Eduard Artemiev inhabits the space between science and art, between the electronic avant-garde and popular music. Known best as the composer for Russian sci-fi classic Solaris, Artemiev also pioneered one of the first synthesizers and puts his central role in electronic music down to the finely honed calibrations of the cosmos.
Early in the 1979 Russian movie Stalker the protagonist is hired as a guide through the wasteland of The Zone—a closely guarded supernatural region containing a room that would provide the inner most desires of anyone who enters. Stalker is hired by a professor and a writer, both of whom have their own motivations, be it scientific or artistic, for undertaking such a dangerous journey through The Zone. The music and background sounds which accompany these three characters has an obvious presence and it’s a remarkable coincidence that the composer of that music, the Russian Eduard Artemiev, should have had his own musical development so dramatically changed by the presence of a scientist and an artist.
Stalker Main Theme by Eduard Artemiev
The scientist in Artemiev’s life was Evgeny Murzin—a mathematician and engineer at an undisclosed Moscow research institute. The two met when Artemiev was studying composition at the Moscow Conservatory. Murzin’s mysterious nature was only amplified when he asked Artemiev if he wanted to come and take a look at a new machine that he was building in the basement under a museum dedicated to the late composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin. The technology at the time could capture sound waves on film and what Murzin had been working on reversed the process; it formed music from an electric current by creating sounds from the artificial image of a wave. More concretely, Murzin’s highly classified work led to one of the first workable synthesisers – the ANS synthesiser, named in tribute to Scriabin.
The resulting sounds were light years ahead of what Artemiev had worked with before, as compositions could now account for microtones (the ANS-synth could split an octave into 720 distinguishable tones). Along with other notable composers like Alfred Schnittke and Stanislav Kreitchi, Artemiev formed bold new compositions with the help of Murzin’s synthesiser including Mosaic and Twelve Views on the World of Sound. An early LP released by Melodya (a state owned record label) showed the eerie and ambient directions the new instrument would take them.
And if making music like this in a Soviet basement wasn’t scary enough for its composers, the authorities were spooked as well. Artemiev was born in 1937, a year after Shostakovich’s opera Macbeth was banned by Stalin and, over a quarter of a century later, things were still going according to “The Plan” where music that was considered corrosive to public morality was heavily censured. There was little to speak of in terms of a commercial music market as the Soviet Union was still largely isolated from the influence of the West.
Fortunately for Artemiev though, Breznhev’s government didn’t meddle with their work. Mysterious Murzin had some major connections with the government at the time and they were willing to turn a blind eye to his extra-curricular activities. Artemiev had also found another niche that managed to avoid the attention of the authorities; composing for cinema. Given that the new synthesiser formed sounds from images it was only fitting to apply those sounds back to images. Artemiev found that scoring for films was another way of getting around the censors, as this music was considered subsidiary and of less importance than the film itself. Artemiev had a number of film scores to his name before an artist came into his life and made him a household name in the Soviet Union.
When Artemiev first met the director Andrei Tarkovsky, the marriage between artist and composer was less than perfect and Artemiev spoke of being frequently “abandoned” while writing the music for Solaris. Tarkovsky hardly turned up to recordings and gave him little in the way of guidance. According to Artemiev, Tarkovsky was generally nonplussed to have him on board (the director had already collaborated with another composer for his previous movies) and imposed one constraint on the young man; make it like you want but make it Bach.
Theme from Solaris, Eduard Artemiev
Solaris’s principal theme takes its melody from Bach’s Chorale Prelude Ich ruf’ zu dir and is played using the ANS-synthesiser. Artemiev would go on to use another Bach melody in the soundtrack for The Mirror, reflecting the director’s obsession with the Baroque composer. Artemiev’s gift was to match image and sound, and what he did so convincingly was capture the drift and weightlessness between the characters in the film. That drift, whether it be man from man, man from society, man from the people he loves, continental or even planetary, meant that everything gave way to this law. Similarly in Stalker the soundtrack sets a single mode or tonality which sets the atmosphere while the lone flute provides the melody which guides the viewer, much like Stalker does for the scientist and the writer. The method adopts instruments from Indian classical music and there is even use of the tambura in the soundtrack. What Artemiev had learned from scoring for movies was how to develop a sense of space for the listener from the sounds alone.
“The advantage of electronic music is that it has given to a composer a possibility to conduct the third dimension – space. In this “composed” space you may, for example, keep the listener’s attention on a one cord, and he will experience a huge effect; this will be the time, filled with large, deepest events.”
His work on Solaris found him admirers in unlikely places. The Japanese space music pioneer Isaio Tomita sent Tarkovsky a copy of his own music to the film. There are intriguing parallels between the two composers – both wrote for the Olympics, films, and adapted classical works. They also both got their start from a breakthrough in technology (Tomita on his MOOG synth and Artemiev on the ANS).
Having composed so much in the way of avant-garde and cinematic works, Artemiev went in the only direction an avant-gardist could; he found Jesus and rock and roll. In the same decade. He’s vocal about his appreciation of Andrew Lloyd Webber having seen a production of Jesus Christ Superstar in his homeland. And in 2007 he managed to release his own stab at a musical for Dostoevsky’s classic novel Crime and Punishment. He also began to go through a serious rock phase where he grew his hair long and listened to Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and Deep Purple among others.
Classically trained, Artemiev’s most cherished composers at the conservatory were Debussy and Stravinsky and at heart he was still drawn to melodies. In the early 80s he became more productive, putting out a couple of LPs of his own solo work that were unconnected with cinema.
One of which is Warmth of the Earth, an LP of cantatas that is part space rock and part glam rock synths-travaganza where electronica gives way to Russian power ballads. This is what Eurovision would sound like if it allowed entries from outside our solar system.
Who Am I – Warmth of Earth
After having scored for over a 100 movies as well as many more solo works, the term ‘electronic pioneer’ is not a title Artemiev holds comfortably. His end-goal uses either or both modes; but it is that telos which he aims for, whether it be finding a counterpoint to the image or furthering some larger theme in his solo work.
“Many people do, in fact, consider acoustic and electronic music as two separate modes of thinking, which have developed along parallel lines that will never actually converge. I feel though, that in the not-too-distant future, these two parallel lines will very definitely come together, and out of this confrontation, an entirely new musical form will emerge.”
Illustration by Bianca Lean.
