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Nikolai Borisovich Obukhov (; Nicolai, Nicolas, Nikolay; Obukhow, Obouhow, Obouhov, Obouhoff) (22 April 189213 June 1954)Jonathan Powell. "Obouhow, Nicolas." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/20236 (accessed 22 January 2011). (Numerous variant spellings of both his first and last names can be found in the literature) was a modernist and mystic Russian composer, active mainly in France. An avant-garde figure who took as his point of departure the late music of Scriabin, he fled Russia along with his family after the Bolshevik Revolution, settling in Paris. His music is notable for its religious mysticism, its unusual notation, its use of an idiosyncratic 12-tone chromaticism language, and its pioneering use of electronic musical instruments in the era of their earliest development.
His early music, composed after 1910, attracted sufficient attention to inspire the periodical Muzykal'niy Sovremennik to organize a concert of his compositions in 1915, and another in Saint Petersburg in 1916, in which all the music performed used a new method of music notation he had developed the preceding year.Sitsky, Larry. Music of the repressed Russian avant-garde, 1900–1929. Greenwood Press, 1994. 254. In 1918 he fled Russia with his wife and two children to escape the hardships following the Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing civil war; after a period of travel in the Crimea, by way of Constantinople they settled in Paris, a common destination for artistic and intellectual refugees due to traditional cultural ties between the two nations.Peter Deane Roberts, "Nikolai Obukhov". In Sitsky, Larry (ed.) Music of the twentieth-century avant-garde: a biocritical sourcebook. Greenwood Press, 2002. pp. 339–344.
In 1926 Serge Koussevitzky, always a proponent of new music, particularly that of experimental Russian composers – he was long a champion of Scriabin and Igor Stravinsky – became interested in Obukhov's massive (and incomplete) magnum opus, the liturgical cantata Kniga Zhizni ( The Book of Life), and conducted a performance of its Prologue in Paris.Slonimsky, Nicolas. The Concise Edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 8th ed. New York, Schirmer Books, 1993. p. 723.
Obukhov remained in Paris, living in a small apartment with his wife, composing and writing about his harmonic and notational system. Physically robust, he made a living as a bricklayer.Nicolas Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch, a Life Story. Oxford University Press, 1988. 79–80 One of his students, the pianist Countess Marie-Antoinette Aussenac-Broglie, intrigued by his mystical religious world-view as well as his music, mastered the art of playing the croix sonore. She became one of the most vigorous proponents both of Obukhov's music and of his unusual electronic instrument, and she also provided him with a house and financial support. Arthur Honegger was one of several composers who published music using his notation, and in 1943 the publisher Auguste Durand printed a group of pieces by different composers – from the 18th through the 20th centuries – using this notation. While Obhukov's compositional activity was partially interrupted by the Second World War, he published his treatise on harmony and notation in 1947, Traité d'harmonie tonale, atonale et totale. Honegger wrote the foreword to the book.
In 1949 he was attacked and mugged by a gang of thugs and injured so severely that he virtually ceased to compose for the remainder of his life. The attackers made off with a portfolio of manuscripts, including the definitive copy of his Book of Life. Rendered an invalid by the attack, he lived another five years, dying in Saint-Cloud, in the western suburbs of Paris. He is buried in the Cimetière de Saint-Cloud; atop his ruined monument was once a stone replica of his croix sonore, placed there by Marie-Antoinette Aussenac-Broglie.Rahma Khazam. "Nikolay Obukhov and the Croix Sonore." Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 19, 2009, pp. 11–12. The MIT Press.
His numerous manuscripts are kept in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Only a few have been published. Larry Sitsky, in his 1994 Music of the repressed Russian avant-garde, 1900–1929, includes a complete alphabetical listing of the composer's works from that archive.Sitsky, 259–263
Obhukov's music was experimental and innovative from the start, with similarities to the tonality and harmonic language of Scriabin in his early work. Other early influences were the writings of philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and the mystical, apocalyptic poetry of Konstantin Balmont, whose verse he set to music. Obukhov evolved a technique of using all twelve tones, not in tone row as Schoenberg was developing in Vienna, but as defining harmonic areas or regions through twelve-tone chords. This was one of the first, if not the first attempt to develop a dodecaphonic compositional method, predating Schoenberg's by several years. Additionally, he developed a scheme for non-repetition of tones until the other eleven had sounded, along with a similar method of controlling intervals. Obukhov was one of several composers at the time working on 12-tone methods; others in Russia included Roslavets, Lourié and Yefim Golyshev.Gojowy, Detlef. "Obukhov, Nikolay," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. Vol 13, pp 485–6.
In addition to the novelty of his 12-tone method, Obukhov was also one of the first composers to require singers to make sounds other than singing, including shouts, screams, whispers, whistles, and groans. An important part of his aesthetic was the idea of religious ecstasy expressed through sound, and later through the other senses. His early songs, composed in Russia, include unusual directions to the singers. The Berceuse d'un bienheureux au chevet d'un morte ("Berceuse of a blessed one at the bedside of the departed") (1918, published in 1921) includes, for detached short utterances, markings such as "suffering furiously", "whistling", "suffering, regretting with a harsh voice", "with an insane smile", "enthusiastically threatening", and "with malignancy".Sitsky 257–258
The croix sonore consisted of a brass cross 175 cm high, planted on a globe 44 cm in diameter with a flattened base. The center of the cross contained a star, which was around chest-height for a standing performer. The electronics were inside the globe, with the cross acting as the antenna, so that the player's hand controlled pitch by moving towards and away from the star. The name of the instrument was engraved on the globe in Russian and French.Shaw-Miller, 76–77
Performance on the croix sonore was a visual as well as an auditory experience. Obukhov intended the performer to be like a priestess performing a religious rite, and no public performance is known to have taken place in which the performer was male. A partial performance of the Book of Life in 1934 was reviewed by a New York Times critic in Paris:
In October 1934, Germaine Dulac made a film of Aussenac de Broglie playing the instrument, with Obukhov at the piano. This took place in Italy with the assistance of the Institute of Rome.
After Obukhov's death, the instrument fell into disuse and then disrepair. For a time it was kept at the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra in Paris, where it could be seen until the early 1980s, but then it disappeared. One of the workers there came upon it by accident in 2009, and now the instrument – the only one known to have been constructed – is on display at the Musée de la musique.
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