond that genre stylistically by infusing into that spirit a neo-electronic palate that bears little resemblance to the experimental style of the German influenced Euro scene, or pop music.

Upon listening it is obvious that Chekalin has an innate understanding of multiple styles and genres. He has not so much learned them as lived and thoroughly absorbed them into his consciousness. So the resulting music is totally organic, not simply a fusion of styles in any way. He combines melody, compositional dynamics, and sonic tone colors in myriad layers and striking ways. Each composition creatively embodies the spirit of the art used in the films imagery. The combined affect creating a unique conceptual audio/visual experience as you listen.
 

After a few listens I think one could say that The Desecration of a Pacific Sign represents not only the best of the past, but a step forward creatively for the future of electronics musically. It channels the spirit and energy of a former time, and by some alchemical musical process brings it alive, unprocessed and unadulterated, creatively exploring new sounds and compositional styles in this brave new world of the new digital domain.
 

Chekalin also has 2 other productions Paradigm Transition & Untimely completed which comprise the other parts of his most recent post symphonic musical triptych. These titles are set to come out on Mir Records before the end of 2007.

[Accompanying images are slides created by Mikhail Chekalin from live performances by in his Electronic Music & Light Graphic Dynamics Experimental Studio in the 1980s.]