Music of the Soviet Era: 1917-1991

Levon Hakobian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317091868
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This volume is a comprehensive and detailed survey of music and musical life of the entire Soviet era, from 1917 to 1991, which takes into account the extensive body of scholarly literature in Russian and other major European languages. In this considerably updated and revised edition of his 1998 publication, Hakobian traces the strikingly dramatic development of the music created by outstanding and less well-known, 'modernist' and 'conservative', 'nationalist' and 'cosmopolitan' composers of the Soviet era. The book's three parts explore, respectively, the musical trends of the 1920s, music and musical life under Stalin, and the so-called 'Bronze Age' of Soviet music after Stalin's death. Music of the Soviet Era: 1917–1991 considers the privileged position of music in the USSR in comparison to the written and visual arts. Through his examination of the history of the arts in the Soviet state, Hakobian's work celebrates the human spirit's wonderful capacity to derive advantage even from the most inauspicious conditions.

Part I
Remainders of the Silver Age and the Sturm und Drang of Soviet modernism

1 The distribution of forces on the musical scene during the early post-revolutionary period

Proletkul’t and poputchiki

The October Revolution of 1917 put an end to the so-called Silver Age of Russian culture and led to mass emigration among those who were involved in this wonderful, frenzied flourishing of arts, letters and humanities. The noted composers who left Russia during the first 12 post-revolutionary years include Sergey Rakhmaninov, Sergey Prokofiev, Nikolay and Aleksandr Cherepnin, Nikolay Obukhov (Obouhov), Ivan Vïshnegradsky (Wyschnegradsky), Nikolay Medtner, Sergey Lyapunov, Aleksandr Grechaninov, Aleksandr Glazunov and Iosif (Joseph) Schillinger. Igor Stravinsky, who had settled in France before World War I, had no reason to return to Russia after 1917.

The rate of the post-1917 emigration was unusually high, not only among Russian composers of both ‘conservative’ and ‘modernist’ wings, but also among leading performers. Those who left Russia during the several years after the Revolution include such celebrities as pianist and conductor Aleksandr Ziloti, conductor Sergey Kusevitzky (Koussevitzky), cellist Grigoriy Pyatigorsky (Piatigorsky), singer Fëdor Shalyapin (Chaliapin), violinist Natan Milstein and pianist Vladimir Gorovitz (Horowitz).

Artists, for the most part, showed no willingness to collaborate with the aggressive and adventurist new régime. At the same time, some important personalities of the avant-garde, ‘leftist’ orientation preserved certain illusions about the revolutionary intentions of Bolsheviks in not only politics, but also culture. During the early Soviet years, such a view was supported by the Bolshevik ‘ministry of culture’ – the People’s Commissariat of Education (Narodnïy komissariat prosveshcheniya, Narkompros) – under the relatively enlightened guidance of Anatoliy Lunacharsky (1875–1933). A passionate admirer of music, especially of Beethoven and Skryabin, he believed revolution and music to be ‘sisters’¹ and, consequently, was inclined to support first of all those artistic movements whose ideology was based on the utopian belief in the transfiguring power of art. The representatives of such movements – in Russia of those times, they were often referred to in a generalizing manner as ‘futurists’ – were appointed directors of the Narkompros structures responsible for different arts. The theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), the painter David Shterenberg (1881–1948) and, more unexpectedly, the young composer Artur Lourié (1892–1966) became heads of the departments of theatre (TEO), visual arts (IZO) and music (MUZO), respectively. Lourié initiated a large-scale reform of concert life and musical education, including the organization of musical events for large audiences and the restructuring of concert and opera repertoire in accordance with the new régime’s ideological attitudes, but his measures met with strong opposition from most musicians and ultimately failed;² in 1921, he resigned his post and the next year emigrated. His main contribution to Soviet music as composer was Our March for collective declamation and winds to words by the greatest ‘futurist’ poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1918): a strange piece in triple time, rather unfit to serve as an accompaniment to marching proletarian masses.

