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"National in Form, Socialist in Content": Musical
Nation-Building in the Soviet RepublicsAuthor(s): Marina
Frolova-WalkerReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the American
Musicological Society, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Summer, 1998),
pp.331-371Published by: University of California Press on behalf of
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content": Musical
Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER
The development of cultures national in form and socialist in
content is nec- essary for the purpose of their ultimate fusion
into one General Culture, so- cialist as to form and content, and
expressed in one general language.
-I. V. Stalin, Marksizm i natsional'no-kolonial'niy vopros
(1934) Comrades, we want-we passionately wish-to have our own
"Mighty Handful."
-A. A. Zhdanov, Sovetskaya muzika (1948) My subject is a unique
and bizarre project: the attempt to create,
within the Caucasian and Central Asian republics of the USSR,
national musical cultures that would reflect the musical
nation-
alism that grew up in Moscow and St. Petersburg during the
previous cen- tury. This project took shape during the early 1930s
at the behest of Stalin, and did not lose momentum until some years
after his death. Even today, however, as former Soviet republics
enjoy their independence, they still feed on the results of the
Soviet-instigated revolution in their cultures, while paying lip
service to the task of undoing the consequences of Rus- sification.
In the Almati Conservatory of Kazakhstan, for example, the
principal language of instruction is shifting from Russian to
Kazakh-a fairly simple matter for lecturing on historical topics,
but not for, say, de- tailed discussion of sixteenth-century
counterpoint, which is still an essen- tial part of the theory
curriculum. On the other hand, no fundamental objections have been
raised about the existence of the Conservatory, al- though its
presence in Almati is, of course, a result of Soviet Russification
policies. The opera house and concert hall similarly arrived in
Kazakhstan as pillars of imported Soviet culture, but are now
accepted as legitimate platforms for the promotion of Kazakhstan's
cultural agenda. Because the transfer of sovereignty from Moscow to
Almati is no longer in doubt, the legacy of Soviet cultural policy
need not be rejected as a foreign imposition. Rather, it can safely
be taken for granted, with piecemeal changes made to reflect the
complexion of the new states. As recently as the 1980s, scores
[Journal of the American Musicological Society 1998, vol. 51,
no. 2] ? 1998 by the American Musicological Society. All rights
reserved. 0003-0139/98/5102-0004$2.00
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332 Journal of the American Musicological Society
and recordings of music resulting from those policies could
still be found in abundance in Moscow music shops. Today they have
all but disap- peared, forlornly consigned to the dustiest corners
of libraries, and to for- gotten cupboards in the back rooms of
schools and colleges. Natives of the former Soviet republics and
Russians alike consider most of this music dead and unworthy of
revival. Not only is it tainted with Stalinism, but for those old
enough to remember, it is associated with the tedium of the routine
tributes to the achievements of each republic that could be found
in text- books, concert seasons, and the examination and
competition programs of the recent yet now so remote past. For the
purposes of musicology in the late 1990s, however, the study of
this music holds great promise, provok- ing reflection on a
constellation of topics: nationalism, cultural colonialism,
orientalism, and the history of socialist realism.'
The main focus of this article is the renaissance of romantic
nineteenth- century nationalism within a socialist multinational
state. Such a combi- nation may seem strange to those who have
learned to assign Marxism and nationalism to distinct and
irreconcilable categories, and indeed, the sep- aration is not
entirely inaccurate on the level of pure theory: national self-
consciousness was supposed to be symptomatic of high capitalism,
and both were destined to collapse together. Nevertheless, the
practical appli- cation and development of Soviet Marxism-Leninism
acknowledged the realities of the age of nation-states, and
employed nationalist ideology for socialist ends without losing
sight of the eventual and inevitable advent of a nationless and
stateless future-or so the Party ideologues declared. The mutual
adjustment between nationalist and socialist mythologies was a
complex process. As we shall see, in the case of music the
rhetorical strat- egies of romantic nationalism were retained but
yoked to new purposes, with results that were sometimes remarkably
grotesque, sometimes simply self-defeating. We can be thankful
that, although equivocation and obfus-
1. See Gregory Salmon's entries on Alma-Ata, Askhabad, Baku,
Bishkek, Dushanbe, Ere- van, Tashkent, and Tbilisi in the New Grove
Dictionary ofOpera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London and New York:
Macmillan, 1992). As Salmon's bibliographies attest, there is as
yet no substantial treatment of these repertories in the
English-language musicological literature. Prior to the Salmon
articles, the only information in English available on many of the
composers discussed in the present article could be found in
Stanley Dale Krebs, Soviet Composers and the Develop- ment of
SovietMusic (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970); and Rena Moisenko,
Realist Music: Twenty-five Soviet Composers (London: Meridian
Books, 1949). The latter is of interest as a faithful-indeed
credulous--precis of the standard Soviet line, but it offers no
independent assessment of events. Ethnomusicologists who carried
out fieldwork in the republics occa- sionally commented on the
interaction of traditional culture with Soviet ideology: see Mark
Slobin, "Conversations in Tashkent,"Asian Music 2, no. 2 (1971):
7-13; and also Theodore C. Levin, "Music in Modern Uzbekistan: The
Convergence of Marxist Aesthetics and Central Asian
Tradition,"Asian Music 12, no. 1 (1979): 149-58. There is a brief
but very penetrating description of the matter in question in
Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and
Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),
xvi-xvii.
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 333
cation were raised to dogma in this era, negotiating the
resulting ideolog- ical hall of mirrors, difficult as it still is
for a researcher, is no longer the life-and-death matter it once
was for Soviet composers and musicologists.
National in Form
For the first few years of the Bolshevik state, musical
nationalism in its nineteenth-century form was certainly out of
favor. Indeed, the cosmopol- itanism and avant-gardism of the
immediate prerevolutionary years had al- ready largely ousted
nationalism. The aristocratic or bourgeois background of Russian
composers, past and present, rendered them members of the enemy
culture, and only Musorgsky's operas, now styled as "dramas of the
people," were spared by the zealous left Bolsheviks of the RAPM
(Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians). For the rival ASM
(Association for Contemporary Music), which drew its sustenance
from Mahler, Schoen- berg, and Krenek, casting The Five overboard
seemed the proper solution to what its members perceived as the
problem of Russian musical provin- cialism.
Attitudes toward folk music also changed. Though it might be
expected that the slogan of bringing high culture closer to the
masses would en- courage interest in folk music, the Bolshevik view
of the peasant class as reactionary shifted attention from rural to
urban, and specifically proletar- ian, popular musical culture. For
the first time, disseminators of folk music had to find in it
something specifically "revolutionary" or "progressive" rather than
merely national. For example, Arseny Avraamov-an early So- viet
experimental composer, sometime exponent of forty-eight-note equal
temperament, and pioneer of film sound-track synchronization
methods, who is remembered principally for his "Symphony of
Klaxons"--saw "highly revolutionary elements" in the still
unexplored modal structure of folk music. He even hinted that
startling intonational discoveries would prove crucial for the
development of "contemporary music, suffocating in the grip of
twelve-note temperament."2 But as expectations of imminent world
revolution waned and the new regime began to come to terms with the
prospect of continuing indefinitely contra mundum, official Soviet
rhetoric returned to the familiar verities of nationalism. The
turning point was the disbanding of both the RAPM and the ASM in
1932, and their replacement by the Union of Composers and its
mouthpiece, the journal Sovetskaya muzika. Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and
The Five were then swiftly rehabilitated, mythologized, and
presented as the only legitimate starting point for the future
development of Soviet music.
