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Cordepiano

Cordepiano is a musical instrument invented by Sergey Belimov in 1996 and patented in France and Russia.

In the core of its sound lies the interaction of special string resonators. Generally speaking, they could be strings of any existing instruments – a harp, a cello, or, for instance, Arabic rhebab or Chinese erhu.

Modern piano (a grand piano with its horizontal strings, but not an upright piano) presents the most perspective prime model, as its existing mechanism of key-to-string interaction can be used to move resonators along the strings. The generated sound is made up of the combination of simultaneous soundings: the string, on the one hand, and the resonator, on the other.

Timbre and agogic characteristics of the sound depend on the speed of movement, direction of movement, pressure, presence or absence of additional vibration of the used device (object) between its friction and resonating parts and the string of a musical instrument.

Cordepiano technique allows for “prolonging” the sound as well as conscious control over its numerous characteristics: attack, fading, internal dynamics and types of vibration, it also gives way to changing timbre/ tone quality of the sounds, using microintervals, playing with multiple sounds.

One may say that modern computer technologies can be used to perform electronic-sensor contact or contactless types of interaction between the key and the device affecting the string, but cordepiano is not an electronic musical instrument. This is the first in the world, unique acoustic instrument which lets a composer work with the sound at the level of its microstructure.

Historically, John Cage’s “prepared piano”, in which the piano sound is combined with percussion sound effect” can be considered to be the predecessor of cordepiano. However, whereas the sound of “prepared piano” remains discreet and newborn timbre is unchanged in the process of performance, cordepiano technique enriches the sound with a possibility to continue and allows for its transformation along the way.

Works of Sergey Belimov

The base-line of Belimov’s work was searching for synthesis of Western and Eastern attitudes to music. This search goes from composition structure to sound structure, from the content of a piece to the content of one single sound that lives its own life.

Another area of composer’s experiments was technique of super scale integral to any one particular composition. Works created (or as Belimov said “grown”) in this technique are his Third Symphony (1990), “Song of Morning Awakening” (1990), “Garden of Diverging Paths” (1991). Microtonal composition “Behind the Mirror of Silence” (1992), which develops this technique, was first performed at the international festival of microtonal music “In Tune II” in Britain in March 1993.

Whatever techniques are applied, the main Constanta of Belimov’s composer image remained his belief in cultural universalism. Diving into the music of non-European cultures, turning to ancient Europe, exploring possibilities of electronic sound or finding unexpected soundings of well-known instruments, the composer’s intention is always to touch upon the fundamental origins of human musicality and, even broader, of human perception of sounds. Music based on such an aspiration inevitably becomes undeniable evidence of cultural and spiritual unity of the world.

Biography

^« When I was born in 1950, Schoenberg, Prokofyev, Honegger and Ives were still active, and Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Sergey Slonimsky were beginning to study composition in conservatories in Paris, Cologne and Leningrad, respectively: John Cage had already invented prepared piano, but had not yet written his concerto for prepared piano and strings, so that the great Giacinto Scelsi could by no means have heard it and continued to play the same note on the piano tor hours on end, listening attentively to fading resonances, and on Sundays a gamelan orchestra was playing in Denpasarin Bali.

Noise, music and silence, have alternated in my life from 1950 till now in 2005, when I am writing this. Gradually, the noise has been increasing, and the silence has been diminishing. Fortunately, the music is still there. I have had the chance to listen to Scelsi's music and the songs of South Kazakh shamans, kemancha music in Azerbaijan and duduk music in Armenia, vedas being recited in India, muezzins' cries in Egypt and Tunis, to talk with Avet Terterian and John Cage and on a Sunday to play in a gamelan orchestra in Bali.