Opposing the policy of gradual transformations, supported by Lunacharsky, was the more radical tendency to reject the pre-revolutionary, ‘bourgeois’ forms of culture and art and to replace them with new, proletarian ones. The newborn mythology of the ‘victorious class’, building an entirely new world on the ruins of the repudiated past, implied an appropriate theoretical and practical background for artistic and literary creations. In order to elaborate such a background, a special organization named Proletkul’t (Proletarskaya kul’tura – ‘Proletarian Culture’) was founded as early as September 1917, shortly before the Bolshevik coup d’état. ‘In the name of our tomorrow, burn Raphael to ashes, destroy museums, trample down the flowers of art’: these verses by Vladimir Kirillov, allegedly inscribed on the façade of Proletkul’t’s office, are indicative of the organization’s principles.

The musical creation, especially in the form of the so-called samodeyatel’nost’ (literally: ‘self-activity’ – an amateur performance guided by an appropriately trained professional) played a privileged role in Proletkul’t programmes. The large system of amateur music clubs, created under the auspices of Proletkul’t and intended mainly for promoting suitably arranged folk music, proved viable enough to escape disintegration for several decades. As to the original Proletkul’t composers Boris Krasin (1884–1936), Dmitriy Vasil’yev-Buglay (1888–1956), Grigoriy Lobachëv (1888–1953) and Lev Shul’gin (1890–1968), their very names are nowadays almost completely forgotten.³ More familiar is the name of Aleksandr Kastal’sky (1856–1926), pupil of Tchaikovsky and Taneyev, a prolific composer of sacred and secular choruses and highly reputed expert in Russian folk song and Orthodox chant, who after the October Revolution was mysteriously converted into a loyal Bolshevik cultural activist. In 1920, he made the first arrangement of the Internationale – the first Soviet anthem – for mixed choir with orchestra. The list of his post-revolutionary works contains several choruses dedicated to Lenin (‘Song about Lenin’, 1924, ‘By the Grave’, 1925), the Red Army, the May First celebrations and other privileged topics of the Bolshevik propaganda. Another relatively notable Proletkul’t figure, Arseniy Avraamov (Krasnokutsky, 1886–1944), remains in the history as one of the Russian pioneers of quarter-tone music⁴ and, more importantly, as the creator of the idea of ‘Symphony of Sirens’ (‘Simfoniya gudkov’) – a truly ‘proletarian’ work, whose sound material had to be provided principally by sounds of industrial provenance. In the early post-revolutionary years, the project of ‘Symphony of Sirens’, rehashing some ideas of Italian futurists and anticipating the future musique concrète, was realized in some major cities (Nizhniy Novgorod, Baku). Judging by its description,⁵ the ‘Symphony’ – intended to be a grandiose accompaniment to holiday celebrations – included, apart from noises, some quotations from revolutionary anthems (Internationale, Marseillaise). The work was executed by appropriately tuned factory whistles, car and ship horns, cannons, guns and other similar devices.⁶

Since the ideology of Proletkul’t conferred to artistic creation the same status as to any kind of manufactured item, the practical activity of Proletkul’t artists inevitably resulted in simplistic short-lived products; as far as music is concerned, these represent chiefly poster-like propagandistic verses to be sung by large masses of lay people. Another type of Proletkul’t production, not extant in any written form, was the open-air May, October and other holiday performance, staged during the first post-revolutionary years with music compiled from different sources, including popular classics and revolutionary songs. The narrative scheme of such mysteries consisted of the following obligatory links: picture of dark past, awakening of protest, ripening of revolutionary consciousness, decisive battle, mourning over the dead heroes and, finally, glorification of the new era.⁷ The scheme in question is of interest inasmuch as it will be later realized in some important works of major Soviet composers, including Shostakovich’s Second and Eleventh Symphonies and Prokofiev’s Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution.

