What was your work as a composer like on Orphic Games? And what can you say about the cantata that you wrote for the project?

I'll say immediately that my participation in the Orphic project was determined at the outset to involve a single aspect of the work, that is, it was planned in advance that I would write, relatively speaking, a choral act. To very specific texts. As far as I know, this was the idea of Boris Yukhananov and Vanya Kochkaryov, who pointed out a remarkable poem by Rainer Maria Rilke and Brodsky's commentary to it. It would be good to combine them. The fact is that I have my own laboratory here in the theatre, where all participants run their own experiments related to melodeclamation and, more broadly, to the relationship of music and speech. I have been doing this a lot and for a long time. What happens if actors have music pulled out from under them? Do they give more? How does this affect their performance?

Why did melodeclamation, born as a theatrical genre, invented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1760, ultimately never become popular? He wrote the first melodrama — Pygmalion. Why was this born as a theatrical genre, but became a concert genre? How is it connected to action and plot? Why, for example, do operas and dramatic performances exist independently of one another, while melodramas lasted for 30 or 40 years until the classical age ended, and romanticism began. In the romantic era, for example, melodramas existed only in concert — they weren't given theatrical embodiment. That's what we're dealing with. It interests me, and I develop it in practice. In particular, at the Electrotheatre.

How was this music written so that text could be declaimed to it? Brodsky, for example.

It's quite simple. The fact is that there are different types of melodeclamation. You can just talk to the music. If you play me some music from your phone right now, I will speak: "Hello, Kristina! How are you? What are your creative plans?" That will still just be talking to music. That's called le degré zéro de l'écriture — zero degree of writing. It's just speech with music, entirely an everyday situation. In this case music plays a purely episodic role. It's just talk over the radio, in the kitchen, for example. Let's call it zero level. The next level is when music is played and a person reads verses to it or, let's say, a prosaic passage. This is the level of the radio. The question is how do you read the verses: do you coordinate with the music or not? We enter the territory of melodeclamation when rhythm comes in; first it's the rhythm of poetic or prosaic phrases interacting with musical phrases, and then from the territory of rhythm we enter the territory of intonation. And what begins to happen? You see, I have a singing chorus that sings...

Made up of dramatic actors?

Which sings miraculously, this chorus has its own secret too. So, we have a chorus that sings. And we have a choir that speaks. The more they work against each other, the more, let's say, the speaking choir adds intonation. That is, they sing more and more. In any case, phonetically it is more like singing than speaking. Zhenya Vesnina gave me a great deal of help in this regard. I saw her a long time ago in the MIR-5 laboratory performance of Robert Musil. They played an excerpt from Musil, and I thought: "My God, my God! This is a beautiful Agatha Musil." An ideal woman of the Silver Age. Insofar as Zhenya, as soloist, competed with the soloists of the chorus and the rest of the chorus, she increasingly began to approach the kind of melodeclamation that was adopted, for example, in 1911 in Vienna. That is, we inserted Rilke inside Brodsky's text, by means of the manner of performance, which came about naturally due to the cyclical interaction of the two choruses. Speaking and singing. The singers tended increasingly toward declamation, while the speakers tended toward intonation. Thus we were able to achieve a certain unity in absolutely heterogeneous material. Because it's one thing to have perfected Jugendstil, modernist poetry, and it's another thing to have Brodsky, our contemporary, practically. We were able to combine them together, although on a certain musical basis, or, shall we say, a musical-intonational basis and a speech-intonational basis, which was characteristic precisely of the Silver Age.

How does one teach this? Is it formalized in any way?

In fact, any talented actor must be able to memorize rather large pieces of text, and if a person has a sense of rhythm, then speaking the phrase in a specific rhythm is not so difficult, as long as a conductor is present. This is the secret of the singing chorus — they never sang as a chorus. Everyone learned their part from a recording on tape. Now there is no tape, I don't know what there is. Maybe they learn from digital media or something else? so, in conclusion, what do we have here? What is happening is that they are singing, but they don't hear each other. Each of them sings separately, to the gestures of the conductor. This would be impossible without a conductor. They would never remember their intros, because they are still not a professional team. The music is very simple, it's built on Greek tetrachords. Only, I transposed them into different tonalities so that you get the feeling of fabric... it's more contemporary in its language than it would be if another lover of reviving Greek tetrachords — say, Nicola Vicentino or Sarlino, Florentine composers who revived Greek tetrachords in the 17th century — were in my place. My pretensions were far more modest, because I had to make everything as simple and as easy to remember as possible. When this simplicity overlaps with the roundelay, we produce quite complex music. Many people had an illusion — what is this chorus that is singing? Some people simply couldn't get it through their heads that it's the same dramatic actors, and not a professional chorus. Later, a lot of people approached me to say how beautifully the chorus sings! What is this chorus? The Electrotheatre chorus? I said, "No, it isn't the Electrotheatre chorus. The Electrotheatre chorus performs in Rannev's Prose. We are dealing with a completely different kind of experiment.

I teach in MIR-5, so this was my task for my students in music. My sense of being a teacher did not come to an end until the very moment it all took shape. In fact, I worked with them, but that was when the exercises began. At first I lectured and paid a lot of attention to melodeclamation because I knew of the plan according to which all these events would develop. I spoke a lot to students about the device of melodeclamation. They naturally forgot all this but, as soon as rehearsals started, they began to remember.

So ultimately I really liked everything. Everything worked as I, in any case, had anticipated. Because there were various scenarios. Because whenever we try something out, we, in fact, are offering up an experiment. In one and the same conditions, we may assume different outcomes of this experiment, different results. But this was one of those results that I liked because everything could have turned out completely different. Who knows? After all, strictly speaking, no one has run these kind of experiments with amateurs before. This is a unique experiment because we have no such culture as a speaking chorus. Vasilyev had a speaking chorus, but that was completely different. It was precisely a speaking chorus. But to accompany all this with the appropriate music — this is something else again. It's one thing when a chorus speaks in unison, it's another thing when they speak in unison to music.

Is this the innovation?

Yes. In this interaction. The innovation is that I investigated the interaction of two choruses — one singing, the other speaking — that took on these roles from scratch, not being professional choruses. Professional singers would have quickly found their way, and would have produced some sort of result, which, most likely, would not have suited me. My task was to do it from scratch with amateurs. So that no one has the slightest suspicion that these people have never done this in their lives. I was quite pleased during rehearsals, when they learned everything under the guidance of the wonderful Dima Matvienko, who took on the titanic work of distributing all the parts. Of course, he wanted it to be more academic, but I, on the contrary, wanted it to be as far as possible from the common standards of choral singing. A bit of a conflict arose between the conductor and his chorus, which is not a chorus. Many different possibilities for experiments arose in regards to the conductor: How would he solve this problem? He resolved it brilliantly. In the end, he realized that we had gone through 28 rehearsals and we would conduct even more, because this truly was genuine, live music, and it must be sung, practiced, and repeated. If it will be included in the next Orphic session, it will sound different. Who knows what the result will be after they begin to feel like a chorus? It will continue to live and develop. The experiment will go on. That is precisely the point.