Kharkov Music

Kharkov Music is a solo piano cycle composed by Ukrainian composer Alexander Shchetinsky between 1981 and 1989. The Belgian pianist Mireille Gleizes, known for her advocacy of new consonant music, has notably featured Kharkov Music in her concert repertoire, contributing to the work’s dissemination in Western Europe.

The piece comprises four movements—“Mouvement,” “Retentissement,” “Élégie,” and “Chanson”—and has an approximate total duration of 13 minutes. These movements contrast in mood and texture but are unified through a shared thematic origin, making the cycle both diverse and coherent.

The cycle’s internal architecture is built upon the transformation of a central thematic idea, which recurs in varied guises throughout the four movements. This technique of thematic metamorphosis provides formal unity while allowing expressive variety. Each movement presents a distinct character:

• Mouvement opens the cycle with restrained energy, introducing motivic material that will later be reshaped.

• Retentissement focuses on resonance, exploring piano sonorities through sustained harmonies, gentle dynamics, and echoing textures.

• Élégie adopts a lyrical tone, with a subdued expressiveness that suggests mourning or quiet reflection.

• Chanson serves as a concluding piece, evoking the simplicity of song while subtly recalling earlier motifs in a transformed and softened form.

The prevailing atmosphere of Kharkov Music is one of calm introspection. The modal language employed by Shchetinsky replaces traditional tonality, generating a harmonic landscape that is gently colored rather than sharply defined. This use of modality, combined with soft dynamic levels and sensitive pedaling, lends the music a dream-like, meditative quality. The piece eschews overt virtuosity in favor of refined expressiveness, prioritizing clarity of texture, melodic contour, and the resonant properties of the piano.

Particularly in the second movement (Retentissement), resonance itself becomes a compositional parameter. Sounds are allowed to linger, creating a blurred boundary between tone and silence. This reflects the composer’s interest in the sensual aspects of sound, a trait that would become central to his mature style.

Context and Reception
The title Kharkov Music may be interpreted as a homage to the composer’s native city of Kharkiv, although the work remains abstract and avoids direct programmatic references. Composed during the final decade of the Soviet Union, it reflects the transitional nature of Shchetinsky’s style at that time: moving away from strict avant-garde practices and toward a more personal, post-serial aesthetic that values expressive nuance, modal clarity, and sonic beauty.

Shchetinsky’s later music has often been characterized as embodying a “personal post-serial style,” one that incorporates serial or quasi-serial elements but avoids doctrinaire atonality. Instead, he emphasizes lyrical expression, formal clarity, and the sensuous qualities of sound. Kharkov Music anticipates this direction, offering a modern idiom that is both intellectually constructed and emotionally resonant.

The piece has been favorably received by performers and scholars alike. Its subtle dynamics, gentle dissonance, and introspective tone have aligned it with a meditative strand of late 20th-century Eastern European piano music. One musicologist highlighted the work’s use of soft dynamics and fluid interplay between sound and silence as hallmarks of Shchetinsky’s pianistic writing.

Today, Kharkov Music remains one of Shchetinsky’s most recognized piano compositions. It is occasionally programmed in recitals of contemporary music and is studied for its synthesis of formal discipline and poetic expression. As an early marker of the composer’s evolving language, it continues to offer insight into the trajectory of post-Soviet Ukrainian music and its engagement with both Western modernism and regional introspection.