Georgi Mushel

Gueorgui Mouchel / Georgi Mushel, Russian composer (1909-1989)

Hello everyone,

I am looking for information about the Russian composer Gueorgui Mouchel / Georgi Mushel, a distant descendant of an officer in Napoleon's army who had taken root in Russia during the 1812 campaign.

Born in 1909 in Tambov, Russia, Georgi Mushel was a student of Gnessin, Alexandrov, Oborin and Myaskovsky when he studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory from 1930 to 1936. Then, he taught piano at the Conservatory of Tashkent and became professor of composition in 1976. Influenced by the local traditional music, he died in Tashkent in 1989.

The Toccata, which is derived from an Uzbek three-movement suite, includes an aria and fugue and is one of the few organ works of the author which have been published (by Peters) in a volume entitled "Soviet Organ Music".

Georgi Mushel has also composed an opera, four ballets, a cantata, three symphonies, six piano concertos, chamber music, vocal works, film music, organ preludes as well as a series of fugues on Uzbek themes and melodies (1947).

Recently, the Toccata was played at St John's Cathedral in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2007, by the British organist Dame Gillian Weir in 2008 at Saints-Anges Church (Canada) and in 2010 in the Hallgrimskirkja of Reykjavik (Iceland) as well as at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

The Uzbek suite was also recently performed by the Russian organist Slava Chevliakov in 2009 on the organ of the French city of Coignières, then by the Russian concert artist Anastasia Chertok in 2010 on the pipe organ of Notre-Dame de Paris. More recently, the work of Georgi Mushel has been played on the pipe organ of the cathedral of Coutances (Normandy) by Mr. Slava Chevliakov on 21 July 2011.

Should you have any information about this Russian composer of French origin or about his work, do not hesitate to contact me! (Note: the issue N°15 of the Norman magazine "Les Godiaôs" provides a summary of my research undertaken since 2006 - for more information, please contact Michele DIESNIS at Saussemesnil – 50700, France).

Thanking you in advance,

Maurice Mouchel -Vallon

Coutances, Normandy, France

(Note: alternative spelling of “Georgi Aleksandrovich Mushel” , in Russian - Георгий Александрович Мушель)

Read the Russian version of this blog at http://gueorgi-mouchel.over-blog.com/pages/_-4222642.html).

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June 28, 2011

Since May 2011, Georgi Mushel’s career and works are better known thanks to the information and initiatives of Professor Akrom Vakhidov. On the other hand, due to his excellent relationship with the composer, Pr. Vakhidov became the sole trustee by will of all his musical and pictorial works.
Finally, thanks to Pr. Vakhidov again, we are in possession of some piano scores that reveal the richness of writing of the composer. Besides, all this information has been reflected in the local press after the organ concert performed on 21 July 2013 in Coutances, Normandy, by Slava Chevliakov*.
MMV

* (Of Russian origin, Mr. Slava Chevliakov was born in Budapest (Hungary) in 1970. In 1989, he joined the prestigious National Higher Conservatory “Tchaikovsky” in Moscow where he attended organ classes specializing in piano, composition, history of music, orchestration, ethnomusicology, etc.  His teachers include Alexei Parshin for organ (a disciple of Marie-Claire Alain) and Helen Gladilina for piano (a disciple of Heinrich Neuhaus).

In 1995, during the same year, he was awarded the first prizes (with Honors) in organ, piano and musicology, and in 1997 he won the first prize in Development and was awarded the State diploma of the Russian National organ Academies. In 1998, he won the first prize of the organ contest organized by UFAM (Paris) and was unanimously awarded the first prize of excellence cum laude by the National Conservatory of Rueil-Malmaison, followed in 1999 by the first prize of virtuosity of the development cycle of the same Conservatory (class of Susan Landale).

Slava Chevliakov holds the French “State Diploma” as well as the Aptitude Certificate for organ teachers. He is the sole and only organ player of foreign origin to have won this award at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique de Paris.

Wishing to perfect himself with great international organ masters and to immerse himself in the best traditions in the field of interpretation, Slava Chevliakov worked with Michel Chapuis at the Conservatoire de Paris, Jean Guillou in Zurich, Gillian Weir in Luxembourg, André Isoir, Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini , Susan Landale and Sophie-Véronique Choplin Cauchefer for improvisation.

He is an assistant professor of the organ class in the “Tchaikovsky” National higher conservatory in Moscow (1995-1997), a pianist-organist accompanying the choir of the city of Rueil-Malmaison, a trainer of the music teachers of the French ministry of Education (2000-2004), an organist of the church of Saint-Louis de Garches (2000-2005), and he is currently an appointed organist at the Church of St.-Léon in Paris.)

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Link to a recording of a concert with GM’s music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RODTt1hYOqY 

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A two-sided artist: painter and musician

While his music is very important, it would be unfair not to highlight his pictorial production, especially since the latter is not unrelated to the first, despite the apparent difference between these two arts. What should be emphasized, beyond the number of his works, is the diversity of musical genres covered by Georgi Mushel. We thus find in his works: opera music, ballet, symphonies, orchestral works, piano, organ, chamber music, several keyboard works, vocal works, chorals, film music, studies, piano and violin, musical dramas as well as stage music.