At first, the attitude of the Bolshevik leaders towards the Proletkul’t ideas was favourable.⁸ In due course, however, the dogmatism of the Proletkul’t approach began to conflict with the régime’s political requirements. On 2 October 1920, Lenin declared that the proletarian mind should be enriched with the knowledge of all the wealth created by mankind.⁹ In the field of cultural policy, this implied the restoration of a necessary respect towards at least some achievements of the ‘bourgeois’ and ‘feudal’ past. On 8 October 1920, Lenin addressed the congress of Proletkul’t with a memorandum, urging the Proletkul’t activists ‘to reject in the most categorical way’ any attempt to fabricate a notion of separate and independent proletarian culture’.¹⁰ In December of the same year, the structures of Proletkul’t were integrated into the system of Narkompros. Up to 1932, Proletkul’t continued a modest existence as a system of samodeyatel’nost’ (amateur performance) clubs.

The end of the Civil War (1920) and the beginning of the New Economic Policy (1921) contributed to a certain normalization of the country’s cultural life. To circumscribe the scope of creative liberty for a Soviet artist, the Party’s number two, Lev Trotsky, launched in 1923 the term poputchik(i) (literally: fellow-traveller[s]). The label poputchik, in principle, could be attached to any person of arts and letters who, without being a member of the Party or fully devoted Communist, showed a sympathy with the Revolution and was hostile to its enemies. Until the second half of the 1920s (when Trotsky lost his influence), the ideological services of the régime remained tolerant towards the poputchiki and even encouraged a certain pluralism.

RAPM and ASM

In the musical life of the 1920s, the most conspicuous manifestation of pluralism was the coexistence of two independent and practically irreconcilable unions of musicians, both formally established in the autumn of 1923: the Association of Contemporary Music (Assotziatziya sovremennoy muzïki, ASM, for some time attached to the State Academy of Artistic Sciences¹¹ and also to the International Society of Contemporary Music, ISCM¹²) and the Russian (subsequently All-Union) Association of Proletarian Musicians (Rossiyskaya [Vsesoyuznaya] assotziatziya proletarskoy muzïki, RAPM or VAPM). Historically, the opposition between RAPM and ASM is a particular case of a more universal, typically Soviet (and by extension post-Soviet) dispute. Both forces involved in that controversy have always been highly characteristic of our country’s cultural scene. On the one side was the narrow, aggressive and xenophobic dogmatism of professionally mediocre, but ideologically stainless, Party demagogues, who, though themselves rather inexperienced in physical labour, tried their best to usurp the right to speak on behalf of working people. Those who were on the other side combined professional honesty and seriousness with the typical poputchik complex: ‘to work together with the others and in accordance with the ruling order’,¹³ without much bothering about the anti-human nature of that ‘ruling order’ and agreeing to perform its commissions, often with more or less sincere attempts at self-justification in private correspondence, diaries or works written ‘for the desk drawer’. Needless to say, as far as tactical struggle was concerned, the former party’s chances of winning have always been higher.

Although the RAPM writers used to oppose what they regarded as the ‘amateurish’ and ‘idealist’ Proletkul’t,¹⁴ in the main the attitudes and goals of both Proletkul’t and RAPM were the same.¹⁵ Their ideology had a common basis, which included at least two important aspects. First, the ‘militant revolutionary songs’ created by proletarian class consciousness were declared to be the only irreproachable material on which to build future Soviet music, as opposed to ‘bourgeois art’,¹⁶ that is the whole classical musical heritage. Second, the history of the world was regarded in light of the irreconcilable struggle between the gloomy past of the proletariat and its bright f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of examples
• Acknowledgements
• Note on transliteration
• Note on translations
• Introduction
• PART I Remainders of the Silver Age and the Sturm und Drang of Soviet modernism
• PART II Music under Stalin
• PART III The year 1953 and after: The ‘Bronze Age’
• Chronological table
• Bibliography
• Index of names and musical works