New Music in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union

This presentation explores some of the ways that Soviet avant-garde composers understood themselves in relation to the Western avant-garde music scene, despite the ideological repression of their musical education and compositional style at the hands of the state. A number of Soviet avant-garde composers expressed an underlying concern with “catching up” to the West with regards to musical modernity. During the Khrushchev Era, a cultural thaw allowed limited information about Western musical styles into the Republics, ostensibly relaxing the impositions of the 1948 Resolution on Soviet Music, and allowing for greater cultural exchange.

I am most interested in exploring the idea of a predefined progression of modern music and a “musical lag” of sorts that Soviet composers perceived between the Eastern and Western Blocs. Young composers believed the lag functioned as a handicap, setting Soviet avant-garde composers back from their Western counterparts. I also hope to address some of the reasons why Soviet avant-garde musicians felt compelled to create “unofficial” music rather than sanctioned content, despite significant personal or professional consequences. Were these composers “rebelling” because they were dissatisfied with the political climate of the USSR, or were they simply interested in obtaining the same kind of fame, freedom, and influence enjoyed by Western composers? Or, to put it another way, does dissonance intrinsically imply dissidence in this scenario?

Because there is relatively little English language historiography on late Soviet avant-garde composers, I will give a brief overview of the cultural climate of the 1950s and 1960s, and examine a few case studies which address the points above.

The Cultural Thaw and Musical Life Under Khrushchev

The Cultural Thaw (1953-1964) refers to the period of Soviet history following Stalin’s death, during which the official policies regarding cultural exchange with the West were relaxed (Schmelz, 3). Under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet artists and writers were allowed limited access to Western materials, although a great amount of content remained unavailable or outside of official Party favor. Khrushchev’s administration aimed to establish better relations with the West, while still asserting Soviet cultural supremacy. Thus, there were strict limits imposed on the kinds of materials brought behind the Iron Curtain, and the cultural purpose they were intended to serve.

While Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s regime occurred in 1956 (during a closed speech to the 20th Congress), it wasn’t until 1958 that the Central Committee published a document discussing how the new official policies impacted the Soviet music world (Caute, 400). In this document, the Party admitted to the overzealousness of Zhadanov’s decrees, while affirming that dissonance and atonality still opposed official Soviet musical ideology. The adherence to “socialist realism” remained intact.

Despite the relaxation of Soviet censorship during the 1950s, foreign musical materials were often only available to professionals within the field. The Union of Soviet Composers hosted a number of closed-doors performances featuring international musicians; these events were kept relatively private out of a persistent paranoia of state surveillance. In 1957, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould offered a master class at the Moscow Conservatory on twelve-tone techniques. This course was only offered to music professionals (Caute, 403)

This is not to say that unsanctioned music by foreigners or Russian emigres did not reach the general public. Smugglers distributed bootleg recordings of Western music, often copied onto widely-available vinyl X-ray plates collected from local hospitals (Coates). These vinyl discs, colloquially known as “ribs,” demonstrate the existing market for underground or “unofficial” music during this period, as well as the pervasive interest in Western musical styles. Additionally, it is clear that scores from out-of-favor composers continued to make their way to the young composers in conservatories. In interviews given to historian Peter Schmelz, a number of conservatory students from the 1950s remember gaining access the scores of Berg and Stravinsky through some of the “liberal” musicologists within the Conservatory (34). 

The Thaw also allowed other Republics within the Union the opportunity to explore new musical possibilities. Notably, instructors at the Tallinn Conservatory in Estonia encouraged musician Arvo Pärt to produce some of the most influential and contentious avant-garde music of the period. This is all to say that despite the continued stifling of creativity under Khrushchev, both musical professionals and the masses found ways to circumvent official policies regarding music and invent creative solutions in order to “keep up” with the musical modernism of the West.

The “Young Composers” and Underground Conservatory Life

During the 1950s, the Moscow Conservatory served as a breeding ground for a number of the most influential Soviet avant-garde composers, including Andrei Volkonsky, Edison Desinov, Alfred Schnittke, and Sofia Gubaidulina. According to Schnittke, the conservatory environment allowed the young composers greater freedom than allotted to official members of the Composer’s Union, who were required to answer directly to fellow union members and Soviet officials (Schmelz, 30). Whether or not Schnittke’s account is entirely accurate, it is evident that a number of Conservatory  instructors exposed their students to works that were banned or out of official favor, and also supported them in their explorations of “formalist” music.

