Soviet Music and Society under Lenin and Stalin

The Baton and Sickle

Neil Edmunds

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134415625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates the place of music in Soviet society during the eras of Lenin and Stalin. It examines the different strategies adopted by composers and musicians in their attempts to carve out careers in a rapidly evolving society, discusses the role of music in Soviet society and people's lives, and shows how political ideology proved an inspiration as well as an inhibition. It explores how music and politics interacted in the lives of two of the twentieth century's greatest composers - Shostakovich and Prokofiev - and also in the lives of less well-known composers. In addition it considers the specialist composers of early Soviet musical propaganda, amateur music making, and musical life in the non-Russian republics. The book will appeal to specialists in Soviet music history, those with an interest in twentieth century music in general, and also to students of the history, culture and politics of the Soviet Union.

1 Music in the socialist state

Anna Ferenc

Modernism and Proletkult, 1921–1932

In discussing initial musical developments under proletarian dictatorship in Russia, one must distinguish between the political structuring of the art on the one hand and, on the other, actual music-making. From the political point of view, the year 1921 marks a relatively significant victory for the state in its bid for more control in the cultural arena once the autonomous and in part reactionary forces of the Proletkult had been disbanded in October 1920. However, the absence of a clear ideological programme for the proletarianisation of music, confusion over the abstract nature of the art, and the need to rely on fellow-travellers for leadership allowed for the continuation of agendas that had existed before 1921 and, in some respects, even before 1917. This situation combined with improvement in economic conditions under the New Economic Policy (NEP) and Lenin’s position that ‘cultural problems cannot be solved as quickly as political and military problems’¹ to yield a musical eclecticism that would play itself out only on the eve of the next decade.

Western scholarship has traditionally acknowledged that music thrived under the NEP despite various material shortages. The period has generally been associated with ‘a lessening of revolutionary militancy, a relaxation of ideological tensions [and] a greater permissiveness in matters of musical taste and style’.² For example, with the resumption of Western contacts interrupted since 1914, the NEP period saw a re-emergence of activities reminiscent of the pre-Revolutionary Evenings of Contemporary Music. These were concerts in St Petersburg sponsored by the World of Art group from 1902 onwards. Under the guidance of Viacheslav Karatygin, they presented Russian audiences with works by Western composers such as Mahler, Strauss, and Ravel, together with works by contemporary Russian composers such as Skriabin, Rachmaninov, and Medtner. Debussy, Reger, and Schoenberg made personal appearances at these Evenings, and it was at one of these concerts in 1909 that Diaghilev was introduced to the music of Stravinsky, an encounter that led him to commission Zhar-ptitsa [The Firebird]. In the same way, in the NEP period foreign artists were invited to perform in Russia, and foreign composers of new music, among them Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, and Franz Schreker, conducted Russian premieres of their own works. Between 1925 and 1927, Leningrad audiences witnessed performances of Igor Stravinsky’s Pul′chinella [Pulcinella] and Baika pro lisu, petukha i baraban [Renard], Ernst Krenek’s Der Sprung über den Schatten, Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, and Berg’s Wozzeck. A reciprocal interest in contemporary Russian music emerged in the West. The works of modern Soviet composers, such as Samuel Feinberg, Alexander Mosolov, and Nikolai Miaskovskii, were played at the prestigious music festivals of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM). In addition, under a special arrangement with the Soviet State Publishing House, new Russian scores were issued by Universal Edition in Vienna.

These events represent but one facet of musical life in the 1920s and, by the end of the decade, a distinctly less modernist, more proletarian-oriented stance began to dominate the musical arena. This and other developments during the period can best be understood in terms of existing factions in the musical community, their competitive attempts to provide the new social order with an appropriate cultural response, and the changing political strengths of players in key administrative positions committed to particular aesthetic platforms. The definition and implementation of an ideologically correct musical agenda was debated vehemently throughout the 1920s. But these polemical battles essentially propagated factionalism that arose during the Civil War.

