Valery Aleksandrovich Gavrilin

Valeri Aleksandrovich Gavrilin (Vologda, 1939 – 1999) was a Russian composer whose work drew on his childhood in the north of the country during the war and on the tradition of folk song. His music occupies a distinctive place within Soviet composition of the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which national idiom and the influences of Western avant-garde coexisted.

His first studies took place at a children's home in Vologda, with the pianist T. D. Tomashevskaya. He then attended the special music school attached to the Leningrad Conservatory, studying with S. Ya. Vol'fenzon (1953–1958), before entering the Conservatory itself (1958–1964), where he studied composition with Orest Yevlakhov and folklore with F. A. Rubtsov. Between 1965 and 1973 he taught composition at the Rimsky-Korsakov Music School in Leningrad. He joined the Union of Composers of the USSR in 1965, the same year he was awarded the title People's Artist of Russia, and he received the State Prizes of the RSFSR (1967) and of the USSR (1985).

The landscape and people of northern Russia, together with the loss of his father at the Leningrad front in 1941, decisively shaped his language. During his conservatory years, the thaw of the Khrushchev era allowed him to become acquainted, besides the classical repertoire, with the music of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bartók, Hindemith, Berg and the Polish avant-garde.

His work Russkaya tetrad' (Russian Notebook), for voice and piano (1965), was received unanimously by the leading Soviet composers. In it he developed a recurring image: that of a peasant woman from northern Russia whose love is never fulfilled. The harmony, predominantly tonal, admits everything from parallel fourths to densely dissonant polytonal clusters. These ideas were carried further in the three Nemetskiye tetradi (German Notebooks), regarded as manifestos of Russian neo-Romanticism of the 1960s and 1970s.

In theatre and film he developed a genre of his own, the 'action' (deystvo), without libretto or arias, made up of solo numbers in the manner of songs alternating with choruses. Voyennïye pis'ma (Letters of War) and Perezvonï (Peals of Bells), his most ambitious work in this genre, combine resources of popular theatre, traditional polyphony and Russian liturgical chant. The latter is considered a model work of twentieth-century Russian choral music.