The
cellist and musicologist Alexander Ivashkin died last night at the tragically
early age of 65. Sasha was one of the most important champions of Russian music
in the West, and promoted the music he loved with phenomenal energy and
enthusiasm: performing it, writing about it, and encouraging others to do the
same. He was an inspiring teacher as well, and many of his pupils, myself included,
owe him a great deal, not only for the knowledge he imparted, but also his
infectious enthusiasm, and, equally importantly, the opportunities he found or
created for others to make music and to make a living out of it.
I
first met Sasha in 2000. He had just moved to the UK to take up a chair at
Goldsmiths. He was exactly the man the college was looking for: Russian music
and performance studies were (and still are) two of the department’s greatest strengths,
and he was able to take over the running of both. My plan was to do a PhD on
the music of Schnittke, and I too had come to the right place; not only was
Schnittke Sasha’s favourite subject, but he was also unquestionably the world
authority on the composer’s music.
Over
the following seven years (I take full responsibility for my slow progress),
Sasha guided me patiently through my research. He felt very strongly that
cultural barriers between East and West led to misunderstandings about Russian
culture, and led to great Russian works being sidelined elsewhere. So to study
Schnittke with him was to study the cultural context in which the composer
worked (and few composers have incorporated their cultural context into their music
as comprehensively or as successfully as Schnittke). Within a few months of our
first meeting, he had organised a trip for me to Moscow and St Petersburg,
armed with a list of phone numbers and addresses of key figures in the Russian
musical establishment. I’m very lucky now to have many professional contacts
and close friends in Russia, all thanks ultimately to Sasha. He was equally
passionate about promoting younger musicians and scholars from Russia, and
using his contacts in the West to provide them with opportunities. One of my
close Russian friends, who is now an established academic is St Petersburg,
told me this morning that he and many of his colleagues owe everything to
Ivashkin.
Sasha
had clear ideas about what was worthwhile and what was not worthwhile,
musically speaking. If he was enthusiastic about, say, the work of a young
composer, he would immediately find ways to promote it. If their music was for
cello, he would perform it. If it wasn’t for cello, he’d persuade them to
arrange it. Similarly, promising young scholars would find themselves invited
to present their work at high profile seminars, would be introduced to his many
contacts in the world of academic publishing, and would be presented with all
sorts of imaginative ideas about possible funding ideas for their research
projects.
But
if something was not worthwhile, he’d make sure you knew. On one occasion I
went to a masterclass he was giving for undergraduates at RCM on the Schnittke
Piano Trio. He took to the stage and began his introductory address. Then he
spotted me, trying to look inconspicuous at the back of the hall, stopped mid-sentence
and shouted out “Gavin, what are you doing here? You’re wasting your time.” Er,
right, hello Sasha. Nice to see you too. I wasn’t wasting my time, of course,
and learnt a great deal about the work that afternoon, even if he assumed I
knew it all already.
Sasha
was very generous in his professional dealings, but liked to keep his private
life private. The name “Sasha” was his one concession to familiarity, and
nobody who knew him personally referred to him any other way. But his desire,
and ability, to keep his long illness private attests to a certain personal
distance between himself and his colleagues.
There
was always warmth, though, in any personal contact with him. When I learnt of
his illness, around September last year, I sent a card, and he responded with
what were clearly heartfelt thanks. He wasn’t much of a facebooker, but
anything he did post was usually about things that mattered. I remember putting
up a picture of our daughter Elsa the day she was born, and a comment
immediately appearing beneath “Congratulations. Big Russian hugs to you all.”
Some
of Sasha’s thinking was very Russian, so much so that it could be hard, from a
Western perspective, to find a common point of reference. He was a big believer
in numerology, in numbers and dates being auspicious or having particular
significance. He and I have a book in press, Schnittke Studies, to which he contributed an article entitled “The
Schnittke Code”. The reference to Dan Brown is entirely deliberate. I spoke to
him one autumn a few years back when he’d just come back from a holiday where
he’d read The Da Vinci Code. I don’t think
he really rated it, but he said that its popularity demonstrated that Westerners
were just as interested in numerology, codes, and esoteric/religious significances
as were Russians, just less able to admit the fact.
Similarly,
Sasha’s “Schnittke Code” examines Klingende Buchstaben, a work Schnittke wrote for him, in terms of the
hidden numbers and messages within the notes. Some of it seems quite fanciful,
especially the claim that Schnittke predicts the age at which he would die in
codes that are embedded in the music. But it didn’t seem fanciful to Sasha, and
nor would it, I suspect, to Schnittke himself.
Much of Sasha’s writing on
Schnittke concerns the consequences of the composer’s ill-health, a topic that
neither Schnittke nor any of his advocates could ignore in the last 10 or 15
years of his life. Both Schnittke and Sasha read much into the parallels between
the composer’s last years and those of Adrian Leverkühn, the (anti?)hero of
Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. From
that perspective, Schnittke’s decline and early death could be seen as the
playing out of some kind of fate. Whether we accept that or not, Schnittke’s
death at the age of just 63 was clearly a very great tragedy for the music
world. And now Sasha too has left us at a similarly young age, living just two
years longer. Perhaps his is the death predicted in Klingende Buchstaben. I’m sure both men would have warmed to that
idea, not that it makes the loss any easier to bear.
RIP Sasha. This is how I’ll
remember you best:
