Hello! I am a music major and on the side of my usual work I love studying obscure composers. I've so far delved far into Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and was hoping to get in-depth on a composer from the same time period, Nikolai Obukhov (or: Obouchov, Obuhow, Obuhov*, Obuhkov). I see Obuhov used a lot in American spellings.
I was able to find one book discussing him briefly in a book at my school's library, and it says this passage:
There are also stories, possibly apocryphal, that Obukhov, in the throes of fanatical and ecstatic composition, would write the bar numbers in red, using his own blood. Obukhov worked on [The Book of Life, Le livre de vie] all his life, and the main work has a number of subsidiary pieces stemming from it, sometimes in multiple versions. The total work, covering some two thousand (!) pages, has apparently never been presented, although fragments have been played by conductors such as Koussevitzky, and French Radio has broadcast come excerpts. A film made by Germaine Dulas on the subject had some distribution in France and Italy in 1935.
I am hungry for the media described here... is there any way of knowing if French Radio had those broadcasts saved and archived, and if I would be able to request copies? Also, how would I go about trying to locate the Dulas film? If anyone here could help me, or direct me towards help, it would be greatly appreciated.
Welcome to Caffarelli's Advanced Fast Hand Finger Wizard Master Class in researching obscure musicians with messy name variations.
When a man has many a name, librarians strip him down to size in the Library of Congress Name Authority File. Here is your dudes official librarian-given name. It is often different than his god-given/mother-given name, but librarians outrank them, so this is the name he will almost certainly appear under, in library catalogs. If he's under a different name, that cataloger is extremely slobby, and catalogers are very rarely mentally slobby.
Now, we take that name, and we dump it into Worldcat. If it doesn't exist in Worldcat, for all intents and purposes, it doesn't exist. Here he has 101 hits in all the libraries represented in the OCLC consortium. Lots of sheet music!
A secret tool for researching musicians only is the mysterious and wonderful MusicSack database. Here are all their citations for bibliographic info on him.
The French radio recordings are a bit more mysterious, but how old is this book you're citing? He seems to have a lot more recent recordings of his music you could easily get your hands on, this and this are both widely held in libraries, and you could probably ILL a copy, or request your library buy one of these, since they're new. Since your library supports a music program, these would both be perfectly appropriate purchase requests for you to make.
The film gave me trouble, because her name is actually Germaine Dulac, not Dulas. IMDB is usually a little better for research film, library catalogers don't encode near as much metadata about films as IMDB does, so pick through these films and try to figure out which ones might have his music.