Alexander Tcherepnin

Alexander Nikolayevich Tcherepnin (born January 21, 1899; died September 29, 1977) was a Russian-born composer and pianist. His father, Nikolay Tcherepnin, (pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov) and his son, Ivan Tcherepnin, (a member of the Harvard University faculty) were also composers. His son, Serge, was involved in the roots of electronic music and instruments. His mother (née Benois) was a niece of Alexandre Benois.

Biography

He was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, he emigrated and then lived in France and the United States. He visited the Far East between 1934 and 1937. He promoted composers in Japan (Akira Ifukube and others) and China, even founding his own publishing house in Tokyo for the purpose. He married a Chinese pianist, Lee Hsien Ming, while in China.

During World War II, he lived in France. In 1948, he went to the United States, and in 1958, he acquired United States citizenship. He and his wife taught at DePaul University in Chicago, where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered his second symphony with Rafael Kubelík conducting. His students there included Phillip Ramey, Gloria Coates, and John Downey. He died in Paris in 1977.

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra has recorded his first-ever complete symphony cycle.

Style and techniques

His early works were fairly original and some of his pieces have enduring popularity. His output includes three operas, four symphonies, six piano concertos, works for ballet, choral music, and a large amount of solo piano music. His first symphony (1927) is remarkable for including the first symphonic movement ever written completely for unpitched percussion. One of two symphonies left incomplete at his death would have been for percussion alone (Arias 2001). Tcherepnin invented his own harmonic language by combining minor and major hexachords, pentatonic scales, old Russian modal tunes and Georgian harmonies. The most famous of his invented scales has nine notes, and consists of three conjunct semitone-tone-semitone tetrachords. This came to be known as the "Tcherepnin scale" (Slonimsky 1968, 19–20).

References

• Arias, Enrique Alberto. 1982–83. "Alexander Tcherepnin’s Thoughts on Music". Perspectives of New Music 21:138–43.
• Arias, Enrique Alberto. 1986. "The Symphonies of Alexander Tcherepnin". Tempo, new series, no.158:23–31.
• Arias, Enrique Alberto. 1989. Alexander Tcherepnin: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313253188
• Arias, Enrique Alberto. 2001. "Tcherepnin, Alexander (Nikolayevich)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
• Slonimsky, Nicolas. 1968. "Alexander Tcherepnin Septuagenarian". Tempo, new series, no. 87 (Winter): 16-23.
• Tcherepnin, Alexander. 1979. "A Short Autobiography". Tempo, no.130:12–18.

External links

• Biography of Alexander Tcherepnin - The Tcherepnin Society
• Alexander Tcherepnin: The Saga of a Russian Emigré Composer