2. Avraamov's comments first appeared in Sovremennaya muzika 22
(1927): 287; quoted in I. Zemtsovsky, Fol'klor i kompozitor
(Leningrad and Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1978), 10-11.
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334 Journal of the American Musicological Society
This revived musical nationalism had to be fitted into a new
mold, of course. It could not be exclusively Russian, since the
nationalities of the sister republics had to be acknowledged; even
the Russian federation was itself now understood to be a
multinational entity. Imperial Russia, "the prison of the peoples"
as it was now styled, had passed, and every Soviet nation now had
the right to express itself on an equal footing with Russia -at
least according to the new doctrine. In the January 1934 issue of
Sovetskaya muzika, we find for the first time a slogan that was
intended to shape the cultural revolution. Stalin himself provided
the words for the heading: 'The Development of Cultures National in
Form and Socialist in Content."3 Soviet musicians had to ensure
that their music was not "na- tional in content," for that would be
bourgeois nationalistic art, according to the code. Only the
outward forms, the technical means of expression, might reflect the
nationality of each republic, and even this was meant as a
temporary concession, until all the national tributaries could
merge into a single mighty river of international Soviet culture,
socialist in both form and content.4 We need not doubt the
attribution of this idea to Stalin him- self, for if one issue
gripped his imagination, it was how to deal with the different
nationalities of the union. He had turned his thoughts toward this
question even before the revolution, when in 1913 Lenin assigned
him the task of developing the Party's policy regarding
nationality. Stalin under- took his charge conscientiously, and the
eventual product of his research was the essay "Marxism and the
National Question." Here we encounter his definition of "nation,"
later memorized by countless students during his rule: "A nation is
an historically constituted, stable community of people formed on
the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and
psychological character, manifested in a common culture."5
The word territory was Stalin's peculiar addition to an
otherwise un- controversial, nonprescriptive definition. Had he
remained in obscurity, his interpretation would have been of no
consequence, but he had every intention of seeing his definition
reflected in the republics of the Soviet Union--and Stalin, unlike
other men, had the power to adjust the world to match his words.
The practical realization of the definition, so far as musical
activities were concerned, was readily apparent in the admini-
strative structure of the Soviet Union. The federation came to
consist of
3. Sovetskaya muzika (January 1934): 3. 4. "Under the conditions
of a dictatorship of the proletariat within a single country,
the
rise of cultures national in form and socialist in content has
to take place, so that when the proletariat wins in the whole world
and socialism is a part of ordinary life, these cultures will merge
into one culture, socialist both in form and in content with a
common language--this is the dialectics of Lenin's approach to the
issue of national culture" (I. V. Stalin, Marksizm i
natsional'no-kolonial'n'y vopros [Moscow, 1934], 195).
5. J. V. Stalin, Works, 13 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1952- 55), 2:307.
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 335
hierarchically organized ethno-territorial units with sometimes
arbitrarily drawn borders. Beneath the level of the entire union
were the national re- publics; within some of these were created
the autonomous republics or the smaller autonomous regions; at the
bottom of the hierarchy were the national districts. Depending on a
unit's importance within the hierarchy, its task of nation building
proceeded at different paces and with different aims: each national
republic was required to build a national opera house and to create
a repertory for it-certainly including at least one large,
through-composed work--by the end of the 1930s. Lower in the
hierar- chy, an autonomous republic within the Russian federation
was expected to produce a full compendium of its folk-song
repertory; in addition it would perhaps receive an overture or two
from Russian composers. Some of the furthest-flung districts with
populations of nomadic peoples were simply left alone. That many of
the republics contained a mixture of ethnic groupings was largely
ignored: only their titular nationality mattered. The newly named
republic of Azerbaijan was one of the more blatant examples of an
artificially created territory: since the boundaries of a national
repub- lic had been drawn around it, a distinct nation was required
to inhabit it. In 1937 the majority population of the republic,
formerly known as 'Tiirk," suddenly became known as the Azerbaijani
nation. Minority ethnic groups were required to assimilate, for
ethnic and territorial complications were not to be tolerated.6
Ethnic groups falling outside the territory that Moscow had defined
as their national unit were encouraged, or often forced, to move to
where the map of the union said they belonged. Mi- norities too
small to become the titular nationality of any unit drifted into
oblivion. Thus, the Soviet bureaucracy realized a tidy scheme of
matching nations and national territories; all future cultural
development was planned within this structure.
Territories of equivalent status were supposed to proceed at the
same pace of cultural development. If the initial goal was the
production of a national opera, then the project was to be carried
out simultaneously across the union, even in seminomadic Central
Asia, where Western cultural in- stitutions were a complete
novelty. Because Uzbeks and Kazakhs were clearly unable to take
such a cultural leap without substantial external help, members of
the Composers' Union from Moscow and Leningrad were re- cruited to
oversee the project. Indeed, in many cases they wrote the re-
quired operas themselves, in what they perceived to be the
appropriate national style. Cooperation thus extended far beyond
the construction of opera houses and conservatories; the notes sung
and played therein were as
6. Mark Saroyan, "Beyond the Nation-State: Culture and Ethnic
Politics in Soviet Trans- caucasia," in Transcaucasia, Nationalism,
and Social Change: Essays in the History ofArmenia, Azerbaijan, and
Georgia, ed. R. G. Suny (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1996), 403-4. Today we can see how such policies can still be
reversed in the absence of a restraining Soviet authority.
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336 Journal of the American Musicological Society
often as not the fruits of Russian labor. Since the creation of
music was regarded as much the same as any industrial process,
composers, as "culture-workers," were expected to serve the state,
often as members of a collective. They were accorded specific tasks
by the Party, which in general followed the much-trumpeted
"unanimous Soviet public opinion on mu- sical issues" of Sovetskaya
muzika. 7 Constructing a national musical culture was, like the
building of a gigantic dam, a matter of concern for the whole
country.
The results were sometimes bizarre beyond any expectation. One
small collective consisting of two Russian composers and one
native, known under their combined surnames,
Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev, produced half a dozen operas for the Uzbek
nation. Another composer, Sergei Balasanian, was of Armenian
origin, though he was born in Turkmenistan. And whose national
composer did he become? Why, the Tajiks'. Reinhold Gliere, after
collecting every available award for composing the first
Azerbaijani national opera, moved on to Uzbekistan, where the Party
thought his ex- perience and talents were needed most urgently.
Almost every Soviet com- poser soon became involved in this
campaign; it was by no means merely a shrewd career move for
mediocrities. By way of illustration, consider the fate of
Alexander Mosolov and Nikolai Roslavets, known in the West as early
Soviet modernists. Mosolov became the first producer of a Turkmen
symphonic suite,8 while Roslavets composed a string quartet on
Turkmen themes; the latter also compiled and harmonized a
collection of Uzbek folk songs. The incentive to produce such music
was indeed strong, for even the ablest composers, since the Party's
stated policy on music left but the nar- rowest of straits between
the Scylla of formalism and the Charybdis of ba- nality. Folk
music, it was even declared, was the only proper source for art
music:
All great masters, all great composers of the past (of all
peoples, without exception!) proceeded from this [i.e., folk
music]. And, on the contrary, those who were locked in a narrow
world of shallow, subjective feelings, and who tried to "create
[music] out their own selves"--eventually found they 7. From
Comrade Chelyapov's speech to the Moscow Union of Composers,
Sovetskaya
muzika (March 1936): 19. 8. The case is complicated by the fact
that Mosolov had displayed a spontaneous interest
in Turkmen folk music long before the Party's call to create art
music for the republics. The finale of his Fifth Piano Sonata
(1926) is a rendering of two folk songs, one Turkmen, one Russian,
within the characteristically dense and demanding style of this
leading figure of the Soviet avant-garde. Later works, such as his
Turkmen and Uzbek Suites (1936), already showed evidence of
compromise, but not enough to satisfy the authorities. It becomes
im- possible to discern the former avant-gardist in the works
written from the late thirties onward: his style had been
irreversibly "corrected" by his experiences in a labor camp. It is
enormously sad to listen to the many bland pieces in the style of
The Five, or to scan the list of his works based on the folk music
of a dozen regions of the USSR, indistinguishable from the output
of his colleagues engaged in the same project.
