Composer Uses Music to Speak Out
Contemporary politics serve as inspiration for Ilya
Demutsky, who based a composition on the Pussy Riot trial.
http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=37906
St. Petersburg-based composer Ilya Demutsky has been awarded
first prize in an important European composition competition, 2 Agosto, and a
medal from the president of Italy,
Giorgio Napolitano, for a musical work inspired by an imprisoned member of the
feminist punk band Pussy Riot.
“The Final Statement
of the Accused,” a ten-minute piece for mezzo-soprano and orchestra based on
Maria Alyokhina’s closing remarks at the controversial Pussy Riot trial in
Moscow on August 8, 2012, was performed by Italian vocalist Clara Calanna and
the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna as part of the 2 Agosto
International Composition Competition Gala. The open-air performance took place
at Piazza Maggiore in Bologna,
Italy, on Aug.
2.
Along with the other imprisoned Pussy Riot member, Nadezhda
Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina has been recognized as a political prisoner by the
Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners, while Amnesty International has
named them prisoners of conscience due to “the severity of the response of the
Russian authorities.”
In a work described as a “requiem for the Russian judicial
system,” Demutsky used excerpts from Alyokhina’s closing remarks to make a
statement against the abuse of justice.
“All you can deprive
me of is so-called freedom. This is the only kind that exists in Russia,”
read the lyrics for the piece, which draws on the translation by Marijeta
Bozovic, Maksim Hanukai and Sasha Senderovich, published on the website of the
Brooklyn-based magazine n+1.
“But nobody can take
away my inner freedom. It lives in the word, it will go on living thanks to
openness [glasnost], when this will be read and heard by thousands of people.
This freedom goes on living with every person who is not indifferent, who hears
us in this country. […] I believe that I have honesty and openness, I thirst
for the truth; and these things will make all of us just a little bit more
free. We will see this yet.”
Demutsky was in France when he learned of the verdict in the
case against the three members of Pussy Riot, who were tried in Moscow. Having just
completed a 20-date French tour with his group, The Cyrillique Ensemble, he
remained in Paris, where he followed the trial
in Moscow
online.
“I see it as having
been a sort of sabbatical,” Demutsky told The St. Petersburg Times in an
interview on Friday.
“I love Paris. I rented an
apartment there and put aside other work to compose this piece.”
For their Feb. 21, 2012, performance, "Mother of God,
Drive Putin Away," conceived as an artistic protest against Patriarch
Kirill's open support of Vladimir Putin in his bid for the presidency, Pussy
Riot was dealt with swiftly.
Alyokhina and
Tolokonnikova were arrested on March 3 and held in a pre-trial detention center
without bail despite having young children. Yekaterina Samutsevich was arrested
on March 16.
The trial, which
started on July 30, was held in a stuffy room at the Khamovniki District Court.
The women were held in a glass cage guarded by a Rottweiler, while the judge
listened to the accusations, routinely dismissing the defense's motions and
barring defense witnesses from the building.
“As most thinking
people did, I followed the situation from the very beginning. Just as they did
this performance in the cathedral, I saw what was happening and how society was
reacting to it. It was important how it began dividing public opinion, but the
verdict, handed down on Aug. 17 of last year, was the culmination of it all, no
doubt.”
Demutsky said he felt
a sense of “bewilderment” during the Pussy Riot trial.
“We all saw how
unfair the verdict was. It was obvious, with all those documents that were
posted on the Internet, and the trial itself, which resembled a kind of show.
It was an absolute farce. I was so bewildered something like this was happening
in our day and age. That is what I expressed in my music, to an extent.”
Born in St. Petersburg, Demutsky, 30, graduated from the Glinka Choir
College and received a
master’s degree in choral conducting from the St. Petersburg State
Conservatory. In 2007, he won a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a master’s
degree in composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His works
include orchestral, choral, chamber, piano, vocal, electronic and film music.
Demutsky said he did not follow the protest movement until
tens of thousands took to the street to protest the rigging of the State Duma
elections in December 2011.
“Until recently, I
was not very interested in politics, because I was absorbed in my education,
studying at the conservatory in St. Petersburg
and then in the U.S.
There was no time for anything else,” he said.
“Of course, I
followed it to a certain degree, but not so thoroughly. But when those events
started, such as the now-legendary march in December [2011], when people slowly
started to become agitated, when it became evident that something abnormal was
happening in the country, then I began taking an interest. It snowballed and
has reached the size it is today. It continues to grow and it will fall apart
one day.”
The two-year sentences given to the women came as a shock to
many.
“Okay, so it was
disorderly conduct, give them 15 days in custody and be done with it,” Demutsky
said.
“Even some of the
lawyers were perplexed; they wondered how this could happen. I can’t understand
this. To me, the punishment is disproportionate to the offense they committed,
taking into account the crimes committed by those in power and what sorts of
punishments they receive. It has been said many times it was a protest against
the merging of church and state, and in no way against religion. They did not
even sing [in the church], the sound was added later; they merely danced for a
minute or so. I can hardly get my head around such things.”
