Biography
Born in Leningrad, 27 May 1950. Russian composer. He studied at the Leningrad Conservatory with Chistyakov and Yevlakhov (1969-75), after which he took a postgraduate course with Arapov (1979-81) and then enrolled as a student of art history at the Sorbonne in 1995. He joined the Composers’ Union in 1977 and served on the board of its St Petersburg section in 1989. He taught composition at the Choral Academy of the Leningrad Academic Cappella (1972-81) and at the Music School attached to the conservatory (1981-92). Belimovґs work is emblematic of his quest to synthesize Eastern and Western thought in the structure of both sound and form of a composition, and is evident not only in the totality but also in the rich, inner content of a single, isolated sound. Another facet of his experimentation resides in the invention of what he calls a supermodal technique which is applied in a unique form to each work; pieces written or, as the composer would have it, ‘cultivated’ in this manner include the Third Symphony and Sad raskhodyashchikhsya tropok (‘The Garden of Divergent Paths’) of 1990 and 1991 respectively. He further developed the technique in Za zerkalom tishinп (‘Beyond the Mirror of Silence’), written in 1992 and performed a year later in the In Tune II festival of microtonal music held in Britain in 1993. Since that time his interests have focussed on the broadening of instrumental timbral capablities; the ‘cordepiano’ technique he developed in 1996 allows for the production on a piano of microtonal intervals, harmonics and multiphonics. In 1997 he attempted to create a virtual interactive musical text with the composition I svet neprekhodyashchiy za oprokinutпmi nebesami (‘And the Light Inextinguishable beyond the Clouds Cast Asunder’).