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 337
had departed from the culture of the people. Their false
creations were re- jected by the people, because the people will
not tolerate a fraud.9 Because the sheer scale of the
national-music project prohibits its com-
prehensive treatment within a single article, I shall confine my
discussion to examples drawn from national opera. First, the story
of this genre in Uzbekistan can provide us with some understanding
of the Central Asian predicament. Like its neighbors, and in
contrast to the Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia, Uzbekistan lacked
even the barest prerequisites for the de- velopment of opera,
national or otherwise. One account described the task facing Uzbek
musicians involved in the opera project; having achieved the first
modest goal of a spoken play interspersed with monodic songs ac-
companied by national instruments, they were now expected to
produce an entire opera:
Owing to the maturing expectations of the Uzbek audience, the
further ques- tion of harmonizing the opera arises, since the most
cultured among the Uzbeks cannot now be satisfied by monophony.
This question appears ever more often on our agenda. It is
mentioned in the resolution on comrade Ikramov's paper at the fifth
session of the Uzbek Communist Party Central Committee. Some steps
are being taken in that direction: the orchestra is being filled
with European instruments, and some numbers are being har- monized.
Piano accompaniment is being introduced, sometimes composed for the
whole piece (e.g., Roslavets, Uttan Pachalyar).
In 1933-34 the work on harmonization acquired the nature of a
mass production process. Comrade [Nikolai] Mironov, who was invited
to do this job, is filling the operas Arshin mal alan, Purtana, and
others with harmo- nized numbers....
The next step to which he [the simple listener] will ascend is
the percep- tion of harmonic music. But for the further evolution
of the Uzbek opera, harmonization alone will not suffice. The
spectator will not be satisfied by emotional empathy alone: he will
demand the reconstruction of the very musical forms constituting
the opera-arias, choruses, finales. At present there still is
absolutely no recitative, which remains unassimilated by Uzbek
singers: immediately after singing, their characters switch to
spoken dia- logue.'0
With the help of composers from Russia, Uzbekistan was ready to
present its achievements as early as May 1937 at one of the early
festivals of national cultures in Moscow."I By then it had produced
ten plays with music,
9. Georgiy Khubov, "Sovetskaya opera," Sovetskaya muzika
(January 1938): 15. 10. E. Romanovskaya, "Muzika v Uzbekistane,"
Sovetskaya muzika (September 1934):
3-9, at 8. 11. The first, pre-war series of the Dekadi'
natsional'nogo iskusstva (ten-day festivals of na-
tional art): 1936 March 11-21, Ukraine; May 17-25, Kazakhstan
1937 January 5-15, Georgia; May 21-30, Uzbekistan
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338 Journal of the American Musicological Society
proudly called "operas," though everyone was aware of the gaps
yet to be bridged. The earliest of these were imported wholesale,
like the Azerbaijani comic opera Arshin mal alan. Later efforts
were collective creations like Farkhad and Shirin, for which the
Russian ethnomusicologist Viktor Us- pensky notated three thousand
bars of folk music that were then harmo- nized and orchestrated by
guest composers Georgiy Mushel' and Tsveyfel'. In time, composers
progressively eliminated spoken dialogue and national instruments,
and reduced the opera's dependence on the mere quotation of folk
sources. Gliere's Gyul'sara, for large symphony orchestra, began
with an imposing overture. At the festival in Moscow, the products
of these different stages of Uzbek opera were presented on an equal
footing and appeared to enjoy a uniformly warm reception. In a
review of the Uzbek contributions, the critic Georgiy Khubov--a
model of Party orthodoxy-- highly praised the newborn art of
Uzbek opera, contrasting the works with "the operatic inventions of
the consumptive art of Western formalists": "Like Antheus,
revitalized by Mother Earth herself, Uzbek art gains strength from
the juices of the native soil," continued the critic, deftly ap-
propriating one of Stalin's favorite images.'2
While the careers of "guest composers" had peaked by the late
1930s, a few Muscovites and Leningraders decided to take up
permanent residence in their adoptive republics. The founder of
national opera in Kazakhstan, for example, one Yevgeniy
Brusilovsky, was still writing operas into the 1950s, by which time
a new generation of conservatory-trained native composers had been
equipped to take over. But some of the republics later preferred to
forget about their Russian guest composers: the Azerbaijanis went
so far as to exclude all mention of the once-celebrated Gliere from
their music history texts. Still, the lasting influence of these
"guests" on indigenous composers was undeniable. As for the "more
advanced" repub- lics (in the sense that they required no external
help in the 1930s), their musical culture had in fact already been
shaped by Russian influence prior to the revolution.
These complex circumstances may be summarized as follows. First,
the culture of each republic developed according to Moscow's
directives, mak- ing them, to this extent, colonial cultures.
Second, these cultural imports were consistently presented as
authentic indigenous developments. Third, the burgeoning
intelligentsia within each republic largely identified with these
cultural developments and made their own contributions within
the
1938 April 5-15, Azerbaijan 1939 May 26-June 4, Kirgiziya;
October 20-29, Armenia 1940 June 5-15, Belorussia; October 20-27,
Buryat-Mongolia 1941 April 12-20, Tajikistan
12. Georgiy Khubov, "Muzikal'noe iskusstvo Uzbekistana,"
Sovetskaya muzika (March 1937): 7-14.
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 339
boundaries set by Moscow's rules. We could even say that later
in the cen- tury these colonial creations had been assimilated and
endowed with some degree of authenticity in the eyes of each
republic's populace. If, following Eric Hobsbawm, we regard
nationalism as a network of invented tradi- tions,'3 then in the
case of the Soviet republics, we can say that various peoples
acquiesced in the invention of traditions by others on their behalf
(indeed, some of the "peoples," like the Azerbaijanis, were
themselves the creation of Moscow). In the second part of this
article, we shall examine the model for all of these national
cultures: the profile of nationalism as it de- veloped within
Russian culture in the nineteenth century. This will enable us to
explain and interpret Moscow's actions as it sought to replicate
the process elsewhere.
Whose Nationalism?
