Monthly Archives: October 2016

As I watched Ziggy Stardust, I found myself comparing Bowie’s performative style to Weimar cabaret culture, which we discussed in class a number of weeks ago. Bowie’s frequent costume changes, theatrical makeup, and transgressive exhibitions of sexuality all signaled an … Continue reading →

Whether or not audiences were tolerant of “glam rock’s play with gender,” glam was still seen as “provocative” (48) in the US and Britain – and deliberately so. This provocation was unequivocally political: Auslander notes that in the former, the … Continue reading →

Brown briefly mentions Adorno and the influence of the Frankfurt School on young student revolutionaries. He notes that in a televised interview, Adorno admitted he found the protest songs of American folksinger Joan Baez “unbearable.” While it is evident that … Continue reading →

Mark Edele makes the remark that stiliagi were “decidedly apolitical” (58), echoing the KGB report he quotes earlier in the text that states the stiliagi held an “unpoliticalness” (40). I was taken by the idea that a subversive youth culture … Continue reading →

In “Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945-1953,” Mark Edele describes the alternative masculinity articulated and embodied by the image-conscious, musically engaged, and socioeconomically well-placed stiliagi of the immediate post-war period as a … Continue reading →

As I was reading Heller’s article, I found myself understanding t.A.T.u.’s Eurovision performance as a means of flaunting post-Soviet musical freedom: making up for lost time, perhaps, or sending a message to the rest of Europe about what it means to … Continue reading →

I remember watching the Eurovision Song Contest as a child. I would wonder why Russia and Ukraine or Serbia and Montenegro would always give each other the most votes, and I would ask why ‘no one likes Britain’. In Bohlman’s … Continue reading →

As Mark Carroll abundantly makes clear, the beliefs surrounding serial music have changed drastically in the post-war classical discipline. No longer is atonal (but still structured) music a socially degenerating force, but instead an uncreative one. Carroll uses Boulez’s words … Continue reading →

Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 (1943) was denounced as part of the 1948 decree for, I assume, its morose and tragic tone. It is the antithesis of the desired socialist realism of the period. Yet, while it evokes war strongly enough to have … Continue reading →

The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party write, in their scathing resolution on Muradeli’s “Great Friendship,” that the opera is not only “vicious” but further, “inartistic” in both its “music and subject matter,” (Sovetskaia muzyka, No. 1 (1948), pp. 3-8.) … Continue reading →