Following Zhadanov’s 1948 Resolution on Soviet Music, the works of composers such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev were officially off-limits to conservatory students. Instruction about Western music often focused on what not to do, and how to avoid composing ideologically offensive scores. However, this method of education often backfired, and provided students with otherwise unavailable information about the musical trends of the Western Bloc. A book by journalist Grigoriy Shneyerson entitled On Music Living and Dead intended to denounce the decadence of Western avant-gardism, but in fact provided some of the most useful instruction on how to compose Schoenbergian scores (Schmelz, 41). Another article by musicologist Johannes Thilman called “On the Dodecaphonic Method of Composition” attempted to “point out the weaknesses of Schoenberg’s system,” but instead, the article’s “professed ‘scientific’ methodical tone only ended up playing into the hands of the ‘enemy'” (Schmelz, 42). By allowing Western cultural content into the Conservatory as a means of demonstrating improper musical conduct, officials in fact provided some of the most vital resources for young composers interested in musical experimentation and twelve-tone composition systems.

Despite the ideological overtones of socialist realism within the Conservatory, a number of musicologists publicly supported their student’s musical experimentations, even though such affirmations could damage their professional careers. Composer Boris Lyatoshinsky brought the scores of Wagner from his private library for orchestration classes, and even publicly defended one of his pupils who accused of “dodecophonic experiments” (Schmelz, 34). Vissarion Shebalin, another musicologist denounced in the 1948 resolution, continued to introduce students to Boulez, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. These secret seminars raised the attention of Soviet officials, who went as far as to question students about their liberal instructors activities (Schmelz, 32). Many of the students interrogated remained faithful to their instructors, appreciative of the access they provided to new Western music. It was in this outwardly strict climate that the most prominent avant-garde composers privately gained the skills to begin experimenting with serialist techniques.

Andrei Volkonsky’s Musica stricta and the Beginning of Soviet Serialism

Many scholars regard Andrei Volkonsky as the father of late Soviet avant-garde music (Kholopov, 7). He was responsible for pioneering Soviet twelve-tone composition and influencing the next generation of Soviet unofficial composers. Volkonsky’s limited access to Schoenberg’s writings on the twelve-tone system led him to create his own, slightly different compositional method, despite his original goal of total sonic emulation. This uniquely Soviet method of serialism would not have been possible without the “lag” that ideological repression and censorship created between the musical culture of the West and the Soviet Union.

 Unlike most of his colleagues, Volkonsky was exposed to modern Western music as a young adult. While he belonged to a prominent Russian family, his formative years were spent in Western Europe, where he studied piano under Romanian composer Dinu Lipatti. In 1947, his family returned to the Soviet Union (Lemaire).  Zhadanov’s 1948 denunciations had a profound effect on official musical training in the Soviet Union. Volkonsky experienced a bout of culture shock upon continuing his education in Moscow, due to his formative exposure to Western musical pedagogy.

 

Volkonsky was accepted to the Moscow Conservatory of Music in 1950. His early training and exposure to Western music gave him a leg up on his colleagues, and he was recognized by his instructors as one of the most talented students in his class. Despite this, he was expelled in 1954, due to his alleged possession of scores by Schoenberg and Stravinsky (Schmelz, 73). This very same year, he vocally defended Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony from open criticism (Hillier, 31). Expulsions and mandatory academic leaves were common at the Moscow Conservatory, for professors and students alike. Despite failing to complete his studies in Moscow, Volkonsky was still able to join the Union of Composers in 1955 or 1956, due to his impressive musical talent. He received an apartment (paid for by the Union’s Muzfond), and earned the majority of his income through writing film scores (Schmelz, 74).  This perhaps calls into question how much of a dissident he truly was, given his strong associations with the Union during this period.

Volkonsky’s brief period of official favor ended in 1956, when he composed the solo piano piece Musica stricta. Many scholars consider this piece to be the first Soviet use of Schoenbergian serialism (Schmelz, 81). While “twelve-toneish” or “proto-serial” works were composed by early Russian futurists, such as Roslavets, Volkonsky’s piece represents the first total serialist work to emerge from the Soviet Union (Schmelz, 81). However, due the continuing limitations on access to Western scores, Volkonsky was forced to do without Schoenberg’s complete writings on the twelve-tone system. The result was a slightly different compositional method that, while similar to Schoenberg’s, had significant technical deviations. Schmelz writes, “…although twelve-tone rows occur in every movement [of Musica stricta], no single unifying twelve-tone row occurs throughout the composition.” Further, Schmelz concludes that the first movement of the piece is not twelve-tone at all, but rather “uses a fundamental unifying motive similar to those used by Schoenberg in his Op. 11 and Op. 19 piano pieces” (Schmelz, 81-82).

