About the Peculiarities of the Author’s Method of Composition in Aleksandr Vustin’s Heroic Lullaby (1991)

Aleksandr Vustin’s individual technique of composition was fully formed by the 1990s and became a universal way of embodying various concepts. In each new work, the same ideas were reinterpreted. Using the example of the sextet Heroic Lullaby, the author analyzes the composer’s mode of working with three basic principles of his method: the universal tone row, the principle of “twelvefoldness”, and the extended Obikhodnïy scale, first used by Yuriy Butsko. The choice of the work is related to its non-typical nature in the context of Vustin’s oeuvre. In addition to the transformations of the basic principles of his method, Heroic Lullaby attracts attention as one of the few examples of working with musical quotations. The piece is a kind of musical autobiography, the “chapters” of which allude to works by Beethoven, Debussy, Schoenberg, Mahler, and Mussorgsky. All such allusions are intentionally given inaccurately, “from memory”, and are always associated with the development of the tone row. In many ways, the interaction of tonal and serial systems is also innovative: the latter takes over the role of tonality, the tones of the rows take over the functionality, and the composer, as if in a parallel “layer”, introduces an auto-quotation — a tonal fragment from the music to the movie Anna Karamazoff.