"National in form, socialist in content": Musical nation-building in the Soviet republics

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Volumn 51, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 331-371

  Frolova Walker, Marina ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 50249155144     PISSN: 00030139     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/831980     Document Type: Review

References (67)

1. See Gregory Salmon's entries on Alma-Ata, Askhabad, Baku, Bishkek, Dushanbe, Erevan, Tashkent, and Tbilisi in the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London and New York: Macmillan, 1992). As Salmon's bibliographies attest, there is as yet no substantial treatment of these repertories in the English-language musicological literature.
2. Prior to the Salmon articles, the only information in English available on many of the composers discussed in the present article could be found in Stanley Dale Krebs, Soviet Composers and the Development of Soviet Music (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970);
3. and Rena Moisenko, Realist Music: Twenty-five Soviet Composers (London: Meridian Books, 1949).
4. The latter is of interest as a faithful - indeed credulous - précis of the standard Soviet line, but it offers no independent assessment of events. Ethnomusicologists who carried out fieldwork in the republics occasionally commented on the interaction of traditional culture with Soviet ideology: see Mark Slobin, "Conversations in Tashkent," Asian Music 2, no. 2 (1971): 7-13;
5. and also Theodore C. Levin, "Music in Modern Uzbekistan: The Convergence of Marxist Aesthetics and Central Asian Tradition," Asian Music 12, no. 1 (1979): 149-58.
6. There is a brief but very penetrating description of the matter in question in Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), xvi-xvii.
7. Avraamov's comments first appeared in Sovremennaya muzïka 22 (1927): 287;
8. quoted in I. Zemtsovsky, Fol'klor i kompozitor (Leningrad and Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1978), 10-11.
9. Sovetskaya muzïka (January 1934): 3.
10. "Under the conditions of a dictatorship of the proletariat within a single country, the rise of cultures national in form and socialist in content has to take place, so that when the proletariat wins in the whole world and socialism is a part of ordinary life, these cultures will merge into one culture, socialist both in form and in content with a common language - this is the dialectics of Lenin's approach to the issue of national culture" (I. V. Stalin, Marksizm i natsional'no-kolonial'nïy vopros [Moscow, 1934], 195).
11. J. V. Stalin, Works, 13 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952-55), 2:307.
12. Mark Saroyan, "Beyond the Nation-State: Culture and Ethnic Politics in Soviet Transcaucasia," in Transcaucasia, Nationalism, and Social Change: Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, ed. R. G. Suny (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 403-4. Today we can see how such policies can still be reversed in the absence of a restraining Soviet authority.
13. From Comrade Chelyapov's speech to the Moscow Union of Composers, Sovetskaya muzïka (March 1936): 19.
14. Georgiy Khubov, "Sovetskaya opera," Sovetskaya muzïka (January 1938): 15.
15. E. Romanovskaya, "Muzïka v Uzbekistane," Sovetskaya muzïka (September 1934): 3-9, at 8.
16. Georgiy Khubov, "Muzïkal'noe iskusstvo Uzbekistana," Sovetskaya muzïka (March 1937): 7-14.
17. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
18. Tamara Livanova's doctoral dissertation, "Istoriya russkoy muzïkal'noy kul'turï" ("History of Russian Musical Culture," Moscow Conservatory, 1938), was viciously attacked by I. Martïnov in his "Izkazhennaya istoriya"
19. ("Distorted History"), Sovetskaya muzïka (May 1939): 81-90.
20. "Istoriya russkoy muzïki" ("History of Russian Music"), edited by Mikhail Pekelis (Moscow, 1940), was discussed in a meeting of Moscow composers and musicologists, reported in Sovetskaya muzïka (January-February 1948): 91: "Unfortunately, comrade Pekelis did not subject his own work to sufficient criticism, particularly the textbook on the history of Russian music, which he edited and to which he contributed, and where, as he himself admitted, the dependence of our musical culture on the West was unfoundedly emphasized, class struggle ignored, originality of Russian music and its leading position in world music in the second half of the nineteenth century passed over."