Since musical nationalism in the Soviet republics was dependent
on the model of nineteenth-century Russia, these states were
expected to inaugu- rate their era of national art music with an
opera, just as Glinka had done for Russia. Moreover, they were
expected to approximate one or other of the two genres derived from
Glinka that had become the twin pillars of Russian music in the
generation after him. The first, in which the topic of class
struggle was particularly encouraged, was the "heroic drama of the
people," represented by Glinka's Ivan Susanin, the ideologically
acceptable reworking ofA Life for the Tsar; the second was the
national epic, written in the manner of Glinka's Ruslan and
Lyudmila. New operas from the re- publics were thus always measured
against the yardstick of the Russian classics. For example, the
Azerbaijani national opera Keroglu by Uzeir Ga- jibekov was
officially deemed a successful embodiment of the national epic
type;'4 if it had a flaw, it was the lack of a monumental overture
in the style of Borodin's Prince Igor.'5 Official Soviet praise of
the Russian classics at times knew no bounds: Russian opera was
pronounced the best in the world, and any history of Russian music
honestly acknowledging Western influence was castigated as a
deliberate distortion.16 Such ideological pres- sures left
burgeoning national cultures little choice in their models.
13. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of
Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
14. "Keroglu" is also transliterated variously as "Ker-ogli" and
"Kyor-Ogli"; "Gajibekov"
similarly appears also as "Gadzhibekov" and "Hajibeyov." The
complications arise from the double transliteration, first from
Arabic to Cyrillic, then from the latter to Roman.
15. Georgiy Khubov, "Iskusstvo Azerbaidzhanskogo naroda,"
Sovetskaya muzika (April 1938): 5-22.
16. Tamara Livanova's doctoral dissertation, "Istoriya russkoy
muzikal'noy kul'turi" ("History of Russian Musical Culture," Moscow
Conservatory, 1938), was viciously attacked by I. Martinov in his
"Izkazhennaya istoriya" ("Distorted History"), Sovetskaya muzika
(May
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340 Journal of the American Musicological Society
On the other hand, significant cultural forces in some of the
republics would have led them eagerly to accept the Russian model,
even without compulsion. More than mere sycophancy was at work
here: large sectors of the republics' urban elites were already
convinced of the benefits of west- ernization, and they saw Russia
as the closest source of a westernizing in- fluence. Azerbaijan was
one such republic. There Mustafa Kuliev, minister of Education, had
started a far-reaching musical reform in the early 1920s, long
before the cultural revolution was imposed by Moscow. Azerbaijan
was one of the three Transcaucasian republics, and the only Moslem
one in the region. Considered more backward than its Christian
neighbors, Georgia and Armenia, it had been largely neglected by
Moscow during the previous hundred years of Russian government. In
cultural terms this meant that while Georgia produced its first
national opera in 1908, fol- lowed by Armenia in 1918 (written by
Petersburg-educated composers Zakhariy Paliashvili and Alexander
Spendiarov respectively), Azerbaijan could claim only a much more
modest achievement-the so-called mugam opera, a string of loosely
connected solo improvisations.'7 Such operas--if we can call them
that--were largely monodic. Harmonized sections intro- duced a
clumsily rudimentary European tonal idiom, with startlingly in-
congruous effects. In 1924, Kuliev initiated a long-running
discussion in the press on the state of opera in Azerbaijan,
calling for its radical mod- ernization and criticizing mugam opera
for its artistic and technical short- comings. In accordance with
the common practice of those days, this initiative from the
official cultural leader was supported by numerous col- lective
letters from the ranks of the proletariat. The workers of the oil
in- dustry and the railways suddenly developed a vigorous appetite
for "real opera": "We need new Azerbaijani operas," they wrote,
along with such slogans as "Cultured modern opera or nothing," and
even "Ban the old mugam opera" and 'Tirk opera must go, along with
the Arabic alphabet and the yashmak [veil]!"18
One aspect of Kuliev's program involved the commissioning of
operas from Russian composers. And so it came about that Gliere,
one of the most
1939): 81-90. "Istoriya russkoy muziki" ("History of Russian
Music"), edited by Mikhail Pekelis (Moscow, 1940), was discussed in
a meeting of Moscow composers and musicolo- gists, reported in
Sovetskaya muzfka (January-February 1948): 91: "Unfortunately,
comrade Pekelis did not subject his own work to sufficient
criticism, particularly the textbook on the history of Russian
music, which he edited and to which he contributed, and where, as
he himself admitted, the dependence of our musical culture on the
West was unfoundedly em- phasized, class struggle ignored,
originality of Russian music and its leading position in world
music in the second half of the nineteenth century passed
over."
17. Mugam (the same as Arabic maq'am and Central Asian makom) is
a traditional setting of classical poetry (e.g., Nezami Genjavi) in
the form of a large cyclic composition based on elaborate vocal
improvisation with instrumental accompaniment.
18. B. Zeidman, "Glibre i Azerbaijanskaya muzikal'naya
kul'tura," R. M. Glitre: Statyi, vospominaniya, materialy, vol. 2
(Leningrad, 1966), 216-36.
-
"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 341
prominent heirs to the Russian nationalist tradition of The
Five, was sum- moned to Baku. After conscientious study of the folk
sources made avail- able to him, he produced for the Azerbaijani
nation an opera, Shahsenem, which was first produced in Baku in
1927. Kuliev argued tirelessly for the need to abandon the legacy
of Persian cultural dominion, and to replace it with a radical
westernization of musical culture along Russian lines. One of the
main rebuttals offered by his opponents was that the non-European,
nondiatonic system of tuning employed in Azerbaijan constituted an
in- surmountable obstacle to westernization. Kuliev replied in this
way:
Some of our musicians are always repeating that Tirk songs
cannot be tran- scribed within the European system. But Russian or
German songs cannot be fitted into the twelve-note European
temperament either.... Yet this did not prevent Russian music from
a wholesale adoption of European founda- tions and techniques, or
from developing these to such heights as Glinka did.19
Hyperbole aside, this statement demonstrates remarkable
clear-sightedness on the part of Kuliev, since Russian nationalist
composers had never ac- knowledged any discrepancy between the folk
song they heard in the field and its representation on the piano,
even though in some Russian tradi- tions this discrepancy was no
less glaring than it was in Azerbaijan. Thus sweeping aside the
reasoning of his adversaries, Kuliev opened the door to all manner
of Russian influence.
Moscow therefore had no need to impose a Russian model on the
de- velopment of Azerbaijani music, since Kuliev and his like had
already em- braced it (although their enthusiasm was no doubt more
easily sustained because of the urgent necessity of pleasing
Moscow's envoys). News of the Azerbaijani project soon passed
beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. The first president and
founder of the new Republic of Turkey, Kemal Atatdirk, noticed the
success in Baku of Glihre's Shahsenem and was suffi- ciently
inspired to invite the composer to his country on a similar
mission. Although Gliere did not go, Turkey eventually secured two
far more em- inent composers in its quest for far-reaching musical
reforms: Bart6k and Hindemith. A group of Turkish nationalist
composers, styling themselves as The Five of their nation, thus
poured out their 'Turkish soul" in the style of Hindemith and
Bart6k. Had Gliere been able to accept the original in- vitation,
they would no doubt have been equally happy to express their
identity in Russian accents.
Nineteenth-century Russian musical nationalism held a powerful
appeal for later national movements in music, owing to its
international success. The project of creating a distinctively
Russian music, begun singlehandedly by Glinka in the 1830s, had by
the end of the century culminated in the
19. Mustafa Kuliev, quoted in Z. Safarova,
Muzizkal'no-esteticheskiye vzglyady Uzeira Ga- jibekova (Moscow,
1973), 96.
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342 Journal of the American Musicological Society
European-wide acknowledgment of an important "Russian school."
