Music, not muddle: Re-examining Soviet sounds and the socialist project

A vivid, flourishing, and diverse musical life developed in the Soviet Union. This vibrant culture was built by professional and amateur artists from among and across its many different nationalities, and spanned styles and genres from classical forms like ballets and orchestras to popular forms like rock and jazz music. Amateur workplace ensembles were promoted to engage workers actively in performances as members of bands, orchestras, and choirs. Debates raged about the path Soviet music should take moving forward. Yet much of this culture remains either shut off or misconstrued to Western audiences–not by its Soviet creators, but by Western scholars, music directors, historians, and performers who have misinterpreted the cultural contributions of Soviet workers through the anti-communist prism of the Cold War. American composer Aaron Copland, in his speech to the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace held at the New York Waldorf-Astoria hotel, expressed his concern that the Cold War that he and Soviet composers already saw emerging in the wake of World War II would lead to a lack of musical exchange between the two sides of the conflict to the detriment of artists in both countries: “One can never tell in advance what will stimulate the imagination of an artist. If a brilliant new composing talent emerges from Tajikistan we all want to hear what his music is like. If a bright new composing star rises out of the Kentucky Mountain area we think the Russian people should know what his music is like” [1]. With the end of the war and of the celebration of music by allied Soviet composers like Dmitri Shostakovich, the anti-communist consensus of the West shifted along the fault lines of the global class war, anchored at the workers’ side by the Soviet Union and on the imperialist side by the United States. The imperialist side cast Soviet music as—to the exclusion of minority nationalities in the Soviet Union—Russian, propagandistic, and written simply to please dimwitted bureaucrats who directed art policy from the halls of government, detached from and above the heads of the artists involved in the day-to-day creation of Soviet art. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/re-examining-soviet-music-and-socialism/