Much of Alfred Schnittke's music, like that of his near-contemporary Gyorgy Ligeti, seems to delight in the dramaturgy of the ill-fated machine: some device, some mechanism of often uncanny humanoid qualities which, in the process of efficiently executing its industrious raison d'etre, chokes on a loose gear and falls to pieces. The spectacle seems to come ingrained with its own tragicomic energy: funny, because hey, this isn't an actual person, and yet also a tad sadder, because hey, this poor thing wasn't even granted personhood before it bit the bit. And it's an old trope too, at least a century, from Stravinsky's poor Petrouchka through Kafka's writing machine and Yves Tangeuy's self-suiciding sculptures.



Schnittke's relatively early Improvisation and Fugue, from 1965, has all the hallmarks of belonging to this rhetorical tradition, and unlike its predecessor, 1963's darker, more violent Prelude and Fugue, the later work is more sprightly and polker-faced, its immanent catastrophe enlivened by a fleet-footed virtuosity and a polystylistic bent soon to become Schnittke's identity-card. The work was written for the composer's wife, pianist Irina Schnittke, and is a kind of show-piece both for the instrument and the composer, sure of itself right up to its scrupulously engineered demise.



The "machine" here takes the guise of a twelve-tone technique which cultivates not one but two rows—and hence, later on, a double fugue of considerable invention and complexity. But while Schnittke practiced serialism dutifully through the 60's (and always against strict Soviet party-lines), he may never have exploited the techniques without some ambivalence; his mind seems to have been "ironized" quite early on—there is no active sense here, for instance, of technological utopia, as perhaps with many contemporary composers on the other side of the iron curtain. And hence the technique, while employed, is tacitly critiqued from a perspective slightly beyond it. That perspective brings in the very things threaten the purity of serialism in the first place, especially in an extended section in acid-jazz style, with dodecaphonic control parsed out into a walking bass and a funky, syncopated high solo line.



Eventually, the machine begins to spin out of control, and that monolothic cipher of evil in Schnittke's music—the chromatic cluster—becomes more prevalent, appearing to mock the careful pitch-calibration with its violently indiscriminate walls of muddy sound. The fugue's bathetic ending is one of Schnittke's first essays in the architecture of ruins: it meticulously builds up to and explodes itself into clusters and catatonic repetitions, the wealth of its fine technology berserking into the gestures of inventive poverty. But in truth, such music doesn't eradicate the expressive, but moves it—one might even say "preserves it"—into another sphere; this is perhaps the essential quality of the humanoid as an expressive category. It exists to allow a perspective on the human, which is in turn kept safe from mere mechanics, and so kept magic.

© Seth Brodsky, All Music Guide