Nikolai Kulbin

Nikolai Ivanovich Kulbin (Николай Иванович Кульбин; 1868, Helsinki - 1917, Petrograd) was a Russian military doctor, painter, graphic artist, theatrical designer, art theorist, music theorist and patron of Russian Futurism.

Kulbin graduated as a physician from the Military Academy of Medicine in St. Petersburg in 1892, working there as a lecturer from 1905 and as a surgeon at the Russian Army Headquarters between 1903 and 1917. In 1915 he reached the rank of full councillor of state. (in Andrey Smirnov, Sound in Z, 2012, p 23)

Between 1908 and 1910, he was in the centre of the avant-garde scene in St. Petersburg, maintaining that all objects in the world were alive and that life itself was based on the universal principles of harmony and dissonance. Kulbin was one of the most influential Russian artists of the early 20th century. He took up art in 1908 at the age of forty, founding the Triangle ‘psychological’ artistic group and organised the Exhibition of Modern Trends in Art, which was the first ever show of avant-garde art in St. Petersburg. It was Kulbin who arranged Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's visit to Russia in 1914. (in Andrey Smirnov, Sound in Z, 2012, pp 22-23)

While Wassily Kandinsky was living abroad, he relied on friends back home to keep him apprised of cultural developments in Russia. When Arnold Schoenberg set off for St. Petersburg in 1912, Kandinsky arranged for his friend, Kulbin to meet him at the train station. “Kulbin knows everything, that is, he knows all the artists of importance,” Kandinsky wrote in a letter to Schoenberg. [1]

During this time Kulbin declared the liberation of sound from its captivity by tradition. His theoretical treatise Free music. Musical applications of the new theory of artistic creativity was based on his lectures conducted in 1908 and was printed in St. Petersburg in 1909. In 1912 it was published in Munich in the collection Der Blaue Reiter Almanac edited by Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. Its significance for Russia was comparable with that of the Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music published by Ferruccio Busoni in Europe in 1907. He asserted: (in Andrey Smirnov, Sound in Z, 2012, p 23)

"New possibilities are hidden in the sources of art itself, in nature. We are small organs of the living Earth, the cells of its body. Let’s listen to its symphonies, which make up part of the common concert of the Universe. It is a music of nature, natural Free music... Everybody knows that the sounds of the sea and wind are musical, that thunder develops a wonderful symphony, and of the music of birds." (trans. Andrey Smirnov)

Anticipating the upcoming musical trends he advocated, amazingly for the time, quarter and eighth-tone music:

"The music of nature is free in its choice of notes — light, thunder, the whistling of wind, the rippling of water, the singing of birds. The nightingale sings not only the notes of contemporary music, but the notes of all the music it likes. Free music follows the same laws of nature as does music and the whole art of nature. Like the nightingale, the artist of free music is not restricted by tones and halftones. He also uses quarter tones and eighth tones and music with a free choice of tones." (in Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp 141-146).

Kulbin was running a salon in St. Petersburg, a kind of informal association (in Russia this kind of establishment was called kruzhok, which was a very popular form of informal association, most typical for artists, poets and musicians all around the country) that included most Russian avant-garde artists, composers, poets, scholars and so forth, which permitted him to spread his ideas among the artistic community. Although he died on 6 March 1917 just after the February revolution, his influence on the young generation of revolutionary artists and scholars was significant. Among his direct or indirect followers were Arseny Avraamov, Leonid Sabaneev, Arthur Lourié and many others. (in Andrey Smirnov, Sound in Z, 2012, p 24)

Writings

• Svobodnaya muzyka. Primeneniye novoy teorii khudozhestvennogo tvorchestva k muzyke [Свободная музыка. Применение новой теории художественного творчества к музыке], St. Petersburg, 1909, 7 pp. (in Russian) [2]
• "Slobodnaya muzika", in Studiia impressionistov, ed. Nikolai Kulbin, St. Petersburg: Butovskoi, 1910, pp 15-26. (in Russian) [3]

External links

• Kulbin at German Wikipedia
• Kulbin at Russian Wikipedia