The Five

Hear this out loudPauseComprised of César Cui, Aleksandr Borodin, Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolay Rimksy-Korsakov, this group of inspired musicians, steeped in Russian society, worked to remove outside cultural influences and create a uniquely Russian sound in their compositions.

Music 101

• Melody. Let's begin our brief study of these elements with melody - not because it is more important than rhythm, but because the first music we will study in the Middle Ages will be Gregorian chant.
• Texture.
• Rhythm.
• Form.
• Harmony.

Hear this out loudPauseBalakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov composed in their spare time, and all five of them were young men in 1862, with Rimsky-Korsakov at just 18 the youngest and Borodin the oldest at 28. All five were essentially self-taught and eschewed conservative and "routine" musical techniques.

Some characteristics of the group's music are:

• Tonal mutability. They also succeeded at artfully preserving “Tonal mutability,” a distinctive aspect of Russian folk.
• Heterophony.
• Parallel thirds, fourths, and fifths.
• Whole tone scale.
• The Russian submediant.
• “Octatonic” or diminished scale.
• Modular rotation.
• Pentatonic scale.

Hear this out loudPauseTchaikovsky was a contemporary of "The Five", also known as the "Mighty Handful", a group of prominent 19th-century Russian composers that included Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Balakirev.

Hear this out loudPausePyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky With his phenomenal talent for melody - as evident in his operatic masterpiece Eugene Onegin as it is in his much-loved ballet The Nutcracker - Tchaikovsky is probably the most popular Russian composer of all time.

5 Stages of the Music Production Process

• Composition. The composition stage is the process of generating musical ideas.
• Arrangement. Music arrangement is the art of taking your musical ideas and laying them out along a timeline to build a final piece of music.
• Sound Design and Production.
• Mixing.
• Mastering.

Hear this out loudPauseAmong ethnomusicologists, it is the most widely used system for classifying musical instruments. Instruments are classified using 5 different categories depending on the manner in which the instrument creates the sound: Idiophones, Membranophones, Chordophones, Aerophones, & Electrophones.

Hear this out loudPauseThese works are musical stories, told by voices from within a vast land, which take the listener deep inside the Russian soul. From tragic to sarcastic, from mystical to picturesque to passionate, no other music so vividly describes a country, its people and its changing culture.

Hear this out loudPauseMily Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin today are referred to as “The Russian Five”.

Hear this out loudPauseWe speak visually, and then translate the tone of each script into corresponding music. It's the deep understanding of tempo, rhythm, and timing that makes the content we create compelling to the ears, as well as the eyes - enhancing both stories and audience engagement.

Hear this out loudPauseTchaikovsky approached his Fifth Symphony from a position of extreme self-doubt, nearly always his posture vis-à-vis his incipient creations. In May 1888, he confessed in a letter to his brother, Modest, that he feared his imagination had dried up, that he had nothing more to express in music.