Despite the fact the
women were convicted on charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”
and portrayed as haters of Orthodoxy, the Zamoskvoretsky District Court in Moscow banned five Pussy
Riot videos for “extremism,” even if only one of them dealt with the church. In
addition to “Mother of God,” the banned videos included “Putin Pissed Himself,”
a recording of a performance on Red Square on
Jan. 20, 2012. According to Demutsky, he wanted his work to serve as a
statement against the abuse of power more generally, rather than only the Pussy
Riot trial.
“I am using
Alyokhina’s closing statement irrespective of the performance [in the church]
or her personality,” he said.
“I’m more interested
in the content of her statement as an expression of a thought about everything
that goes on, including in the judicial system.”
Demutsky said he
followed the trials of opposition leader and Moscow
mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny and school teacher Ilya Farber, and has
continued following the Bolotnaya case, the trial of 12 people charged with
rioting during a May 6, 2012 opposition rally on Bolotnaya Ploshchad in Moscow.
“The punishments are
completely disproportionate; they even sentenced an old woman who had the
courage to hit a policeman to several years in prison,” he said. “All this is
simply outrageous, in my view.”
The original idea was
to write music based on the closing statements made by all three Pussy Riot
members, Demutsky said.
“The entire process of composing music is lengthy and takes
a lot of energy,” he said.
“I have to set aside
time for it. If it took almost one month for me to compose this piece, then
three would take about three months, and so I would have needed the time and
financial means to do it. I finally decided to do just one. This is not a
commissioned project. I did not even have anyone who would undertake its
performance. I composed it for nobody, without knowing if it would ever be
performed or not. I kept it in my desk until April, when I learned about this
competition and checked the rules. I then orchestrated the piece and submitted
it. That’s the whole story of this work.”
“The Final Statement
of the Accused” uses excerpts from Alyokhina’s concluding remarks, but the link
to the English translation of the full statement is provided in the notes to a
video of the Bologna
performance that Demutsky uploaded to YouTube.
“In her statement,
there was a lot about that specific trial, about the conditions in the
pre-trial cell, about the protest in the cathedral, about the authorities,”
Demutsky said.
“I took the more
general points and came up with an accusation. It does not even mention the
country but is rather a sort of generalization, personified by the singer. I
would like the work to be seen as a manifesto that is even a bit divorced from
the context of the Pussy Riot trial. I would like it to be seen as a discrete
work of art.”
“I did it in English
because I realized it wouldn’t be performed in Russia and that it’s more
convenient to perform it abroad in English, rather than in Russian,” Demutsky
said.
“Moreover, the
English translation is more literary, and it was simply easier for me to
compose music to it. The statement feels spontaneous, even if it was written
down beforehand and read aloud. The translators made it sound more condensed. I
had the Russian text and the translation in front of me, and I compared which
was better in terms of rhythm and phrasing, which is important for vocal music.
Eventually, I chose the English version.
“It’s interesting
that while Pussy Riot’s performance seemed silly to many, everybody was
surprised by the profundity of their statements. They did say accurate things
using profound language. Their statements are excellent! I would simply advise
those who argue that one should not compose music to words by these people to
take the time to read the statements.”
Despite protests by international musicians and artists
against the imprisonment of Pussy Riot, few of their Russian counterparts spoke
out.
“This can be
explained partly by the fact that even very influential cultural figures are
affiliated with state-funded institutions, and even if a person has a viewpoint
critical of the authorities, he doesn’t express it not because he fears for
himself, but for his institution,” Demutsky said.
“If you head an
institution employing several thousand people, then maybe it is the right
decision to keep silent. Otherwise, your institution will be left without the
means of survival. I understand these people, but I do not understand people
who have nothing to lose because they’re recognized internationally and not
affiliated with any institutions. If these touring musicians and opera singers
have concerts cancelled in Russia,
they won’t lose a thing. It’s unpleasant but it is not a loss worth keeping silent
over or even flirting with the authorities in a servile way.”
Demutsky dismissed
arguments that art should stay out of politics.
“I simply can’t
understand this,” he said. “Show me one branch of art that doesn’t interact
with politics. What, there is no politics in literature? It’s enough to look at
Solzhenitsyn, and it is the same in music. Mussorgsky, with his ‘Khovanshchina’
and ‘Boris Godunov,’ are these not political? Or take Prokofiev and ‘Ivan
Grozny,’ which was once partly banned. Or Shostakovich. Perhaps the people who
say this have a poor knowledge of the history of art. Nothing prevents the
artist from speaking out, because he or she is a citizen of their own country.
As citizens, they should react to what happens in society, otherwise they are
not citizens.”
According to
Demutsky, the response to “The Final Statement of the Accused” has been mostly
positive. “There were some insults, but they came mostly from nameless cowards
on the Internet. The reaction I get in personal messages is generally warm, and
it is pleasant and important to me that this work has been heard and understood
in the way I wanted it to be understood.”