Formes en l'air
Piano Solo - Sheet Music

Piano solo

SKU: BR.EB-8119

Composed by Arthur Lourie. Solo instruments; Softcover. Edition Breitkopf. Early modern; Music post-1945. Score. Composed 1915. 12 pages. Breitkopf and Haertel #EB 8119. Published by Breitkopf and Haertel (BR.EB-8119).

ISBN 9790004175026. 9 x 12 inches.

Arthur Vincent Lourie once said of himself that his intense relationship to poetry and visual art gave him a certain advantage over other musicians. He was one of the earliest and most versatile musical innovators among the Russian Futurists. Lourie began to compose with twelve-tone complexes as early as 1912, and published his thoughts on quarter-tone notation in the Futurist periodical Strelyets in 1915. In this same year, he composed his Forms in the air , a prototype of graphic notation, which he dedicated to Pablo Picasso. These three miniatures reflect the harmonically austere style of the early experimental period, which was rich in dissonance and favoured the use of chordal combinations with half-tone tension. This early style evolved shortly thereafter in the direction of New Simplicity characterized by a new diatonicism and linearity, of which Lourie was also one of the forerunners. The composer provided no information concerning tempo and interpetation of the Formes en l'air . Thus, in consideration of the otherwise so scrupulously indicated dynamics, it would seem that he deliberately left this question up to the performer. lt should not be forgotten, however, that Lourie was one of the earliest and most consequent representatives of the new sound ideal of objectivity and reduction: The Forms in the air should be performed transparently, not as a Scriabinesque sound ecstasy. Lourie, like his friend the poet Alexander Blok and the majority of the Russian Futurists, had supported the October Revolution. Lunacharsky named him commissioner of music, and in this position Lourie, as first Music Minister of the young Soviet State, promoted the initial flowering of the leftist, avantgarde artistic tendencies. His activity ceased abruptly in 1922, when he did not return from an official journey abroad. He had established contact with Busoni in Berlin and with Stravinsky in Paris. At first turned away by the French authorities as a Bolshevik commissioner, he was able to settle in Paris in 1924, only to be driven away by the German occupiers in 1941. Lourie, although a baptized and convinced Catholic, came from a Jewish family with a long tradition, which had been expelled from Spain in the Middle Ages. He accepted Serge Koussevitzky's invitation to emigrate to the United States. There he lived until his death, relatively unknown and ignored by the post-World-War-II New Music. In addition to numerous orchestral, chamber and solo works, Lourie composed two operas on subjects by Pushkin, The Feast during the Plague (1935) and The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1961). Detlef Gojowy, Autumn 1980

Lourie was one of the earliest Russian Futurists. He began composing with twelve-tone complexes as early as 1912, and in 1915 he published ideas for quarter-tone notation. "Formes en l'air," an archetype of graphic composition, is dedicated to Picasso.