In part, factionalism was allowed to develop under Lunacharskii’s leadership of Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment). As a Bolshevik intellectual, Lunacharskii encouraged artists to pursue ‘revolutionary inspiration’ in their art, but also defended pre-Revolutionary cultural achievements as the legitimate inheritance of the proletariat and, so as to entice co-operation from highly skilled, politically independent professionals, recognized the need for creative freedom and individuality of expression. His choice of Arthur Lourié (Artur Lur′e) to head the Commissariat’s music division (Muzo) reflects this liberal policy. Lourié actively promoted the cause of modern music and thought the art form to be essentially an apolitical medium. As reported later by critic and musicologist Leonid Sabaneev:

Due to the good fortune that the first music ‘minister’ of Soviet Russia was Arthur Lourié, himself an ultra-modernist and follower of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, the modern school of thought predominated in the musical bureaucratic circle, entirely to the disadvantage of the representatives of moderate and conservative trends. A strong promotional propaganda was organized for the modernists; their works were published by the State, an act that doubtlessly represented a positive aspect of this period.³

Other music specialists who allied themselves with the Narkompros agency included the composers and modernist sympathizers Vladimir Shcherbachev and Nikolai Miaskovskii; the musicologists Pavel Lamm, Nadezhda Briusova, and Boris Asafiev; the critics Vladimir Derzhanovskii and Viacheslav Karatygin; the pianists Konstantin Eiges and Konstantin Igumnov; and the violinist Lev Tseitlin, who in 1922 founded a successful conductorless orchestra, Persimfans, which gave impressive performances of not only the standard classical repertoire, but also challenging contemporary scores. Within an additional ‘academic’ subsection in Muzo, which in October 1921 became Russia’s first State Institute of Musical Science (Gosudarstvennyi institut muzykal′nykh nauk, GIMN), music researchers such as Sabaneev, Nikolai Ianchuk, Petr Zimin, and Mikhail Ivanov-Boretskii pursued scholarly and educational interests. Lourié’s exclusionary professional aesthetic, however, soon elicited complaints from the revolutionary-minded Trade Union of Art Workers (Rabis) and was the cause of his early dismissal and replacement by the more moderate former Proletkult member Boris Krasin in 1921.

During the Civil War, musicians took part in ‘enlightenment’ programmes for workers that yielded a proliferation of military bands and amateur choral studios. Insisting that artistic creativity be ideally limited to events and subjects ‘by, for and about workers’,⁴ the more militant faction of these Proletkult organisations can be seen as a precursor of the movement to proletarianise music in the 1920s. However, the primary focus of the Proletkult’s music studios involved familiarising workers with the classics of Russian and Western art music as well as the Russian folksong, and relied on the expertise of highly trained musicians such as Boris Krasin, Nadezhda Briusova, and Alexander Kastalskii.⁵ In addition to the focus on working with the masses, the Moscow Proletkult’s music division afforded a place for a small avant-garde group eager to break with the conventions of the past in an attempt to forge truly new forms of musical expression. Perhaps the most iconoclastic product to emerge from this effort was Arsenii Avraamov’s Simfoniia gudkov [Symphony of Hooters], which was executed in Baku harbour to mark the anniversary of the Revolution in 1922, and recreated less successfully in Moscow the following year. The instruments of the orchestra in Baku included navy ship sirens and whistles, bus and car horns, a machine gun battery, and cannons, as well as a complex, specially designed ‘whistle main’ (magistral′). The composition involved the superposition of cannon volleys, sirens, horns, and whistles with renditions of the Internationale, the Marseillaise, and the Varshavianka by a mass band and choir.⁶

Avraamov also experimented with microtonal compositional possibilities, and eventually developed a 48-part octave subdivision at GIMN. His microtonal interests were shared early on by Lourié and Ivan Vyshnegradskii and predated the establishment in Petrograd of a Society for Quarter-Tone Music in 1923 by Georgii Rimskii-Korsakov (a nephew of the well-known composer, Nikolai). The interest in quarter-tone composition received a favourable assessment from Lunacharskii even as the first electronic instrument, the ‘Termenvox’ or ‘Theremin’, invented by the acoustics engineer Lev Termen (known abroad as Leon Theremin), attracted praise from Lenin in 1922. The Theremin was to have far-reaching applications, making its way into compositions by Joseph Schillinger, Edgard Varese, the sound tracks of Hollywood films, and American popular music culture.

