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This chapter offers an overview of the principal developments in scholarship on Soviet music over the last two decades, highlighting notable achievements and the opening up of important new areas of study, in addition to assessing the extent to which perspectives on the period have undergone considerable change. It concludes with a discussion of the sizeable lacunae in knowledge that remain, and attempts to suggest potentially fruitful areas for further enquiry.

This chapter deals with the history of Soviet music’s relations with the outside world from the mid-1920s until the end of the millennium. During all these decades the Soviet musical production of any coloration was perceived by the free Western world as something largely strange or alien, often exotic, almost ‘barbarian’. The inevitable spiritual distance between the Soviet world and the ‘non-Soviet’ one resulted in some significant misunderstandings. Though some important recent publications by Western musicologists display a well qualified view on the music and musical life in the Soviet Union, the traces of past naiveties and/or prejudices are still felt quite often even in the writings of major specialists.

This chapter discusses changes in Soviet musical life on the eve of the so-called Cultural Revolution, particularly the acceptance of key Western and Russian classics as part of the new Soviet state's censorship and cultural propaganda. It examines the efforts of musicians and scholars to build Soviet musical culture during the 1920s, which includes propagandising the generation of composers known as the Russian classics, focusing on three major figures: Pëtr Chaykovskiy, Modest Musorgskiy, and Mikhail Glinka. It also considers the Bolshevik government's support for ‘bourgeois’ music-making as well as the movement towards mass cultural education; the Soviet Union's canonising of major Western composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Richard Wagner; repertoire politics in the Leningrad Philharmonia and Moscow Philharmonia; debates in the music press over the issue of Western modernism; and the controversy surrounding the Imperial capella's retention of sacred music.

This chapter examines Soviet musical life during the war years and the transition to the Cold War. It first considers the repertoire of the Moscow Philharmonia and the Leningrad Philharmonia before discussing musical life in blockaded Leningrad during the period 1941–1944, with particular emphasis on the Radio Committee Orchestra and its broadcasts for the entire duration of the blockade. It then assesses the impact of Allied ‘internationalism’ on Soviet concert life, along with Joseph Stalin's partial restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church and its significance for sacred music. It also analyses the ‘rehabilitation’ of Sergey Rakhmaninov and Richard Wagner, the post-war investigation of Soviet music known as the Zhdanovshchina and how it cemented the new Soviet cultural foreign policy, and the dispute between Soviet composers and the distinguished pianist Aleksandr Gol'denveyzer. Finally, it evaluates attitudes toward Soviet music abroad and new Western works during the late 1930s and 1940s in post-war Soviet scholarship.

The Introduction outlines the rationale for the volume, and its pioneering status in attempting to represent a broad cross-spectrum of recent research by Russian and Western scholars working on Russian music since 1917 that illustrates how the field has transformed since glasnost’. It opens with a brief overview of the development of the research domain, indicating the principal changes in emphasis and approach, and the intellectual issues that have come to the fore. It proceeds to summarise the themes of the essays in the volume’s six parts, explaining their significance in relation to the wider domain of Russian cultural studies.

This chapter analyzes Soviet orientations toward international music competitions that flourished into a widespread system by 1958. Soviet violinists, pianists, and cellists were famously successful in these competitions, sometimes displaying stunning dominance by sweeping almost all the top spots. Considering how the Soviets thought about their rules, their juries, their contestants, and their likely outcomes, the chapter asserts that Soviet assumptions of superiority led them to call for “objective” judging—which they understood should mean Soviet success. They carefully chose their competitions throughout the 1940s and 1950s while building systems of education, preparation, and reward that made international music competitions an integral part of the domestic Soviet music education and concertizing systems.

This chapter examines the Soviet manipulation of international copyright law over an American film studio's fair use of music written by Soviet composers in an anti-Soviet film. At issue was the use of music written by Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and Aram Khachaturian in what American film scholars consider the first Hollywood Cold War film, William Wellman's The Iron Curtain. Soviet objections to the use of the music in the film eventually resulted in two court fights, one in New York and the other in Paris. Though the Soviet effort to stop the film screening in the United States failed, a strategic adjustment that included assigning distribution rights to a French publisher resulted in a major Soviet victory when subsequent distribution in Europe ceased.

The chapter is structured around several thorny issues that shape and define our conversation about Soviet music and contemporary Russian musical life across the East–West divide. Among these are the continuing exoticisation of Soviet music by the West and the persisting taboo areas in Russian musical research today. In conclusion, an attempt is made to suggest how these prejudices and blind spots can be overcome to further scholarship and to create the mutual understanding that is needed for effective dialogue between Russian and Western musicologists, especially in the light of renewed tensions between Russia and the West.

This chapter contrasts the successful international mobility of the violinist David Oistrakh with the distressing immobility of the pianist Stanislav Richter. In trailing Oistrakh around the world up through his first triumphant tour of the United States, the chapter shows that sending their superstars abroad allowed the Soviets to demonstrate one of the most compelling strengths of their system. However, the potential benefits of displaying that excellence were undermined by a perpetual obsession with control. Continuous secret police opposition derailed attempts by the Ministry of Culture to send Richter to the West—a clear proof of the notorious KGB security control over international tours. Exploring the relationship between touring and making collaborative recordings also suggests that the transimperial tours further facilitated the global standardization of orchestral sound.

This chapter examines the ‘Stalinist Enlightenment’ in music in relation to internationalism and Western modernism during the period 1932–1941. It first provides an overview of Joseph Stalin's Resolution ‘On the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organizations’ of April 1932 and its impact on Soviet cultural life before turning to the liquidation of RAPM and its implications for Soviet musicians. It then considers the changes in Stalinist cultural policy and how they affected major musical institutions and the repertoire they performed. It also discusses the ways that several Russian and Western composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Wagner, and Ludwig van Beethoven were canonised at the expense of their Soviet counterparts.

