Ivan Tcherepnin was born in Paris, France on February 5, 1943. Grandson of composer-conductor Nikolai Tcherepnin, and son of the celebrated Alexander Tcherepnin and the noted pianist and pedagogue Ming Tcherepnin, Ivan won international recognition as a composer, as had his grandfather and father before him. In the 60s he entered the Harvard University to complete a degree in music, studying principally with Leon Kirchner. Like several other gifted composers of his generation, young Tcherepnin developed an expertise in electronic music media that at times reversed the pupil-teacher relationship. When Kirchner's unfinished opera Lily was scheduled by the New York City Opera, Tcherepnin's guidance and assistance in realizing the electronic and taped portions proved invaluable in bringing the piece to the stage. (It may be noted that his elder brother Serge had provided similar assistance to their father in the production of an electronic radio-drama score, and later developed the Serge synthesizer, which Ivan frequently used in his electronic pieces.)
Concurrently with his work at Harvard, Tcherepnin studied in Europe with Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. After holding teaching positions at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Stanford University, Tcherepnin joined the music faculty of Harvard University in 1972, where he also served as Director of the Harvard Electronic Music Studio.
He composed strings, orchestras… For the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York, redrawing the too-often artificial boundaries between art and reality, he found a kindred spirit in John Cage, who became a close friend, and took a lively interest in Tcherepnin’s music. When Cage gave Harvard’s Norton Lectures he was Tcherepnin’s house guest, and on their frequent mushrooming excursions together Cage shared his exhaustive knowledge of mycological lore. Contemplation of the Cageian mysteries of indeterminacy further widened the scope of Ivan's art.
In Tcherepnin’s work literally dozens of musics—traditional and revolutionary, old and new, instrumental and electronic—co-exist and cross-pollinate. One of his primary artistic goals was to keep the ear-mind connection open and free of artificial constraints. He believed this connection was the most important avenue for communication and development available to humans. Reveling in the interaction between performance and composition, Ivan prized his mastery of Western technological instruments (the piano and synthesizer) while also delighting in such traditional “low tech” instruments as the psaltery and the Persian santur, and allowing the worlds to interpenetrate in a manner that sometimes obliterated the distinction between “live” and “electronic.” This marriage of east and west, old and new informed his ambitious Santur Opera (1977), for santur, electronics, and projections, which was staged in 1981 by Peter Sellars at the Paris Festival d’Automne and won the Grand Prize of the 1982 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. I feel proud to feature a selection of such seminal work and pay homage to a man who left far too soon, died in 1998. R.I.P.