an excerpt from Ivan Tcherepnin, Dialogue with Myself (Thought on Evolution), article for festival book, Korsholm Festival, Finland, 1990

IVAN: ... I can really say, "Evolution begins at home." ... I was only two years old when my grandfather died, so I cannot say that I knew him directly. His early music was in the grand Russian style: tone poems, ballets, operas, concerti, songs. Although he was traditional in this way, he was by no means a reactionary and it is indicative of his progressive spirit that my grandfather took the young and rebellious Sergei Prokofiev under his wing at the St. Petersburg Conservatory (not known at the time for its musical tolerance).
        Later, my grandfather's music became influenced by French impressionism, to such an extent that friends nicknamed him "Debussy-Ravelovitch." But towards the end of his life all traces of impressionism disappeared and he developed a very restrained style based on the modes of Russian liturgical chant. Seeing it on paper, I remember thinking that this music seemed almost dull to me and I felt afraid that I would not like it. But only a year ago, I heard a performance of one of these late works, the oratorio "The Descent of the Holy Virgin into Hell", and was deeply moved by its simplicity and power. It made me appreciate how my grandfather's music had evolved, from traditional to "modernist/impressionist" and finally to a totally personal style which had resonances which went beyond being simply an expression of his milieu. In sum, his music went from the Current/Past tot he New/Modern to the ver Old/Original (or radical, as in radix, "root").

IVAN 2: Nothing gets older faster than the new!

IVAN: And nothing gets newer better than the old!

IVAN 2: Given the proper curing! Otherwise it rots! As does anything, new, old or present, without proper care and attention, otherwise known as love. I wrote the third movement of THE NEW CONSONANCE as an homage to my grandfather. It is based on the medieval tune "L'homme Arme". The music is stripped to bare essentials, muted and bleached, as if woven into an ancient tale told by a grandfather to his grandson.

IVAN 2: Have you ever written an homage to your father?

IVAN: In a way, ALL my music is an homage to my father. While I was growing up, my father's music was so much around me that it practically became part of my bones! Later this presented a challenge for me to find my own voice, a different sort of challenge than my father faced vis a vis his father.
        My father often used to say that my grandfather was a great man and that his music was underrated. Yet one could hardly imagine musical lifestyles more contrasting than those of my father and grandfather. Whereas my grandfather's music is characterized by its reserve, reverence and tradition, my father's early works were just the opposite: brash, provocative, autodidactic. In 1929, the premiere of his First Symphony in Paris provoked such a scandal that the police had to be called in to restore order after the second movement, scored for percussion only. ... As the years passed, my father kept on adding elements to his musical vocabulary, including more and more, excluding less and less. Towards the end of his life, he had come full circle from revolutionary to evolutionary -- his language reached the many rather than the few. The unspoken goal was universal appeal, to bring people togetther. In my eyes, my father was not so much an eclectic as he was a composer who discovered a source of life in music, without which all intellectural artifices and stylistic constructs would remain forever sterile. In his own words, he found his musical mission.

IVAN 2: A hard act to follow!

IVAN: In fact, eventually I did my best not to follow it. Early on, I wrote music purely for my own pleasure and as gifts for my parents and friends. My father had done the same as he was growing up. But by the time I entered college, I was looking fo rdifferent areas of interest -- unsuccessfully, it seems. Music simply gave too much pleasure to give up. So I began to distrust pleasure. "Beyond the pleasure principle!" What was difficult for me at the time (the early '60's) was to find a way to assimilate two musical currents which seemed mutually exclusive: post Webern serialism [compositions based on an arrangement of patterns of pitch, rhythm, or dynamics; twelve-tone music] and the more traditional contemporary music of which my father's was an example. Like many others at the time, I found the most exciting challenges to be in the area of serial composition. But what made the situation especially sensitive for me was that I had a deeply embedded sense of the beauty and integrity of my father's music so that I could never dismiss it as being passe. I remember analyzing some of my father's radical works from the 20's and finding proto-serial elements in it, but I also knew that my father felt that these works, revolutionary as they might have been at the time, were not the ones he would wish to be remembered by. So while I composed using my version of the serial system, at the same time, I also wrote pieces in my "natural" Russo-Franco-Chiense-American style. Such a piece is DEUX ENTOURAGES SUR UN THEME RUSSE.
        During this time I was studying at Harvard University. My composition teacher was Leon Kirchner, a student of Schoenberg who had a distrust of all dogma and had evolved a personal musical language of great natural complexity. Boulez came and taught for one semester, and Cage also came to give a lecture. Many idease were in the air.
        Kirchner's insistence on the integrity of hte music itself and not its intellectual rationalizations was like a fortress which I trie dto batter down by championing avant-garde music, change and serial ideas. But it withstood all attacks and abides to this day, a tribute to the man and his music.
        In 1965, I went for a year to study in Koln with Stockhausen and Pousseur. By this time the cracks were beginning to show in th serial front. It became more and more evident that everything, ANYthing was possible, and that the great revolutionary step into generalized serialism which had been predicted was to become just another eedy in the evolutionary tide.

IVAN 2: What did your father think of all of this?

IVAN: He felt a certain pride to see that his sons were not taking anything for granted. It also probably gave him a vicarious pleasure to see Serge and me go into the thick of the new music as he had done in th 20's. He was especially enthusiastic of our ventures into electronic music since it represented new and uncharted territory, "the music of the future," he would call it.
        And so, for may years, even my most outrageous musical experiemnts were assented to by my father. Perhaps there was some inner frustration on my part that resulted from his forbearance and openness, and maybe I was testing how far I needed to go to reach the point where my music would no longer be understood or approved of by him. That point was reached in 1976, when my father came to a live-electronic piece I had composed for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York. When we came home after the concert, my father seemed distraught and said something to the effect that he couldn't understand how I could consder what I had done to be music. I was too exhausted from the performance to answer, but I remember my brother Serge coming to my rescue. The new day, the same peice was performed and this time my father accepted it, even liked it. But nevertheless, I had reached a crossroad. I no longer felt the need to set artificial limits to my musical expression, no need to cut myself off from y musical roots, no need to cut off my nose to spite my face. No more!
        My father died in 1977, and shortly thereafter I made a transcription for orchestra of the very piece which had led to that crossroad. I called it LE VA ET LE VIENT, "the coming and going."