Synthesis of inspiration – Newspaper Kommersant No. 244 (7445) dated 12/30/2022

The legendary composer Eduard Artemiev, the author of music for more than 150 films, a pioneer of electronic sound, an educator and innovator, died in Moscow.

Eduard Artemyev was born in Novosibirsk, but was a Muscovite to the marrow. Here he received two higher musical educations, here he first saw a synthesizer, here the revolutionary soundtrack for the film Solaris was recorded and his other works were created for the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Nikita Mikhalkov, Andrei Konchalovsky and other directors.

However, the first in Artemiev’s filmography was the tape of the Odessa film studio “To Meet a Dream” (1963). The main author of the music was Vano Muradeli. The events of the film unfolded on Mars, the dignitary composer tried to sound them with the help of a familiar orchestra, but remembered that among the graduates of the Moscow Conservatory there is such Artemiev, who experimented with sound together with the inventor of the first ANS studio synthesizer Evgeny Murzin. Artemiev eventually created the soundtrack for the Martian landscapes, and Muradeli insisted that the name of the young colleague be indicated in the credits and paid him a real “adult” fee.

So at the age of 23, Eduard Artemyev became an active film composer. For seven years he wrote music for cartoons, plots from “Wick” and feature films that few people remember now.

But in 1970, he created the music for Nikita Mikhalkov’s graduation short film A Quiet Day at the End of the War, and since then not a single director’s film has done without Artemyev’s music; the only exception was the Soviet-Italian Black Eyes (1987). The pinnacle of collaboration between the two artists is considered to be the film “At Home Among Strangers, Stranger Among Our Own” (1974). Neither the director nor the composer concealed that Sergio Leone’s westerns with Clint Eastwood became their source of inspiration. However, the Soviet audience had nowhere to see them, and the tape looked like a complete revelation. According to Artemyev’s memoirs, he wrote the main theme of the film in one day. “The Song of the Ship”, performed by Alexander Gradsky behind the scenes, has become a kind of symbol of the Mikhalkov family: Artemyev composed it to the verses of the mother of Nikita Mikhalkov and Andrei Konchalovsky – Natalia Konchalovsky.

Eduard Artemiev began working with Andrei Konchalovsky himself later, in 1974, at the Siberiade. As a guide, the director then offered him a record by the Greek composer Vangelis. Much later, at the very end of the 20th century, the main musical theme of “Sibiriada” became the basis of the trance composition of the Rostov duet PPK “Resurrection” and, as such, hit the 3rd place in the British chart. This was the first success of Russian music on the world pop arena, the composition conquered the charts even before the breakthrough of the tATu group. Artemiev himself considered the Dutch version of Klaas and Niels van Gogh.

Although the main creative achievements of Eduard Artemyev are usually associated with film music and electronic experiments, he undoubtedly had a unique sense of a hit.

He perfectly felt the pop genre and created unique tenacious melodies. Suffice it to recall “Hang-gliding”, which appeared as a sketch in Nikita Mikhalkov’s film “Kin” and became popular in the performance of Valery Leontiev. This is actually a reference Soviet disco, a song for all time. But Artemiev was not going to exploit this technique and this sound – he had more important things to do.

Almost simultaneously with the music for “Siberiada”, the composer wrote the soundtrack for “Stalker” by Andrei Tarkovsky, a VGIK classmate of Konchalovsky. And the first experience of their cooperation was “Solaris” (1972). During the recording of the music for Solaris, the composer used the ANS, a synthesizer that did not have a keyboard. Artemiev got acquainted with foreign instruments in the early 1970s, when Western experts began to come to the USSR with lectures – Artemiev first turned the knobs of a foreign-model synthesizer when Robert Moog brought his instrument to Moscow. Prior to that, he had only ANS. Subsequently, foreign musicologists were struck by the fact itself: an exceptionally progressive mechanism for its time worked behind the Iron Curtain. The American press wrote that the Solaris soundtrack was “proto-ambient soundscapes built around Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chorale Prelude in F Minor” and marveled at how opposed it was to the soundtracks of John Barry and Elmer Bernstein that were released at the same time.

Artemiev’s soundtracks abroad were in fact not only well known, but also actively published. “In the West, I earn more than in Russia,” the composer once admitted in an interview with Kommersant.

In addition to film music, Eduard Artemiev created operas, works for choir, symphonies, suites and piano music. He worked a lot for the theater. His music was performed at two Olympics – Moscow and Sochi.

Interest in his heritage came in waves, and the last wave was associated with another fashion for old synthesizers, which became the subject of collecting and worship all over the world. Despite his age, Artemyev until recently appeared at concerts both as the author of sounding works and as a lecturer-commentator. He was keenly interested in new technologies both in music and in cinema. And he continued to write music.

In early December, Eduard Artemyev was hospitalized with the coronavirus, and later there were complications associated with chronic heart disease. He died at the age of 86, remaining in the memory of several generations not only as a composer with impeccable taste, but also as a researcher, innovator and educator.

Boris Barabanov