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Alexander Galich

Aleksandr Galich (Russian: Александр Аркадьевич Га́лич, October 19, 1918 – December 15, 1977), was a Russian poet, screenwriter, playwright, and singer-songwriter. Galich is a pen name, a sort of acronym of his last name, first name, and patronymic (Ginzburg Aleksandr Arkadievich).

Alexander Ginzburg was born on October 19, 1918 in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk) into a family of Jewish intellectuals. His father, Aron Samoilovich, was an economist, and his mother, Fanni Borisovna Eksler, worked in a music conservatory. For most of his childhood he lived in Sevastopol. Before World War II, he entered the Gorky Literary Institute, then moved to Stanislavsky's Operatic-Dramatic Studio, and then to the Studio-Theatre of A. Arbuzov and V. Pluchek (in 1939).

He wrote plays and screenplays, and in the late 1950s, he started to write songs and sing them accompanying himself with his guitar. In some way springing from the romance tradition and the art of Aleksandr Vertinsky, Galich developed his own trend within this genre. He practically single-handedly created the genre of "bard song". Many of his songs spoke of the Second World War and the lives of concentration camp inmates -- subjects which Vladimir Vysotsky also began tackling at around the same time. They became popular with the public and were made available via magnitizdat.

The first songs, though rather innocent politically, nevertheless were distinctly out of tune with the official Soviet aesthetics. They marked a turning point in creation and life of Galich, before that quite a successful Soviet man of letter. This turn was also urged by the case of the aborted premiere of the play Matrosskaya Tishina written by Galich for the newly open Sovremennik Theatre. The play, already rehearsed, was banned by censors, who claimed that the author had a distorted view of the role of Jews in the Great Patriotic War. This incident was later described by Galich in the story Genralnaya Repetitsiya (Dress Rehearsal).

Galich's increasingly sharp criticism of the Soviet regime in his music caused him many problems. In 1971, he was excluded from the Soviet Writers' Union, which he had joined in 1955. In 1972, he was expelled from the Union of Cinematographers. That year he became baptized in the Orthodox Church.

Galich was forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1974. He initially lived in Norway for one year, where he made his first recordings outside of the USSR which were broadcasted on Radio Liberty, a congress-funded radio station outlawed in USSR. His songs became immensely popular in the underground scene for being openly critical towards the Soviet government. He later moved to Munich, where he joined the Russian anti-communist organization NTS. He finally moved to Paris where, on the evening of December 15, 1977, he was found dead by his wife, clutching a Grundig stereo recording antenna plugged into a power socket. While his death appears to have been an accident, the opinion that it was either an assassination or a suicide is widespread, as his wife was absent the whole day and no one witnessed the exact circumstances of his death.^[1] In 1988, he was posthumously re-instated into the Writers' and Cinematographers' Unions. In 2003, the first memorial plaque for Galich was put up on a building in Akademgorodok (Novosibirsk) where he performed in 1968. That same year, the Alexander Galich Memorial Society was founded.

Alexander Galich, like most bards, had a fairly minimal musical background. He played his songs on a seven string Russian guitar, which was fairly standard at the time. He often wrote in the key of D minor, relying on very simple chord shapes and fingerpicking techniques. He had basic piano playing skills as well.

Galich had a signature cadence that he would usually play at the conclusion of a song (and sometimes at the beginning). He would play the D minor shape on top of the fretboard (fret position 0XX0233, thickest to thinnest string, open G tuning), then slide down the fretboard with his left fingers to a higher voiced D minor (0 X X 0 10 10 12).

• (Russian) The Alexander Galich Club
• (English) More on Galich including sound samples and lyrics
• (English) Alexander Galich's bio
• (Russian) Galich page on the bard.ru site

References and notes