“Romantic Music” by Rodion Shchedrin as One of the Distinctive Marks of His Creative Style

Main Article Content

Marina V. Milovkina

Abstract

The article examines the “Romantic Music” Suite for symphony orchestra by Rodion Shchedrin, whose title indicates a stylistic direction, which is extremely important in his entire creative work. The source of this direction was the opera “Not Love Alone” and, to the greatest extent, the ballet “Anna Karenina” with a notable genre definition of “Lyrical Scenes” borrowed from P. Tchaikovsky. “Romantic Music”, which became a concentrated version of the ballet, gave impulse to other purely instrumental works by Shchedrin himself, as well as by T. Smirnova, V. Kobekin, V. Ryabov and other composers with similar stylistic features and often identical titles.


In this way, as if the general tendency of the post-avant-garde period – to return music to its original essence of being the “language of feelings” – is repeatedly captured. As Shchedrin said, “You must write as you are writing and feeling”.
The analysis of this work focuses on the logic of the integral composition, the principles of selection, arrangement and rearrangement of thematic material, the new harmonic context for melodic quotations, and the manifestation, within the suite, of such features of the romantic poem as mono-intonation, narrativity, and the gradual strengthening of sectional closeness qualities in a suite composed of several movements.


Keywords: Rodion Shcedrin, Romantic Music, leittems, mono-intonation.

Article Details

How to Cite
Milovkina М. В. (2022). “Romantic Music” by Rodion Shchedrin as One of the Distinctive Marks of His Creative Style. Music Scholarship / Problemy Muzykal’noj Nauki, 47(2), 7–18. Retrieved from https://musicscholar.ru/index.php/PMN/article/view/1352
Section
Musical Genre and Style
Author Biography

Marina V. Milovkina, Voronezh State Institute of Arts, Voronezh, Russia

Post-graduate student; Scientific adviser – E.B. Trembovelsky, Honored Art Worker of the Russian Federation, PhD (Arts), Professor, Head at the Music Theory Department of the Voronezh State Institute of Arts