Elena Petrushanskaya Averbakh

Moscow State Institute for Arts Studies

Elena Petrushanskaya Averbakh is Chief Research Fellow at the Department of Media Arts of the Moscow State Institute for Arts Studies (Gosudarstvennyj institut Iskusstvoznaniia) (since 1993). She is author of a number of monographs: The Birth of Sound Image: the Poetics of Phonography in the cinema, radio and TV (1985, 1999); The Musical World of Joseph Brodsky (2004, 2007); Mikhail Glinka and Italy (2009),; The Adventures of the Russian Opera in Italy (2018). Furthermore, she has published over 120 research papers devoted to the relationship between music and literature, mass media and twentieth century artistic culture, music for the cinema and TV series. She is also the author of a preface to a collection of works by Shostakovich.

Clusters of mythological traces in the works of Russian women: from the ideas of composers to popular literature

29 Gennaio 21

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The term “cluster” in music refers to a consonance similar to a sound “spot” generated by adjacent dissonant sounds that do not fit into traditionally structured chords. In literature it means a diagram indicating the influences and sources of the phenomenon which is object of the study. In the works of Russian women composers, especially in the twenty-first century, the features of various mythologies, with their transversal points of junction and fusion, are particularly clear. This trend acquires the quality of a "cluster of mythological traces". For example, the composer Sofia Gubaidulina (born in 1931) defines herself as a "representative of the archaic consciousness". Her music and ideas are combined with the features of the ancient and more recent mythologies of the East and West, like Egyptian mythology, Slavic and Tatar pagan epics, Biblical and Christian mythology, and the philosophy of Martin Buber. In the opera "Einstein and Margarita" (2006) by Iraida Yusupova (born in 1962), such "clusters" fuse the "demythologization" of the plot, parodically echoing Bulgakov's novel, with the range of ideas created by Philip Grass (in his opera "Einstein on the Beach", 1976) and with the remythologization of the sound features derived from the mythology of Soviet song culture. These phenomena testify to the boldness of women composers in exploring the horizons of their identity. I will compare them with the mythological "clusters” that can be traced in the books of a number of popular Russian women writers, mainly of detective stories, including Victoria Platova, Guzel Yakhina and Ekaterina Ru. The field of observation is prose associated with "musical themes", "musical mythology" and its cluster connections with other mythological traces.