In 1923, an Association of Contemporary Music (Assotsiatsiia sovremennoi muzyki, ASM) was established in Moscow, and for a time also served as the Russian chapter of the ISCM. Aiming to promote contemporary Russian works at home and abroad and to enhance Soviet musical life with performances of some of the latest compositions from the West, it represented highly trained musicians of progressive, if not modernist, orientation. Under the administrative leadership of Derzhanovskii and fellow-critic Viktor Beliaev, the Association counted among its adherents Miaskovskii, Lamm, Feinberg, Sabaneev, Konstantin Saradzhev, and Nikolai Roslavets. Asafiev and Shcherbachev became involved in a similar though separate organisation by the same name in Leningrad. The positions occupied by many of these individuals in conservatories, state agencies, and all divisions of Narkompros in particular allowed them to achieve their objectives and to influence and encourage a younger generation of composers that included Alexander Mosolov, Leonid Polovinkin, Vissarion Shebalin, Vladimir Deshevov, and Dmitrii Shostakovich. The ASM published periodicals and sponsored a series of chamber and orchestral concerts that featured the music of European composers such as Hindemith, Milhaud, Béla Bartók, Arthur Honegger, Erik Satie, and Karol Szymanowski, as well as compositions by the Russians Feinberg, Miaskovskii, Roslavets, Mosolov, Polovinkin, and Shebalin.

Within the modernist circle, two composers are particularly noteworthy: Nikolai Roslavets (1881–1944) and Alexander Mosolov (1900–73). Representing the older generation, Roslavets was a leading figure in the most avant-garde sphere of the modernist cause, a relatively prolific composer during the 1920s, and initially a dedicated Communist who held positions in Rabis, the Moscow Proletkult, the Administration of Professional Education (Glavprofobr) in Narkompros, and the State Publishing House (Gosizdat) among others. Between 1913 and 1919, he developed a system of tone organisation, which he continued to apply to his chamber and orchestral compositions throughout the next decade. Based on the manipulation of ‘synthetic chords’, it resembles Skriabin’s late compositional practice, and its complexity attracted comparison at home and later abroad with the dodecaphonic work of Arnold Schoenberg.⁷ After the Revolution, Roslavets naively defended his pre-Revolutionary compositional creed by drawing an analogy between his emancipation of music from outdated conventions and the new socialist structuring of society. His modernism, however, soon proved to be unacceptable, and, by the early 1930s, his music was silenced and his name disappeared from reference sources.

Mosolov, on the other hand, was a promising young composer who gained international notoriety in the late 1920s and early 1930s for his orchestral piece Zavod [The Iron Foundry], the first movement of a suite excerpted from the ballet Stal′ [Steel], which was never staged. Often associated with constructivism, the composition’s portrayal of machines in motion through a layering of motoric, dissonant, and percussive ostinatos actually has much in common with the earlier Cubo-Futurist aesthetic. First performed along with Roslavets’s cantata ‘October’ and Shostakovich’s Second Symphony at an ASM concert in 1927 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, The Iron Foundry was subsequently acclaimed at the ISCM festival in Liège in 1930 and was featured at the Hollywood Bowl in 1932.

