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.
The Rehearsal and Performance of Holiday Music: Philosophical Issues in Stratechuk v. Board of Education
This philosophical study addresses the implications of the legal case Stratechuk v. Board of Education, ruling that a policy prohibiting the performance of religious-themed holiday music did not violate the United States Constitution. Two questions are investigated: the differences between the classroom study and public performance of religious music, and the study of holiday music as a subgenre of religious music. Conclusions suggest that a school policy delineating between the rehearsal and performance of sacred music fails to appreciate the interrelationship of these musical practices. While this type of policy attempts to resolve controversy by moving sacred music out of public performance spaces it does not succeed in addressing the underlying philosophical tensions involved in the curricular use of sacred music. Further, a policy that allows the musical celebration of only secular aspects of particular holidays unnecessarily privileges secular over religious meanings and thus limits students’ contextual understanding of the holiday. The academic performance of sacred music within the comprehensive study of a given holiday should not constitute an endorsement of particular religious beliefs, or violate an appropriate position of religious neutrality.
From modernism to socialist realism in four years: Myaskovsky and Asafyev
Two outstanding personalities of the Soviet musical life in the 1920's, the composer Nikolay Myaskovsky and the musicologist Boris Asafyev, both exponents of modernism, made volte-faces towards traditionalism at the beginning of the next decade. Myaskovsky's Symphony no. 12 (1931) and Asafyev's ballet The Flames of Paris (1932) became models for Socialist Realism in music. The letters exchanged between the two men testify to the formers uneasiness at the great success of those of his works he considered not valuable enough, whereas the latter was quite satisfied with his new career as composer. The examples of Myaskovsky and Asafyev show that early Soviet modernists made their move away from avant-garde creativity well before they faced any real danger from the bureaucracy.