In the last two decades, the discipline of Russian music studies in Russia has undergone a profound transformation. The lifting of restrictions on access to hitherto inaccessible archival materials has made a wealth of new information available, and, in conjunction with the accompanying relaxation of censorship and increased contact with the West, has had far-reaching implications for scholarship. Open discussion of many aspects of the country’s musical past which were hitherto erased from standard Soviet accounts became possible, enabling the distortions and mendacities of Soviet scholarship to be corrected. The present chapter details some of the most significant achievements of Russian musicology in recent years, as well as the problems created by the challenging material conditions in which research on Russian music has to take place.

This chapter considers Blitzstein’s few years of co-habitation with Bill Hewitt; his continued leftist activities, including his involvement with the American-Soviet Music Society and his support for Henry Wallace; the growing censuring of him and his activities by anti-communists, including his inclusion in Red Channels; and his heightened championing of the amalgamation of popular and serious traditions as found in American, including Broadway musicals, and in the Soviet Union, including Prokofiev. This chapter also surveys his work from the immediate postwar years, including an unproduced show about Soviet-American friendship, Goloopchik; his incidental scores for Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest and G. B. Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion; and his ballet for Lincoln Kirstein and the New York City Ballet, The Guests, choreographed by Jerome Robbins.

This chapter charts the rise of Russian nationalism during the period 1937–1941. The year 1937 ushered in a new phase in Soviet historiography that explicitly placed Russia in a position of national authority over all the other Soviet republics. The historian David Brandenberger interpreted this change in terms of a need to consolidate popular opinion in the wake of the First Five-Year Plan. This chapter first considers the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, and particularly at the Moscow Philharmonia and Leningrad Philharmonia, and their impact on Soviet musical life. It then examines the renewed attacks on former RAPMovtsï, led by Moisey Grinberg, along with the reinvention of the Russian musical heritage by celebrating composers such as Pëtr Chaykovskiy. It also discusses the controversy surrounding the kuchka and the rebranding of Modest Musorgskiy.

The relationship between Soviet power and the musical life of the nation is usually viewed in terms of the domination of the latter by their former. This paper considers the other side of the coin: how Soviet power could act as an enabler to those whose predilections and personalities made for a propitious adaptation to the regime and its affordances.

This chapter examines the Soviet encounter with the cultural facilitator of the mid-century Western cultural production system: the impresario. Soon after their artists began touring the West, Soviet policy makers realized that the Western impresarios organized much more successful exchanges than did the system of cultural diffusion developed by the Soviets. The decision to entrust tours to impresarios instead of old networks of friendship societies resulted in more successful tours, but also in outright integration into the U.S.-dominated global economy of music production. Once Soviet cultural bureaucrats identified reliable impresarios, such as Sol Hurok in the United States, they adapted quickly to maximize the propaganda and financial advantages of those partnerships. In a material sense, the transimperial exchange of musicians created a short term win-win situation.

This chapter examines repertoire politics during the ‘Great Break’, also known as the ‘Great Turning Point’, which was announced as a formal change of direction in Soviet economics in 1929 and marked the end of the New Economic Policy (NEP). The impact of NEP on cultural life is often discussed in terms of the more aggressive ‘cultural revolution as class war’ period coinciding with the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932). Soviet music during this period found itself in a seemingly paradoxical situation: artists wholly devoted to the communist cause became divided along lines of avant-garde versus ‘proletarian’ art. This chapter considers the efforts of Lev Lebedinskiy and other members of RAPM (Russian association of proletarian musicians) to compose new music for the masses during the Cultural Revolution. It also looks at the Leningrad Philharmonia's repertoire between 1929 and 1932 and its initiatives to provide educational concerts for workers, along with RAPM's campaign against the surviving remnants of church music.

This chapter explains the genesis and results of the party's most dramatic intervention into professional music life. Party intervention in music was not an inevitable final stage of the Zhdanovshchina. Rather, explosive conditions of intra-professional and institutional competition intersected with a specific set of events to turn an unsuccessful staging of a new Soviet opera into a brouhaha that not only affected the music profession but also transformed the relationship between the Composers' Union and governmental and party oversight bodies. There could be no clearer evidence that the Soviet music profession was not and could not be autonomous than the public browbeating and humiliation meted out to the leading Soviet composers in the early months of 1948, and the wholesale change in leadership that accompanied it in the Composers' Union, the government's Committee on Artistic Affairs, and at the prestigious Bol'shoi Theater.

This chapter focuses on the anticosmopolitanism campaigns that followed the Zhdanovshchina. Participants, victims, and historians alike have correctly understood the anticosmopolitanism campaigns as primarily anti-Semitic. However, this understanding is incomplete. A close study of the music profession during the anticosmopolitanism campaigns demonstrates that anti-Semitism was an essential component of anticosmopolitanism, but in no sphere were the two coterminous. Instead, examining some of the organizational and practical battlegrounds in which bureaucrats, party ideologues, and music professionals struggled with “cosmopolitanism” and “cosmopolitans” reveal that anticosmopolitanism had a diverse array of coexistent meanings, intended and unintended. All these understandings of anticosmopolitanism together formed the context in which the Composers' Union once and for all solidified its authority, decisively squeezing the influence of the Committee on Artistic Affairs out of the production and control of Soviet music and expanding its direct connection with the Central Committee's cultural oversight apparatus.