In 1923, the Association of Proletarian Musicians (later the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, or RAPM) was founded by members of the propaganda division (agitotdel) of the State Publishing House. Originally consisting of individuals who were ‘just beginning musical training or had been more active in revolutionary politics than in the mainstream of musical life’,⁸ it was committed to promoting music that was readily accessible and ideologically clear in the manner of revolutionary songs and mass choruses. The organisation was firmly set against modernism and rejected cultivation of any ties with the West. Consequently, in its struggle for power and influence, the RAPM targeted the alliance between the musical establishment and the agencies of Narkompros by accusing the ASM of propagating ‘decadent’, ‘bourgeois’, ‘formalist’ ideology. While members of the RAPM produced music of little lasting value, the efforts of the Production Collective at the Moscow Conservatoire (Prokoll) founded in 1925 were a little more successful. Embracing the proletarian cause, but distancing itself from the simplistic, militant rhetoric of the RAPM, Prokoll aimed to operate as a collective, though its best work was accomplished by the gifted student Alexander Davidenko.

Confusion over defining and developing a truly Soviet music for the new uneducated proletarian audience fuelled growing ideological debates in which the communist membership of proletarian forces eventually gained the upper hand. In 1929, Lunacharskii left his post in Narkompros, and the ASM ceased its activities shortly thereafter. To escape the increasing political turmoil, certain composers such as Roslavets and Mosolov spent time in Central Asia composing music based on indigenous folk melodies. Miaskovskii, on the other hand, having emerged as the foremost Soviet symphonist, abandoned the ASM. In the twilight of NEP culture, a cry for central intervention in musical affairs was raised in all quarters. Guidance came on 23 April 1932, in the form of the Party resolution ‘On the Reformation of Literary and Artistic Organizations’. This dissolved all existing proletarian organisations, replaced them with unions containing a communist faction, and instituted the elusive aesthetic doctrine of ‘socialist realism’, advocating the portrayal of an idealistic reality in its ‘revolutionary development’.⁹ In so doing, the resolution ended a period of flexibility and began an era of state-controlled cultural regimentation.

Music after 1932: centralisation and cultural control

A single Union of Soviet Composers (Soiuz sovetskikh kompozitorov) for composers and musicologists was established in 1932 in Moscow and Leningrad. By 1940, branches existed in many other urban centres throughout most of the republics. An Organisational Committee (Orgkomitet), directed by such recognised composers as Shostakovich, Reinhold Glière, Iurii Shaporin, Dmitrii Kabalevskii, Aram Khachaturian, and Viktor Belyi, was set up in 1939 to coordinate activities in Moscow. Its mouthpiece was the periodical Sovetskaia muzyka [Soviet Music], founded in 1933, whose aim was to oppose ‘the ideology of modernists as well as the leftist interpretation of Marxism’ and to promote ‘the development of a Marxist-Leninist musicology’.¹⁰ In the musical community, the goal from now until the death of Stalin in 1953 would be to uphold the directives of the 1932 resolution and, with help from the central authority, to root out counterrevolutionary, formalist (read ‘modernist’) tendencies.

In the midst of these new developments, Prokofiev returned to Moscow from his sojourn abroad. After many extended visits that began in 1932, his repatriation was completed in 1936. Overtaken by nostalgia for his homeland and a desir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• A note on transliteration
• Introduction
• 1 Music in the socialist state
• 2 The ways of Russian popular music to 1953
• 3 Declared dead, but only provisionally: Shostakovich, Soviet music-hall and Uslovno ubityi
• 4 From the factory to the flat: thirty years of the Song of the Counterplan
• 5 Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier: how the steel was tempered
• 6 ‘Lenin is always with us’: Soviet musical propaganda and its composers during the 1920s
• 7 Amateurs and enthusiasts: folk music and the Soviet state on stage in the 1930s
• 8 National identity, cultural policy and the Soviet Folk Ensemble in Armenia
• 9 Going beyond the border: national cultural policy and the development of musical life in Soviet Karelia, 1920–1940
• 10 A nation on stage: music and the 1936 Festival of Kazak Arts
• 11 Uzeyir Hajibeyov and his role in the development of musical life in Azerbaidzhan
• Index