Fortunately, Volkonsky was not upset by these compositional differences, when he belatedly learned of them. In an interview, he explained:  “I decided that I didn’t understand [twelve tone] techniques very well…and it’s good I did it incorrectly…I named [the piece] Musica stricta because of the strict techniques, although I used them entirely according to my own manner” (Schmelz, 88).  Volkonsky’s retrospective appreciation of his deviation from Western techniques speaks to the desire to create uniquely Russian avant-garde music, rather than reproductions of existing Western compositions, no matter how jealous he may have been of the West’s “musical freedom”. His alleged pride in creating a new form of serialism may speak to the general concern about the musical “lag,” and his desire to write new music, rather than repetitions existing European techniques. Stylistically, Musica stricta absolutely aligns with the kind of formalism the Party so strongly opposed, even during the Thaw. While there are tonal moments in the four movement piece, it is very evidently removed from the aesthetic dogma of socialist realism. Official reception in the Soviet Union was cold, to say the least. In October of 1961, the twenty-second Party Congress publicly attacked Volkonsky’s experiments in dodecaphony (Hillier, 31).  In 1962, Volkonsky’s music was, for all intents and purposes, banned by the Third Congress of Composers (Lemaire). This was followed by Khrushchev’s denunciation of all dodecaphonic music as “the music of noises” (Calico, 152). Volkonsky’s compositions fell out of favor, and ceased to be regularly performed. Despite his evident pleasure in creating a system of serialism unique to Soviet Russia, his compositions still proved to be too “formalist” and Western to garner official favor.

Later in his career, Volkonsky grew interested in incorporating the music of Bach and the early Renaissance into his body of work. It is difficult to discern the motivation for his drive towards neoclassicism, be it political, economic, or personal. He emigrated to France in 1973, although Frans Lemaire notes that in Western Europe, “…he found an organization of power and silence which…was not so different from the one he had known in Russia, with aesthetic ideology replacing the political.”

Arvo Pärt: Musical Avant-Gardism in the Republics

Arvo Pärt was born in 1935 in Estonia, a Republic of the Soviet Union.  As a young adult, he trained at the Music Middle School in Tallinn, and was later accepted as a student at the Tallinn Conservatory after showing extraordinary musical talent (Hillier, 27). It was during his studies at the conservatory that Pärt began to understand the ideological restrictions placed upon musical production. He noted, “…when I was older, in the Conservatory, then I began to appreciate what it was to live in the Soviet Union, everything enclosed or forbidden. But as a child I didn’t know anything different” (Hillier, 26).  Fortunately, Pärt’s natural musical talent, permissive instructors, and limited access to illegal scores and tapes fostered creativity early on in his studies. In his biography of Pärt, Paul Hillier notes:

[Pärt] was extremely fast to assimilate to any new idea, whether it came from his teachers or elsewhere, and [the Conservatory] would extend his later adoption of various avant-garde techniques to information often gleaned from the merest hint of a new idea from the West. His instructor, Heino Eller, recognized his distaste for early music and counterpoint, and permitted his earlier explorations of Western music, albeit privately. Following his death, Pärt noted: “I was then quite alone and had to teach myself everything; it was like a new beginning, a new contact with music” (Hillier, 28).

This unofficial sanctioning of free musical expression by his instructors eventually resulted in Pärt’s first orchestral composition, Nekrolog (“Obituary”), performed in 1960. This piece was the first Estonian work to feature the twelve-tone system of composition. While Khrennikov interpreted this work as a commentary on the horrors of fascism, due to its harsh dissident sound, it is notable that Pärt himself refrained from commenting on the work’s socio-political message. Stylistically, Nekrolog employs bleak, anxious and ominous tones, an aural catharsis of pain and oppression. The political implications of the composition’s theme are evident in its very name, but whether the obituary itself is intended for those living under communism, or those killed by fascist regimes, remains unclear (Hillier, 36).

Nekrolog  was publicly denounced at the Third Congress of Soviet Composers in 1962, the same Congress which denounced Andrei Volkonsky’s dodecaphonic experiments (Hillier, 35). Tikhon Khrennikov’s speech directly addresses Pärt’s work, and its inappropriate use of Western serialist techniques to critique Western European fascism:

A work like Pärt’s [Nekrolog] makes it quite clear that the twelve-tone experiment is untenable. This composition is dedicated to the memory of the victims of Fascism, but it bears the characteristics of the productions of foreign ‘avant-gardists’: ultra-expressionistic, a purely naturalistic depiction of the state of fear, terror, despair, and dejection…so we see that the attempts to employ the expressive techniques of the avant-garde bourgeois music for the realization of progressive ideas of our time are discredited by the results they produce (Hillier, 36).

In a bizarre twist of events, that very same year Pärt was one of six prize winners at “The All-Union Survey of the Creative Work of Young Composers,” which speaks to the continued opaqueness and confusion about official Soviet musical ideology (Hillier, 31). The disjuncture between Pärt’s obvious talent and his desire to experiment with new musical techniques presented a severe problem to the Composer’s Union.