This recognition, even celebrity, nevertheless fell short of the
higher purpose to which Russian nationalists aspired in the late
nineteenth century: to forge a culture fully independent of Western
influences, one whose profound originality and spirituality would
show "old hag Europe" the way for- ward.20 In his final years,
Rimsky-Korsakov frankly admitted that such aspirations, at least in
the musical domain, were unattainable: "In my opin- ion, a
distinctively 'Russian music' does not exist. Both harmony and mel-
ody are pan-European. Russian songs introduce into counterpoint a
few new technical devices, but to create a new, unique sort of
music--this they cannot do."21 Russian nationalism, while
successful as a creative stimulus, therefore failed as a political
program. Later musical nationalisms within the Soviet Union never
acknowledged this failure, however, but instead accepted the
Russian mythology unquestioningly. Composers not only based their
nationalist projects on the same romantic premises, such as the
primacy of folk music; they also borrowed the techniques used by
Russians to assimilate folk material, and, ironically, deployed
some of the stylistic features that Russian composers had
supposedly derived from Russian folk song. What had been initially
designed as a representation of authentic
20. These ambitions, invoking the "Moscow as a third Rome" idea
(a phrase current since the fifteenth century), were voiced more by
the coterie of nationalist writers associated with The Five than by
the composers themselves. Odoyevsky wrote of Glinka's A Life for
the Tsar: "With Glinka's opera there appears something that has
been long searched for and still not found in Europe--namely, a new
trend in art; and from thence a new period in art history begins:
the era of Russian music" (V. F. Odoyevsky,
Muzikal'no-literaturnoye naslediye [Mos- cow: GMI, 1956], 119).
Stasov was impatient to see Balakirev "forever part with the
general current of European music" and start creating Russian music
that would be "new, great, like nothing ever heard or seen before"
(see his letter of 13 February 1861 in M. A. Balakirev and V. V.
Stasov, Perepiska, 2 vols. [Moscow: Muzyka, 1970-71], 1:122). Cui,
a nationalist in his writings rather than in his music, said that
"in Europe, music has grown so elderly that no harmonic and
orchestral spices can help it any more, whereas Russian music is
fresh and full of vigor" (Ts. A. Cui, Izbrannie stat'i [Leningrad,
1952], 37). Underlying these remarks was the critics' propensity to
exaggerate the extent to which compositions exhibited Russian char-
acteristics, as did, say, Nikolai Mel'gunov onA Life for the Tsar
or Cui on Rimsky-Korsakov's First Symphony (Mel'gunov, "Glinka i
yego muzikal'nie sochineniya" [1836], reprinted in T. Livanova and
V. Protopopov, Glinka, vol. 2 [Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye
muzikal'noye iz- datel'stvo, 1955], 202-9; and Cesar Cui, letter to
Rimsky-Korsakov of 27 December 1863; see N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov,
Polnoe sobranie sochineniy: Literaturniye proizvedeniya i
perepiska, 7 vols. [Moscow: Muzgiz, 1955-70], 5:254). In music, as
in other aspects of Russian na- tionalism such as literature or
religion, Russia tended to compare itself with Europe rather than
any particular country; see, for example, the musings of the young
Taneyev, who dreamed of reproducing the whole of European music
history in Russia and to this end started writing Palestrina-style
counterpoints on Russian folk-song material (P. I. Tchaikovsky and
S. I. Taneyev, Pis'ma [Moscow: Goskul'tprosvetizdat, 1951],
56-61).
21. P. A. Karasyov, "Besedi s Nikolayem Andreyevichem
Rimskim-Korsakov'im," Russkaya muzikal'nayagazeta 15, no. 49 (7
December 1908), cols. 1119-20; quoted in Richard Taruskin,
Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works
Through "Mavra," 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1996), 1:64.
-
"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 343
Russianness was appropriated by later composers trying to
express the Ka- zakh or Georgian spirit.
The attractions of Russian musical nationalism as a model are
not hard to see, for the movement was unique in many respects. It
involved com- posers of several generations whose music shared a
significant degree of continuity and common purpose; it pursued
ambitious goals in creating a national musical language; and, most
importantly, it succeeded in pro- ducing rich and diverse artistic
results. Just as The Five once believed that emulating Glinka
guaranteed the Russianness of their works, so later did nationalist
composers elsewhere imagine that following the Russian model would
ensure the authenticity of their own efforts. Indeed, in the course
of their project, spanning three-quarters of a century, Russian
composers had at some stage addressed nearly all the possible
issues arising from the at- tempt to create a musical nationalism.
Let us recall the most important features of their experience.
The first group of problems arise when folk songs are collected,
ar- ranged, and imitated. In accordance with the principles of
German roman- tic nationalism adopted by the collectors, the whole
corpus of folk songs found on Russian-populated territories was to
be considered a national treasure; the local thus acquired the
status of the national, and the mutable contours of everyday music
making were fixed once and for all as a priceless insight into the
nation's soul. The massed riches of folk-song transcrip- tions,
though, were not immune to reevaluation. The most important re-
assessment occurred in the 1860s, when the rural/urban opposition
arose (and, coordinated with this, old/new, Russian/westernized,
pure/contami- nated, and modal/tonal); the only the body of peasant
songs worthy of representing the Russian national identity, as
defined by Slavophile doc- trines, came to be those of supposedly
pre-Petrine origin. The nineteenth century saw several changes of
fashion in Russian folk-song arrangements, coinciding with each
successive attempt to redefine the function of folk song: it was
successively regarded as a source of entertainment, a venerable
part of the nation's cultural heritage, and an object of
scholarship. These definitions gave rise to styles of harmonization
marked in turn by the care- free imposition of external
conventions, then by what was thought to be a more respectful
approach, and finally by a style deemed to be au- thentic.
Russian methods of bringing folk song into art music ranged from
straightforward quotation to the abstraction and assimilation of
various perceived characteristics. But the ambitions of musical
nationalism set a further goal: the creation of a Russian musical
language. The desire to develop music in parallel with literature
drew composers beyond the rel- atively simple task of using Russian
folk melodies: if the melodies were the lexis of the language, a
distinctively Russian musical syntax also had to be found. Glinka,
the first to set out on this path, sought in particular an
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344 Journal of the American Musicological Society
alternative to symphonic development in the Germanic manner. The
result was the "changing-background" variation technique, which was
to prove so fruitful for him and his successors. The next important
step was the discovery by Vladimir Stasov of the law of Russian
plagalism, which he based solely on his examination of Glinka's
compositional habits. This was treated as evidence of a purportedly
fundamental difference between Russian harmony, articulated around
IV, and Western harmony, in which the role of V is central.22
Another development that came to be regarded as part of an
authentically Russian musical syntax was the declamatory style
Musorgsky extracted from the melody of Russian speech. And so the
innovations of individual composers were recast as discoveries of
an im- manent Russianness. Once again, however, Rimsky-Korsakov
punctured these pretensions:
Russian traits--and national traits in general--are acquired not
by writing according to specific rules, but rather by removing from
the common lan- guage of music those devices which are
inappropriate to a Russian style. The method is of a negative
character, a technique of avoiding certain devices. Thus, for
example, I would not use this turn of phrase:
A'.
if I were writing in a Russian style, as it would be
inappropriate, but in other contexts I might use it freely.
Otherwise it would not be a creative process, but only some kind of
mechanical process of writing in accordance with var- ious rules.
