2003
Large Organ Notebook No. 1





To Princess L.B. Shishkhanova
--
Music
Yuri Butsko's "Large Organ Notebook" can be called a unique phenomenon in modern literature for this instrument, at least it is certainly unique among organ works created in Russia. The only analogue, which probably served in some sense as a model for the composer, are the organ cycles of the great French composer Olivier Messiaen, one of which, by the way, has a similar name - "Livre d'orgue", that is, "Organ Book". By "book" (or "notebook") is meant not just a composition of great length, but a book with a capital letter, a book that reveals (or hides in itself) an image of the world.
The style of the "Great Organ Notebook" is connected with the "Polyphonic Concerto", but also differs greatly from it. The "Notebook" contains motifs of ancient Russian chants: here we can hear recitative "refrains" from the requiem "Remember, O Lord, the souls of Thy departed servants" (in the Toccata and, as a distant memory, in the Pastoral) and the Trisagion (the so-called "funeral" - in the Eternal Movement). But the point is not so much in using chants as themes for development, as in creating a certain intonational, melodic, and therefore figurative field of the composition. Chants from Orthodox usage form the basis of the "Great Organ Notebook", its cantus firmus.
At the same time, all parts of the "Notebook" are built on the models of ancient forms of Western European instrumental music; some of them - prelude, passacaglia, toccata - are especially often found in organ literature of different centuries and acquire their own circle of images and associations in it. This "memory of the genre" (or rather, of different genres) is perceived by the listener throughout the entire composition. The intersection of such distant from each other, if not in time, then in space, and also in meaning, phenomena as Orthodox singing and ancient European genres, creates a completely special style of the "Large Organ Notebook", unusual even for the composer's own work.
