VАRIABILITY, APHORISTIC PHRASE AND PLAYING AS AESTHETIC AND STRUCTURE-FORMING PRINCIPLES IN "MOVEMENTS FOR 13 STRINGS INSTRUMENTS" BY SIMEON PIRONKOV

The composition “Movements for 13 string instruments” was completed in 1967 and belongs to the group of works by Simeon Pironkov whose titles include the word “music” – “Night music”, which is written the year before, “Ballet music in memory of Igor Stravinsky”, created at the beginning of the ‘70s of the last century, and “Music for two pianos and orchestra”. The external connection is the genre uncertainty of their names, which is equally characteristic of the notion “movements” which emphasizes the continuity of the musical process over time without suggesting a connection to a particular genre. At the same time, unlike the three “music”-s, the plural form used in the title – “movements” – draws attention to the plurality of the musical impulses that make up the whole musical thought. The strength of the 13 string instruments indicates the belonging of the work to the chamber orchestral music and fits it into the objective European tendency towards chamberhood, which was established in the first decades of the twentieth century. Listeners are unexpectedly involved in “Movements for 13 string instruments” to hear about eight minutes 37 of micro-episodes – movements that resemble fast-moving movie frames or short theatrical scenes – before the colorful kaleidoscope of parallel-moving melodic lines, clusters, peculiar rhythmic formulas and characteristic strokes to be abruptly cut off by the “guillotine of the four-bars final” (according to the exact expression of the musicologist Rosalia Bix). The versatility of the used vehicles of expression and the masterful handing of them are important prerequisites for the artistic impact of the work, recreating with a laconic expression part of the ever flowing life stream in the form of a series of changing movements. At the same time, it is also a way of the composers playing with its own creation, an expression of the typical for the 20th century tendency for the art to entertain with its means. In any case, “Movements for 13 string instruments” express the youthful spirit of their creator, because, according to the extremely inventive maxim of the theater producer Nicolay Georgiev, “man has stopped playing not because he is old but he is old because he has stopped playing”.