Throughout the 1960s, Pärt grew wary of the strictness of serialism. In 1963, he composed Perpetuum Mobile (Perpetual Motion), a four-minute serial orchestral piece which, in a strange turn of events, received glowing reviews from Sovetskaya muzika, with one critic going as far as to admit that “Pärt used contemporary techniques of musical expression well [emphasis mine]” (Schmelz, 224). Schmelz suggests that this favorable reception may be due to a shift in the technical procedures Pärt employed. While Nekrolog was unapologetically twelve-tone, “[A] listener to [Perpetuum Mobile] is aware of the gradual increase in dynamics, volume, and tension, but is not necessarily aware of the calculations governing its progress,” which is to say, the intense dramatic effect of the piece overshadowed its formalist construction (222). Evidently, the suitable socialist content of Perpetuum Mobile concealed its governing technical system, thus proving it a resounding success. The critical acceptance of this piece may represent shift in official taste, or perhaps serve as a further example of the confusion regarding the official Soviet position on music. In either case, Perpetuum Mobile served as a pivotal moment in Pärt’s career, who towards the end of the 1960s became interested in religious music and the compositions of Bach, and moved away from Schoenbergian techniques.

With regards to his Western influence, Pärt himself was hesitant to admit his own exposure to European and American avant-garde composers. As we have seen with Volkonsky, the desire to assert one’s creative abilities was of great importance to the young Soviet unofficial composers. In a personal interview, Pärt explained:

It’s very possible I was influenced by [John] Cage, but it didn’t come from his music, but from things that were, perhaps, completely unknown to me. I may have heard a word, or seen a face or a picture, or something by someone connected with Cage. When people are hungry they are sensitive to every hint of food. It’s the same with ideas, particularly in that time in the Soviet Union. The hunger for information was so great that at times it was enough to hear just one or two chords and a whole new world was opened up (Schmelz, 65).

Alfred Schnittke expressed a similar concern, claiming that due to the separation of East from West, everything the Soviet Union produced appeared to be “borrowed,” regardless of actual cultural exchange (Schmelz, 65). Pärt and his fellow composers were insistent that they were, indeed, creating their own musical world, separate from both official Soviet ideology and the current musical trends of the West. The discourse surrounding individual creativity speaks to a desire for Russian-ness (or Estonian-ness, in the case of Pärt), but most importantly, a Russian-ness separate from the governance of the Composer’s Union or the Party’s official ideology. This leads me to believe that the “rebelling” of the young composers was less about inciting revolution, and more about creating a creative and compelling Eastern musical identity.

Continued Impact: Khrennikov’s Seven

In 1979, Composer’s Union leader Tikhon Khrennikov publicly denounced seven Soviet composers for allowing their pieces to be performed in the West, and officially banned their works from the Soviet Union. These composers included Elena Firsova, Dmitri

Smirnov, Alexander Knayfel, Viktor Suslin, Vyacheslav Artyomov, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Edison Desinov (Kozinn). Like Volkonsky did later in his career, a number of these composers emigrated in order to continue their work abroad (Taruskin, 319). Richard Taruskin argues that this denunciation differed significantly from Khrennikov’s 1948 resolution, in that instead of attacking a senior canon of composers (such as the famed Shostakovich and Prokofiev), Khrennikov now aimed his aggression at those beneath him, barely upsetting the existing order and conforming to what Taruskin aptly calls the “gerontocracy” (319). The decree was, for the most part, ineffective at blacklisting these composers. The departure of a number of the denounced musicians (something Shostakovich and Prokoviev were unable to do) speaks to the “young composers” ability to continue their work, despite falling outside of official Soviet favor. Gubaidulina and Desinov both achieved a great deal of success outside of the Eastern Bloc, and their works are performed to this day. Unlike the 1948 blacklisting, Khrennikov’s attempt to silence “the Seven” reveals a last-ditch effort to hold onto the crumbling Soviet musical doctrines.

 

Works Cited

Calico, Joy. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw in Postwar Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Caute, David. The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Coates, Stephen. X-Ray Audio: The Strange History of Soviet Music on the Bone. London: Strange Attractor, 2015.

Hillier, Paul. Arvo Pärt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Kholopov, Yuri. “Andrei Volkonsky the Initiator: A Profile of His Life and Work.” In          Underground Music from the Former USSR, ed. Valeria Tsenova. London: Routledge      Press, 1997. 1-20.

Kozinn, Allan. “Tikhon Khrennikov, Prominent Soviet Composer, Dies at 94.” New York Times. 15 August 2007.

Lemaire, Frans C. “Volkonsky, Andrey Mikhaylovich.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/29649.

Schmelz, Peter. Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music During the Thaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Taruskin, Richard. “Two Serendipities: Music and Power.” In Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New Essays. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016. 303-331.