21. B. Zeidman, "Glière i Azerbaijanskaya muzïkal'naya kul'tura," R. M. Glière: Stat'yi, vospominaniya, materialy, vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1966), 216-36.
22. Mustafa Kuliev, quoted in Z. Safarova, Muzïkal'no-esteticheskiye vzglyady Uzeira Gajibekova (Moscow, 1973), 96.
23. These ambitions, invoking the "Moscow as a third Rome" idea (a phrase current since the fifteenth century), were voiced more by the coterie of nationalist writers associated with The Five than by the composers themselves. Odoyevsky wrote of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar: "With Glinka's opera there appears something that has been long searched for and still not found in Europe - namely, a new trend in art; and from thence a new period in art history begins: the era of Russian music" (V. F. Odoyevsky, Muzïkal'no- literaturnoye naslediye [Moscow: GMI, 1956], 119).
24. Stasov was impatient to see Balakirev "forever part with the general current of European music" and start creating Russian music that would be "new, great, like nothing ever heard or seen before" (see his letter of 13 February 1861 in M. A. Balakirev and V. V. Stasov, Perepiska, 2 vols. [Moscow: Muzyka, 1970-71], 1:122).
25. Cui, a nationalist in his writings rather than in his music, said that "in Europe, music has grown so elderly that no harmonic and orchestral spices can help it any more, whereas Russian music is fresh and full of vigor" (Ts. A. Cui, Izbrannïe stat'i [Leningrad, 1952], 37).
26. Underlying these remarks was the critics' propensity to exaggerate the extent to which compositions exhibited Russian characteristics, as did, say, Nikolai Mel'gunov on A Life for the Tsar or Cui on Rimsky-Korsakov's First Symphony (Mel'gunov, "Glinka i yego muzïkal'nïe sochineniya" [1836],
27. reprinted in T. Livanova and V. Protopopov, Glinka, vol. 2 [Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye muzïkal'noye izdatel'stvo, 1955], 202-9;
28. and Cesar Cui, letter to Rimsky-Korsakov of 27 December 1863;
29. see N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, Polnoe sobranie sochineniy: Literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, 7 vols. [Moscow: Muzgiz, 1955-70], 5:254).
30. In music, as in other aspects of Russian nationalism such as literature or religion, Russia tended to compare itself with Europe rather than any particular country; see, for example, the musings of the young Taneyev, who dreamed of reproducing the whole of European music history in Russia and to this end started writing Palestrina-style counterpoints on Russian folk-song material (P. I. Tchaikovsky and S. I. Taneyev, Pis'ma [Moscow: Goskul'tprosvetizdat, 1951], 56-61).
31. P. A. Karasyov, "Besedi s Nikolayem Andreyevichem Rimskim-Korsakovïm," Russkaya muzïkal'naya gazeta 15, no. 49 (7 December 1908), cols. 1119-20;
32. quoted in Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through "Mavra," 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 1:64.
33. I have examined the myth of "Russian plagalism" in my article "On Ruslan and Russianness," Cambridge Opera Journal 9, no. 1 (1997): 21-45.
34. Rimsky-Korsakov, quoted in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions 1:64.
35. Olenin, quoted in Miliy Alekseevich Balakirev: Vospominaniya i pis'ma, ed. E. Frid (Leningrad: GMI, 1962), 344.
36. Alexander Spendiarov, interview for the newspaper Kommunist (Baku), 26 March 1925, no. 66.
37. Reprinted in Spendiarov o muzïke (Yerevan: Izd-vo Tsk Kp Armenii, 1971), 53-57.
38. F. A. Abukova, Turkmenskaya opera: Puti formirovaniya, zhanrovaya tipologiya (Ashkhabad: Ylym, 1987). Abukova seems unaware that the Gregorian and ancient Greek modes were very different systems.