It is to be noted that in Georgi Mushel’s work, painting went along with music, i.e. not as a distraction from the latter, but as a source of inspiration. Akrom Vakhidov provided us with a list of paintings exhibited at concerts in Uzbekistan, Russia and Germany:

1° Solitude - 2° Envasion - 3° Dusty Storm - 4° Wind in the Cane - 5° The Morning Distance - 6° The Spring Song - 7° The Morning Serenade - 8° On the devastated Hills Afrasiab - 9° Samarkand in the lights of the Raising Sun - 10° Evening Harmony  - 11° Ancestors - 12° At the Sunset - 13° The Morning Harmony - 14° Fugue in Samarkand Tradition - 15° The Crying Wounds of the war - 16° The Dying Star - 17° E=mc 2 - 18° White Balloon - 19° Radioactive Forest - 20° Black Sun - 21° Black Lake - 22° Remains of Activities of Human Beings - 23° Space -Time - 24° In the Waves of the gravitation - 25° Space Strangers - 26° Eternal Argument - 27° From the Series "Distant Worlds" - 28° On a Distant Planet - 29° Inhabitants of Distant Worlds - 30° Martians.

In support of the assertion that music and painting go hand in hand, Akrom Vakhidov claims that Georgi Mushel managed to embody his music in some of his paintings. Thus, as he wrote the music for the film entitled "The Cotton Season", Georgi Mushel painted both "Faraway Morning" and "November". Similarly, during the staging of the ballet "The BALLERINA", he painted "The Dance of Spring”. Quite rare, if not unique, this feature was worth noting anyway.

A final aspect of the career of Georgi Mushel must be mentioned: before him, Uzbek music was generally devoted to local folklore. But through many of his compositions, he contributed to the development of classical music in Uzbekistan. He was thus the first to create an opera (“Farkhad and Skirine”), a ballet (“The Ballerina”), symphonies, a suite for organ, a musical drama (Moukini), music for the film “Cotton Season”, a series of choral works as well as some chamber music.

Georgi Mushel faced for a long period the criticisms and envy of many of his fellow composers: his foreign origin was a good pretext but the originality and richness of his work were undoubtedly the real reasons for this.

Finally, a friend of the Russian culture places the work of Georgi Mushel in its historical and artistic context, without pretending to penetrate the secret of his inspiration, as it is true that its mystery is perhaps not the least of its beauties.

MMV
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The Pictorial Work of Georgi Mushel

(by Patrice Mouchel-Vallon)

Let us explore here what Georgi Mushel’s painting reveals about the artist himself, about his belonging to the Russian culture and about the feelings of Soviet artists during the Cold War.

The lack of dating and the reduced number of reproductions do not prevent us from bringing out the main features of Georgi Mushel’s painting. Having worked from the Stalin era until the fall of the Berlin Wall, his art, as should be remembered, is that of a man in exile, cut off from his family roots and careful not to earn the wrath of the authorities. His collection, even if one ignores the degree of his notoriety in Uzbekistan, recalls, if necessary, the existence of a contemporary Russian painting that expressed itself outside the official rules of socialist realism, which remained in force for a long time.

This painting is not of great daring for its time, being confined to the figurative register abandoned by the European avant-gardes. However, it still belongs to the same landscape vein as that of the earliest works of Russian artists in the twentieth century such as Kandinsky and Malevich. This vein reflects the considerable influence of French impressionist painting, from the exhibition of paintings by Monet in Moscow.

But the similarity ends there: his painting is entirely based on the play of lights and colors through the foliage and water bodies. As in the Fauve painting, the colors are not quite those of nature. Better yet, a glowing light invades the scene as in the paintings of Turner, but without the viewer being able to discern whether it is of natural or artificial origin. Humans disappear from the scene and there only remains the fascinated or worried way the painter looks at nature, which here is a close or familiar nature. Here, there are no Siberian panoramas or views of the Central Asian steppes.

This strange relationship of the artist to nature is a feature of Russian culture, whether in literature, painting or music. A first context, which is specific to the twentieth century, adds itself to it: it should be remembered that the Soviet era celebrated instead the victory of Man on the indomitable Nature, with major building projects and mass displacements to the East. Without any environmental concern whatsoever.

Then, a second context comes into the picture: the fascination of the East which is another constant of Russian culture. Both the painter and the musician show an equal interest in Uzbek culture, their adopted province. It is impossible to say whether this interest has been imposed by circumstances or if it reflects a gradual acculturation of the exile to the country that nurtured his soul for over 40 years.

This concern to integrate popular culture as a need to regain one’s lost roots can be found in many Russian intellectuals. One of the pioneers of Russian orientalism was the painter Nicolas Roerich, one of the unsung apostles of theosophy, a half-spiritual half-philosophical doctrine which reached its heyday before and especially after the First World War and played a significant role in the establishment of peace-keeping international institutions. It offered nothing more than to have a lost Humanity recover the values in existence among the least developed nations of Central and Eastern Asia, i.e. values ​​of peace and sharing, on a background of return to nature.

One of the Anglo-Saxon heirs of this thinking is the New Age movement that flourished during the Cold War and which we find in Georgi Mushel’s artistic equivalent in the East: hope for an extraterrestrial life, anti-nuclear pacifism, communion with trees, which themes express on both sides of the Iron Curtain human aspirations for a better and, if possible, less paranoid world. The Soviet authorities could not, however, censor this internal thinking as they were officially champions of peace against the Western imperialists.

On the other hand, the question of the relationship of the musician with his painting remains entirely unanswered. The virtuosity, the search for complexity and the love of performance which are so specific to his music are not to be found in his paintings. Everything happens, on the contrary, as if his painting was used to appease a personal turmoil, as a therapy that does not speak its name. This obsessive light that haunts his paintings is certainly the expectation of a coming, but which one?