To achieve a Russian style I would avoid some devices, for a Span-
ish style I would avoid others, and for a German style, still
others.23 How very prosaic. Here the composer is not, after all,
the conduit for
the ineffable groanings of the Russian soul, but merely a
practical musician who has learned the trick of avoiding certain
turns of phrase in order to create a distinctive stylistic
ambience. The individuality and brilliance of many a work of
Rimsky-Korsakov or Borodin can conceal this negative practice of
shunning certain procedures, but if we turn to the more faceless
creations of, say, Alexander Olenin, a pupil of Balakirev, we can
quickly sense the truth of Rimsky-Korsakov's words. Olenin
described his opera Kudeyar thus: "It is like a Russian song taken
to extremes, for no device characteristic of the West is employed
in this music, which is based, rather, on Russian two-part textures
with their peculiar features of voice lead- ing."24 Finished in
1911, this opera is now rarely heard. The first impres-
22. I have examined the myth of "Russian plagalism" in my
article "On Ruslan and Rus- sianness," Cambridge Opera Journal 9,
no. 1 (1997): 21-45.
23. Rimsky-Korsakov, quoted in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the
Russian Traditions 1:64. 24. Olenin, quoted inMiliyAlekseevich
Balakirev: Vospominaniya ipis'ma, ed. E. Frid (Len-
ingrad: GMI, 1962), 344.
-
"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 345
Example 1 Alexander Olenin, Opera-song Kudeyar (a) Orchestral
prelude to act 1
4 -.. ...
WIN .a I-
sion the music creates is of an obsessive avoidance of standard
"Western" traits, such as a basic four-part texture, common
modulations, chromati- cism, and the leading tone in minor mode.
Instead the composer maintains a largely three-part texture, in
which two parts usually proceed in parallel thirds or sixths; he
also generally restricts his harmonic palette to a modal
diatonicism (Ex. la). Parallel fifths and octaves, a freely
changing meter, and a lack of transitions between keys or modal
centers pervade the opera. Where the plot requires Olenin to create
dramatic tension, however, he seems unable to stand by his
principles, for he slips back into operatic cli- ches that bring
with them full four-part harmony and a more conventional use of
tonality (Ex. Ib). His occasional use of the whole-tone scale is
also incongruous, though he would not have acknowledged it so,
since the scale was considered Russian property on the grounds that
Glinka was the first to use it. Olenin could have presented a
similar excuse for all his modula- tions via an augmented triad as
well. But what of the opera's clear use of Leitmotiv? Surely this
technique could not be claimed for Russia? Unfor- tunately for
Olenin, Kudeyar illustrates all too well how nationalist doc-
trines alone are not enough to produce gold, no matter how
faithfully the artist adheres to them. Without the support of
considerable talent, skill, and taste, the musical result can
totter on the brink of absurdity.
By the turn of the century, it was already becoming painfully
obvious that Russian composers' claims to have created a national
musical language could no longer be taken at face value. Various
harmonic novelties and one characteristic variation technique had
been stamped with a Russian trade- mark, but these hardly offered
limitless possibilities for future develop- ment. The surviving
members of The Five gradually abandoned the
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346 Journal of the American Musicological Society
Example 1 continued
(b) Scene of Kudeyar and Nastya from act 4
Kudeyar (Giving Nastya a lingering look) Broadly, freely
Ya lyub- lyu, lyub-lyu te-bya kra-
a,4r ii W, I K ._ y rF mF -sa- vi-tsa! Ya lyub- lyu te- bya da
zhar-che prezh-ne- vo! A ye-
He rushes toward a pile of weapons and picks out some knives and
a mace.
-shcho lyub-lyu ya vo-lyush-ku! 8va.
----------------------------------------------
I., SAw I IW
[I love you, I love you, my beauty! I love you even more than
ever! But I also love my freedom!]
nationalism they had so passionately espoused in earlier years.
Balakirev produced a Second Symphony that Stasov regarded as
disappointingly conventional. And although Rimsky-Korsakov
deliberately stopped short of adopting Debussy's "decadent"
harmony, contending that whatever sounded suspiciously French in
his music in fact derived from Glinka, the words quoted above
betray the depth of his disenchantment with nation-
-
"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 347
alism. Glazunov, principal heir to the Russian style and the
most beloved child of The Five, chose to refine his motivic and
contrapuntal writing along overtly German lines, and to develop
without compunction his pen- chant for Wagnerisms. Other graduates
of the St. Petersburg Conservatory seemed more loyal to the forms
they learned from A. B. Marx than to the idea of creating new forms
out of Russia's noble clay.
All the earlier myths of Russian nationalist music were
resurrected three decades later for the purposes of Soviet cultural
policy. Ignoring the evi- dent disillusionment in the words and
music of those who had been at the center of musical nationalism,
policymakers presented a fictional version of this era of music
history as a model whose successes commanded emulation on the part
of republics from the Black Sea to the frontier of China. Take, for
example, one of the founding fathers of Armenian national music,
Alexander Spendiarov. Born in the Crimea of Armenian parents, and a
stu- dent of Rimsky-Korsakov, he later devoted himself to the study
of Arme- nian folk music with the intention of creating a music for
the nation he chose to identify as his own, even though he never
troubled to learn its mother tongue. His operaAlmast (1918) was
later appropriated for Soviet purposes and praised as a worthy
precursor to the new cultural policies, despite mild criticism of
the density of its musical language. Here is Spen- diarov's appeal
to nationalism:
European music is already too refined; it has offered us
everything it can. It has nothing more to say and, to compensate
for the lack of anything new to say, has to resort to various
musical tricks. In order to introduce something fresh, Western
musicians turn to the East, and rightly so.
I cannot understand many of our musicians sitting in Baku,
Tbilisi, and Yerevan, who conduct their search in the wrong
direction. To arouse any interest in Europe [at present], an
Armenian, Azerbaijani, or Georgian com- poser must demonstrate a
talent at least equal to Scriabin's. Nevertheless, a moderately
gifted musician, if he were to move in the right [i.e.,
nationalist] direction, would [also be able to] achieve results
that would create interest in Europe.25
These are familiar rhetorical strategies in a new context: the
opposition old Europe/young Russia, grist for the mill of Russian
nationalism in the previous century, is now simplified into the
opposition old West/young East. The composers of national music in
the republics observed the success of nineteenth-century Russian
music in Europe and concluded that if the West had found Russia's
offerings so pleasingly exotic then, it would now delight all the
more in the "authentic" delicacies of oriental nationalism.
25. Alexander Spendiarov, interview for the newspaper Kommunist
(Baku), 26 March 1925, no. 66. Reprinted in Spendiarov o muzike
(Yerevan: Izd-vo Tsk Kp Armenii, 1971), 53-57.
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348 Journal of the American Musicological Society
This evinced a pragmatism from which their Russian nationalist
predeces- sors had, at least in their public statements, distanced
themselves.
There are indeed many such parallels--some intended, others
uncon- scious-to be found in the literature of musical nationalism
in the repub- lics. The Russian nationalists had expended much
effort in attempting to trace the diatonicism of Russian folk song
back to its allegedly Greek roots, and now the national composers
of the republics did likewise. Even in a recent book on Turkmen
music, F. A. Abukova noted that the "synthesis of Turkmen modes
with the major-minor system" was easily achieved owing to the
closeness of the Turkmen modes to those of the Greeks; the author
thus chose to call the results of this cross "Phrygian" and
"Locrian."26 Or again, the fact that Russian folk song was wrongly
as- sumed to have been monodic meant that the problems Russians had
faced over harmonization were much the same as those confronted by
the new national composers attempting to assimilate genuinely
monodic styles. Harmonization was, of course, a nonnegotiable, or
indeed a defining, ele- ment of both the Russian nationalist and
the later Soviet projects; there was no question of remaining
within the limits of monody. The Azerbaijani national composer
Gajibekov offered the following advice on the subject of
appropriate harmonizations:
Unskilled harmonization of an Azerbaijani melody may change its
character, neutralize its modality, and even vulgarize it. But this
does not mean that Azerbaijani music should remain monodic forever.