39. Uzeir Gajibekov, Osnovï azerbaidzhanskoy narodnoy muzïki (Baku, 1945), 32.
40. Odoyevsky, "Starinnaya pesnya," in Muzïkal'no- literaturnoye naslediye, 252-54, at 253.
41. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
42. Uzeir Gajibekov, quoted in Safarova, Muzïkal'no-esteticheskiye vzglyady Uzeira Gajibekova, 45.
43. Iosef Rïzhkin, "Stilevïye chertï sovetskoy muzïki," Sovetskaya muzïka (March 1939): 47-52.
44. See Gajibekov, Osnovï azerbaidzhanskoy narodnoy muzïki.
45. Uzeir Gajibekov, "Muzïkal'noe razvitie v Azerbaydzhane," first published in Maarif ve medenijet (1926), no. 8 (in Azerbaijani);
46. Uzeir Gajibekov, "O narodnosti v muzïke," Revolyutsiya i kul'tura 5 (1939): 110 (in Azerbaijani);
47. Gajibekov, "O narodnosti v muzïke," reprinted in his O muzïkal'nom iskusstve Azerbaydzhana (Baku, 1968), 85.
48. V. Vinogradov, Uzeir Gajibekov i azerbaydzbanskaya muzïka(Moscow, 1972), 13-14.
49. Gajibekov, Osnovï azerbaydzhanskoy narodnoy muzïki, 32.
50. Gajibekov, "O narodnosti v muzïke," 86.
51. For more on the achievements of his school see S. Khalfen, "Azerbaydzhanskaya shkola peniya," Sovetskaya muzïka (March 1940): 81-82.
52. Aram Khachaturian, quoted in D. A. Arutyunov, A. Khachaturian i muzïka Sovetskogo Vostoka: Yazik, stil', traditsii (Moscow, 1983), 15.
53. Khubov, "Sovetskaya opera," 15.
54. The 10 February 1948 Resolution of the Communist Party Central Committee, entitled "On V. Muradeli's opera The Great Friendship," extended its criticism beyond Muradeli and branded another six composers formalist: Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, Vissarion Shebalin, Gavriil Popov, and Nikolai Myaskovsky (published in Sovetskaya muzïka [January-February 1948]: 3-8).
55. and "Vistupleniya na sobranii kompozitorov i muzïkovedov g. Moskvï," Sovetskaya opera, ibid., 63-102).
56. See also Alexander Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow (London: Turnstile Press, 1949; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973).
57. A. A. Zhdanov, introductory speech at the meeting of Soviet musicians in the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Sovetskaya muzïka (January-February 1948), 10. The lezghinka is a type of fast Georgian dance.
58. A. Lepin, " 'Altïn-Kïz': Kirgizskaya opera V. Vlasova i V. Fere," Sovetskaya muzïka (December 1937): 48-55.
59. A. Livshits, "Puti razvitiya muzïkal'noy kul'turï v sovetskoy Chuvashii," Sovetskaya muzïka (September 1934): 16.
60. A report from a musical conference in Tashkent; see I. Martïnov, "Muzïkal'naya konferentsiya v Tashkente," Sovetskaya muzïka (March 1937): 102.
61. quoted (approvingly) in T. Vïzgo, "O natsional'noy forme sovremennoy uzbekskoy muzïki," Sovetskaya muzïka (May 1953): 45-50.
62. V. M. Gorodinsky's speech at the meeting of Moscow composers and musicologists, Sovetskaya muzïka (January-February 1948): 92.
63. I. Zemtsovsky, "O fol'klore, istorizme i paradoksakh" (1968);
64. reprinted in Zemtsovsky, Fol'klor i kompozitor, 31-37, at 32, 37; emphasis added.
65. "Ob opere Velikaya druzhba V. Muradeli," Sovetskaya muzïka (January-February 1948): 5.
66. Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 33-45.
67. On the conquest of the New World, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).