Киномузыка Бориса Чайковского: «тембровая оптика» и «визуальная акустика»

Abstract

There is something inexplicable in the fact that the film music of the greatest Russian composer of the 20th century, Boris Alexandrovich Tchaikovsky (1925–1996), hasn’t yet been seriously analyzed – not only as a part of his multifaceted legacy, but also as one of the very meaningful pages in the history of music and cinematography. The entire “literature” about the film music of the artist is limited with several synoptical essays (sometimes with gross factual errors and incredible contextual comparisons). But after all he, together with S. Prokofiev, D. Shostakovich, G. Popov, definitively changed the status of music in the Russian cinematography. It is unlikely that this gap, incomprehensible to any professional, aesthetic and moral logic, can be explained only by the fact that the composer imposed a strict ban on the making the studies devoted to his life and work during his lifetime. He was the only composer in the country awarded with the title of People’s Artist of the USSR and the USSR State Prize, who refused official appraisal, although supposed chroniclers and various interviewers always surrounded him. The need for a phenomenological understanding of musical and cinematographic logic of Boris Tchaikovsky became evident after the completion by the article’s author the first monographic study of all the orchestral scores of the composer. B. Tchaikovsky knew cinema very well, he appreciated the unique features of the cinematography, used its expressive possibilities in his symphonic and chamber music in his original way. The composer created a gallery of vivid images in the film music beloved by millions, although many don’t realize its authorship. The poetics of B. Tchaikovsky’s film music raises a number of issues primary to the holistic understanding of the composer’s style: the role of music and the sound-timbre palette in the process of film-making; the “optical” properties of musical timbres, acoustic images as visual projections; the typology of timbral extension and cinematographic chronos; the linking of musical and visual plasticity, and others. For the first time are published the judgments of B. Tchaikovsky revealing some of his views on the essence of music in cinematography and the peculiarities of the interaction between the composer and the director. As the main analytical material are used such outstanding films like “Seryozha” by G. Danelia, “Burn, O Burn, my Star” by A. Mitta, “French Lessons” and “A Raw Youth” by E. Tashkov, “Aibolit-66” by R. Bykov, “The Marriage of Balzaminov” by K. Voinov and others.