... Polyphony should be based not on correct chord progressions or
harmonic cadences that require changes in modal structure, but
rather on the combination of logically con- structed independent
melodies.27
The example given by Gajibekov (see Ex. 2) demonstrates not so
much the independence of melodies, but rather the avoidance of
anything that would do violence to the melody. His argument is
strongly reminiscent of the recommendations Vladimir Odoyevsky had
made in 1863: "We tried to keep the piano accompaniment as simple
as possible (sine quarta conso- nante) ... we did not dare to
insert any seventh chords ... this would entirely distort the
character of Russian singing, both secular and sacred."28
Gajibekov's recourse to imitative textures as a palliative to
four-part har- monic style was a strategy the Russian nationalists
had frequently turned to
-imitation, no doubt by dint of its greater antiquity, was not
so strongly associated with Western music. Each republic sought to
draw the line be-
26. F. A. Abukova, Turkmenskaya opera: Putiformirovaniya,
zhanrovaya tipologiya (Ashkh- abad: Ylym, 1987). Abukova seems
unaware that the Gregorian and ancient Greek modes were very
different systems.
27. Uzeir Gajibekov, Osnovi azerbaidzhanskoy narodnoy muziki
(Baku, 1945), 32. 28. Odoyevsky, "Starinnaya pesnya," in
Muzikal'no-literaturnoye naslediye, 252-54, at
253.
-
"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 349
Example 2 Uzeir Gajibekov, two harmonizations of an Azerbaijani
melody "Strict" style
Folk style
Folk style
'... ! !
ld ! T t
---,,-----
... . ,J -J J J .J -j J -
tween its earliest, ad hoc "naive" harmonizations of monodies
and its later, systematic efforts, based on principles of
appropriateness somehow de- duced from properties of the monodic
style. In Russia, this distinction had been used to separate the
harmonized collections of Nikolai Lvov and Ivan Pratsch from those
of Balakirev; in Armenia, it likewise separated the work of the
collectors/composers Khristofor Kara-Murza and Sogomon Komi- tas.
The Russian dream of new, authentically derived harmony and meth-
ods of development was ultimately a burden that the later,
conservatory- trained generations of local composers willingly
shouldered, resulting in, for example, the so-called mugam
symphonies of Azerbaijan.
Many of these parallels were at first encouraged, if not
created, by the Moscow and Leningrad composers offering "brotherly
help" to their col- leagues in the republics. Take, for example,
the group of composers gen- erally known by the hyphenated triplet
Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev, who were assigned to the Kirghiz Republic.
In their first full-blown opera, Ai-churek, Abdilas Maldibayev, the
native member of the collective, provided tran- scriptions of
original folk material and composed some melodies in a sim- ilar
style as well. This, however, was considered only as raw material,
which had to undergo a long process of refinement and shaping--a
task carried out entirely by Maldibayev's two Muscovite colleagues,
Vladimir Vlasov and Vladimir Fere. Their desire to create a Kirghiz
style true to the mon- odies they had in their hands led them back
to the strategy Rimsky- Korsakov so candidly revealed: the via
negativa of avoiding anything that would sound too blatantly
Western. Attempting to purge themselves of many compositional
techniques that had become second nature, they in- stead doubled
the melody in fourths, on no better grounds than that the
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350 Journal of the American Musicological Society
Example 3 Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev, Ai-churek, act 2, orchestral
introduction to Ai- churek's Tale
Mosso
-----
cresc. .' r4,=q -i , 11F 4
G G
fourth separated successive strings of the traditional
accompanying instru- ment, and likewise doubled the composed bass
line at the fifth, simply as a means of eschewing the
characteristic sounds of Western harmonization. The result of this
approach can be seen in Example 3.
Although this negative procedure was thus passed on from the
Russian nationalists to the national composers of the republics,
the latter did not treat the peculiarities of the Russian
nationalist style on a par with other nonindigenous compositional
features; indeed they apparently regarded the style as neutral.
Glinka was depicted as the father of all musical nation- alism, to
the extent that musical procedures stemming from him, or by
extension from The Five, were above suspicion. The Russian
nationalist devices of flat VI within the major, chromatic
counterpoint for diatonic melodies, and, above all, the
changing-background variation technique all found a home in the
national operas of the republics. In the Caucasus, they figured in
Paliashvili's Abesalom i Eteri and Daisi (Georgia), Spendiarov's
Almast (Armenia), and Gliere's Shahsenem (Azerbaijan); in Central
Asia they could be heard in Brusilovsky's Zhalbir (Kazakhstan) and
Gyul'sara (Uzbekistan), and Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev's Ai-churek
(Kirghizstan) ... and the list goes on. Another characteristic
touch is the use of augmented triads to evoke the mysterious or the
fantastic in operatic scenarios: in Ai- churek, for example, the
appearance of the dervishes is so marked, just as Rimsky-Korsakov
might have done (Ex. 4).
Example 5, from Ai-churek, is reminiscent of the clumsiness of
Bala- kirev's pupil Olenin, whose use of conventional four-part
harmony to un- derscore moments of dramatic tension was grotesquely
at odds with his otherwise austere observance of the negation
principle. Here the harmonic
-
"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 351
Example 4 Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev, Ai-churek, act 2, Kalhyman and
other girls drive away the witch and dervishes
f PI udim."
Sf dim.
b i N
. .. 1 1"dl 6 6
palette of Vlasov and Fere is crudely disturbed when, after
singing in a simple and "appropriately" harmonized style, the
eponymous heroine "joyfully embraces her girlfriends" to the sound
of distinctly Western seventh-chord progressions.
It should be clear by now that in comparison with its more
highly regarded Russian prototype, this music often seems to be of
a weaker, hot- house variety, the result of the hurried cultivation
of an externally formu- lated Soviet-style nationalism within the
ecology of equally artificial nation- states. Even for the
indigenous composers who gradually supplanted the Russians, it was
extremely hard, if not impossible, to overcome the inertia of the
Russian models. Nationalist composers from regions in the Caucasus
and Central Asia whose musical idioms had already been appropriated
to some extent by Russian and European music also had the legacy of
orien- talism to overcome. The very concepts of nationalism and
orientalism, as formulated by Edward Said, are of course closely
related: the former in- vents a national "Self," while the latter
invents a contrasting "Other" with the ultimate purpose of
reinforcing the national self.29 But what happens to nationalism in
"oriental" countries? Are Western images of the East re- jected as
misrepresentations, or are they incorporated to some extent into
the national consciousness? For our present purposes, orientalism
encom- passes Western/Russian musical idioms developed as
representations of the East. But to complicate matters, Russia has
often seen itself as mediator between East and West. True, Russian
orientalism created images of a
29. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1978).
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352 Journal of the American Musicological Society
Example 5 Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev, Ai-churek, act 2, Ai-churek
joyfully embraces Kaliy- man and the girls
3 m.d. 3
3-3
433 3
3 3
I-: .# 1 ~ 1~ r 4- I IL II1
-]: ; L F f" r I
10 rit.
a I L--3.
