The Music of Edison Denisov

Abstract

At a time when scarcely any Soviet composer of the post-war generation had been heard of, let alone heard, in this country, it was quite a coup for the 1967 Brighton Festival to have been able to present a performance of Sun of the Incas by Edison Denisov—and this only three years after the work was composed. Rough and ready as the Brighton performance undoubtedly was (with poorly cued parts and too little rehearsal time), it was readily apparent to performers and audience alike that this was no safe, middle-of-the-road music, but the work of a forward-looking composer with a voice of his own as distinctive as that of any of his western contemporaries. The same audience would certainly have been astonished to know that Denisov—like other now distinguished Soviet composers of the same generation—had been totally cut off from the literature of non-Russian 20th-century music in its entirety until the late 1950's: not a hint of any of the historic musical events of our time had been allowed to reach them—not even of the developments in pre-1914 Vienna. In Denisov's case it is still more surprising to learn that his own early environment had denied him the experience of music of any kind.