Don’t Sing it on a Feast Day: the reception and performance of Western sacred music in Soviet Russia, 1917-1953
Abstract Despite official hostility to religion and ambivalence towards Western bourgeois culture, the Soviet Union9s major orchestras and choirs retained a high number of Western sacred works in their concert repertoire. In this article, I examine the apparent incongruity of this aspect of Soviet concert practice, with specific focus on the two most important Soviet choirs in Moscow and Leningrad: the Leningrad Capella, and the Moscow-based Russian Choir of the USSR. I argue that the process of cultural appropriation in the Soviet Union embraced a sufficiently broad conception of Western musical culture for this repertoire to be considered not only safe, but of central canonic importance. With an appropriate ideological varnish, and even textual alteration, a careful selection of Western sacred music could be rendered “Soviet” enough to remain core repertoire, albeit subject to fast-changing currents in cultural politics throughout the period 1917–53.
Music and Power in the Soviet 1930sSimo MIKKONEN. , Lewiston, NY : Edwin Mellen Press, 432 p.
Simo MIKKONEN, Music and Power in the Soviet 1930s, A History of Composers’ Bureaucracy, Lewiston, NY : Edwin Mellen Press, 432 p. L’etude de la vie musicale de l’ancienne URSS s’est considerablement renouvelee ces dernieres annees, notamment apres l’ouverture des archives de l’Etat en 1991. La production musicale sous la dictature stalinienne a longtemps ete consideree uniquement sous l’angle ideologique, comme un outil de propagande parmi d’autres. Les premiers travaux sur le sujet ont surt...
"National in Form, Socialist in Content": Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics
The present article examines the Soviet project of developing national musical cultures within the Caucasian and Central Asian republics of the USSR. This undertaking effectively required the transplanting of the Russian nineteenth-century model of musical nationalism to the republics, under the guidance of composers sent from Moscow and Leningrad. The article investigates the relationship between this model and its imitations, using examples from Caucasian and Asian operas, and touching upon the connected discourses of orientalism and socialist realism.