Russian Music 2.0 program and its first awardees
On June 30, 2020 the Aksenov Family Foundation launched the annual program "Russian Music 2.0" aimed at developing and renewing the traditions of the Russian composing school and presenting its best achievements in Russia and abroad. The goal of the program is to initiate the creation of new musical pieces by the most prominent Russian composers of the new wave. The Russian Music 2.0 project has become a new initiative of the Aksenov Family Foundation, known for its creation of the Russian Society of Friends of the Salzburg Festival, its support of the projects of conductor Theodore Kurentzis and other notable phenomena of contemporary Russian culture. The new project is an example of how the landscape of contemporary Russian music can be shaped with the support of private capital, representing a variety of artistic movements.
In 2020, nine composers became laureates of the program: Mark Buloshnikov, Dmitry Burtsev, Oleg Gudachev, Daria Zvezdina, Daniel Pilchen, Marina Poleukhina, Alexey Sysoev, Boris Filanovsky, and Alexander Khubeyev.
Today several dozen outstanding composers belonging to different generations, stylistic currents and aesthetic platforms work in Russia, while there is no systematic practice of new works commissioning, the driving force of the compositional process all over the world. With the Russian Music 2.0 program, we would like to create the preconditions for the emergence of an ecosystem for new academic music in Russia, and at the same time create optimal conditions in which its composers can express themselves.
The names of the laureates, who each received a monetary award for their work, were determined by an international expert council. The program's board included leading experts in the field of contemporary academic music: composer and professor Yannis Kyriakides of Royal Conservatory of The Hague, Russian-German composer Sergey Nevsky, director of the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Victoria Korshunova, conductor and founder of the Questa Musica ensemble, Philippe Chizhevsky, Russian music critics Yulia Bederova and Dmitry Renansky, and Harvard University composer and professor Chaya Chernovin. They chose the laureates from among Russian authors working in the field of academic music.
Aksenov Family Foundation intends to present musical pieces by Russian composers of the new wave in Europe. The project "Russian Music 2.0" itself, according to the idea of its initiators, should become an annual event.