In the intervals between listening, talking and playing, I managed sometimes to penetrate into silence and then to record what I had heard there. At times I could catch just the basic cell out of which all the rest would grow: I heard the oboe concerto in Repino in the winter 1987, the flute concerto in the deafening noise of Sadovoye Koltso in Moscow in 1990, the cello concerto in 2000 near my house, close to the Bois de Vincennes, the saxophone concerto in 2002 on the Pont Neuf in Paris, and "Every fly is a mystery» in our friends' kitchen in Florence in 2004.1 do not know exactly when and where I first heard "Multjcordes"- maybe a couple of months before my birth and maybe towards the end of the 80's, but then it made no sense to "create'' this work because the instalment did not exist at the time. And the conventional piano, even prepared in Cage's manner, still could not produce a continuous sound, play micro intervals and change its timbre. Hence I had to invent it. It is a pity that I did that only in 1996, after Scelsi had died; I think he would have liked it.

«For me, music represents a means of getting in
touch with the absolute,to attain what I would term
approaching to the Whole».

Sergey Belimov, in an interview by Alexander Kharkovsky
'Kuda zovyot nas syn neba i zemli' [Where the son of heaven and earth calls us],
Iskusstvo Leningrada (Art of Leningrad), 1991, N'4.

Sergey Belimov was born in Leningrad in 1950. He studied at the Leningrad (Saint-Petersburg) Conservatory (1969-75, prof. 0.A.Evlakhov and V.P.Chistyakov), after which he took a postgraduate course with Arapov (1979-81); later, in 1995, he studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1977 he became a member of the Composers' Union, and from 1989 on until he moved abroad was the secretary of the administrative board of the Saint-Petersburg Composers' Union. He taught composition at the Choral Academy of the Leningrad Academic Capella (1972-81) and in the Musical College of the Saint-Petersburg Conservatory (1981-92). Since 1993, Sergey Belimov lived in France. He taught composition at the Conservatories of Bagnolet and Saint-Ouen. He was the author of a great number of symphonies and chamber works and has received many national and international composers' contests' awards (1975, 1980, 1983, 1985, 1996, 2004). His works have been performed at international modern music festivals and in concerts given in Amsterdam, Arezzo, Berlin, Brussels, Bucharest, Bremen, Vilnius, Wurzburg, Erevan, Salzburg, Cortona, Helsinki, Moscow, New-Milford, Odessa, Paris, Rome, Saint- Petersburg, Stockholm, Tanglewood, Tokyo, Florence, Zurich and elsewhere, and have been broadcast by several international television and radio companies.

The radio program “Free electron”,

led by Alexander Kharkovsky, with the participation of Sergey Belimov and Sofia Levkovskaya can be listened to here.

P.S.

Sergei loved “Composer’s Village” in Repino, where he wrote many of his compositions. He would come here regularly from Paris to work – most often to finish a composition he had started earlier, to meet the dead line of an oncoming festival (“Sound Paths”, “St.Petersburg Music Spring”, etc.), or for a first performance in Philharmonics or House of Composers. Sergey had expressed the will to blow his ashes in Repino. We, his close friends and relatives did the right thing realizing his last will, I think. Part of the ashes of Sergey was blown not far away from Anna Akhmatova‘s grave (he loved her poems so much) in Komarovo, neighboring Repino. However, his urn was buried at one of the oldest St.Petersburg cemeteries “Krasnenkoe” near the graves of his parents.

Joseph Raiskin

Discography

Sergey Belimov. 6 Concertos. St. Petersburg, 2006

Soloists:

Juozas Rimas
Roberto Fabbriciani
Jean-Paul Dessy
Daniel Kientzy
Elysabeth Merx
Georges Boukoff

& Conductors:

Gennady Rozhdestvensky
Ravil Martynov
Feodor Lednev
Lodovic Bacs

Contents:

“Of Water Alive and Dead”(1987): for Oboe and String orchestra

“El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan” J.L.Borges (1991): for flute and chamber orchestra

Concerto for cello and string orchestra (2000)

“Multicordes” for 31 cordepianos (2003)

“Fedor Dostoevsky. Every fly is a mystery” (2004): for a recitor, brass quintet and electronics

“Funeral song in memory of my mother Eugenia Lukhina (2003): for saxophone and chamber orchestra

Cordepiano

Works of Sergey Belimov

Biography

Discography

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