3 3
.
? "
3
8 ? 5
fairy-tale East, but Russian composers were also happy to
cultivate the ex- otic, oriental image they enjoyed in the West.
For the eastern republics, however, Russia was a Western power,
with a Western culture, and they could not identify with it.
Westernizing intellectuals within these societies only reinforced
the point: they wanted to emulate Russian culture because its
occidentalism was progressive, not because its oriental qualities
could be easily assimilated. Let us now explore the musical
consequences of this conceptual tangle.
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 353
Shadows of Orientalism
When Glinka set out to represent Russia musically, he had only a
few Russified Italians and Germans of local significance to compete
with, and Beethoven's Razumovsky Quartets seemed to flatter
nationalists rather than invite reproach for misrepresentation. But
for the burgeoning nationalism in the republics there was a whole
tradition of orientalism to take into ac- count; this style,
moreover, was not yet a thing of the past, for the progeny of The
Five still worked within it. Gliere, for example, created Shahsenem
in good faith, since he felt empowered rather than inhibited by the
Russian orientalist tradition. Composed for a people whose company
he had shared for some years, and whose music he heard every day,
it could not be a fantasy about some vague Eastern paradise.
Nevertheless, Gliere seems to have been oblivious to the enormous
advantage he had over his predeces- sors: the style of Shahsenem's
music shows little or no evidence of what he had seen and heard. As
we can see in Example 6, his key to the treasures of the Orient is
the lowered sixth degree in the major. This he cultivates in melody
to form an augmented second with the leading note, and in har- mony
to form the minor subdominant chord. Both techniques had, of
course, been used in Russian and European orientalism throughout
the century preceding Gliere's exploits, and they did not now
escape the at- tention of the first native Azerbaijani composer of
importance, Uzeir Ga- jibekov, whose resentment of orientalism
caused him to venture mild criticism of the honored and renowned
Reinhold Gliere, Order of Lenin: "Augmented seconds in music,
images of the nightingale and rose in po- etry, flower-bud
ornaments in the visual arts, multicolored costumes and ceremonious
bows in the theater: all this pseudo-Eastern style can only jar on
an Eastern people and violate their spirit and tastes."30 In time,
even the Russian critics writing for Sovetskaya muzika began to
play the game of catching out any composer guilty of "conventional
external exoticism" or following "old and dead orientalist
traditions," though on the whole they considered orientalism a
problem of the past.
In 1939, losif Rizhkin outlined three main differences between
pre- revolutionary Russian orientalism and the new Soviet music
written for the republics. First, the process before the revolution
was unidirectional, while in Soviet times it became reciprocal:
while Russians (Sergei Va- silenko, Gliere, Boris Shekhter, and
Brusilovsky) depicted the East, east- erners (Khachaturian,
Gajibekov, and Mukhtar Ashrafi) returned the compliment. Second,
before the revolution only a few individuals sought out the songs
and dances of the East, while now a significant portion, per- haps
even the majority, of Soviet composers worked with this
material:
30. Uzeir Gajibekov, quoted in Safarova,
Muzfkal'no-esteticheskiye vzglyady Uzeira Gajibe- kova, 45.
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354 Journal of the American Musicological Society
Example 6 Reinhold Gliere, Shahsenem, act 1, Kerib's aria
1, r r Frmmfii Ya Ke- rib, pe- vets vdokh-no- ven- nYy,
Lyut-sya
,9 I.IVIIV
vdal' vse mo- i pes- ni, Svoy u-
.. . . . . r- r . =",.
-del ya p0- stig sok- ro- yen- miy, V e-torn
slav- myj moy ye- nets.
1Y 4.0
0.,- il
0 Fo
..+ - - -. - : II IF -z
.,J.!+ ,-.. . , ,r -d l a' -stg so - o- ve - nf, e tr ?:0"
WNW F I.
1 21'" IV- ?
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 355
"Soon the melodic richness of the East will become the common
property of Soviet music, and Soviet culture will incorporate not
single streams, but the full waters of Eastern music."31 And third,
the fairy-tale and fantastic elements of Russian orientalism
contrasted with Soviet music, which, while legitimately open to the
earlier styles, did not allow its conventions to overshadow the
whole, diverse reality of the East. But while Rizhkin's smooth
arguments consigned problematic orientalism to the past, com-
posers living thousands of miles from his Moscow office were still
greatly vexed by the task of producing music that represented the
East. They could not simply repeat the familiar formulas of the old
orientalism, and yet their music still had to be filtered through
Western notation and assimilated to Western forms and genres. Let
us trace Gajibekov's approach to these is- sues, with particular
reference to his epic opera Keroglu, which he con- sciously wrote
as a corrective to the orientalism of Gliere's Shahsenem.
In his effort to overcome orientalist conventions, Gajibekov
began, naturally enough, with a careful study of "Azerbaijani" folk
music and on the basis of his findings attempted a theory of
melodic modes.32 This assumed--wrongly, as we have seen-that
Azerbaijan was a single nation with a single culture, but for the
moment we can set aside this reservation. While he was occupied
with developing his arguments and definitions, all was well. But
when the time came for him to apply his theories to his opera, he
was immediately confronted with a series of excruciating problems
involving tuning, polyphony, harmony, and vocal style. He could not
in- dulge in hand wringing for long, however, since he had a job to
carry out at the behest of the Soviet authorities. In the end he
was apparently unable to reconcile the demands of his nationalist
agenda with those of the task in hand, for his earlier
pronouncements are clearly at odds with the actual score of
Keroglu.
With regard to tuning, Gajibekov agreed from the start that
Azerbaijani composers should adopt twelve-note equal temperament.
In this, he was merely accepting the pronouncement of Kuliev, the
minister of Education; there was probably little room for
disagreement. Still, he was frank in ad- mitting various
difficulties. On the traditional tar (a lute with adjustable
frets), there could be twelve, thirteen, seventeen, or nineteen
pitches within the octave: for example, either two or three pitches
might exist between D and E, depending on the context. Gajibekov
lucidly described how a mod- ern piano would completely distort a
folk melody that had a tonic on E, another degree roughly the same
as the piano's Eb/D#, and a third, fimc- tionally distinct degree
falling between these two (on the piano, this last
31. Iosef Rizhkin, "Stileviye cherti sovetskoy muziki,"
Sovetskaya muzika (March 1939): 47-52.
32. See Gajibekov, Osnovi azerbaidzhanskoy narodnoy muziki.
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356 Journal of the American Musicological Society
would have to be assimilated to one of its neighbors).33 By
1939, however, he had enacted a rather bizarre volte-face, saying
that Azerbaijani music possessed no intervals smaller than the
semitone and even adding, with peculiar satisfaction, that "our
semitone, in fact, is wider." 34By this stage of his career,
Gajibekov was no longer a mere nationalist of local standing, but a
celebrated composer of the Soviet Union. His change in status ap-
pears to have colored his judgment considerably: "I myself ignore
the groundless claims of some musicologists that the international
musical alphabet is not sufficient for the representation of the
characteristics of Azerbaijani music. This opinion is wrong, since
the chromatic scale satisfies us completely."'5 Gajibekov had never
actually opposed the adoption of the imported tuning, but rather
had simply pointed out problems that might arise in implementing
it. His change of opinion therefore cannot be regarded as a
pragmatic political concession. It would seem, instead, that he had
sincerely convinced himself of this orthodoxy of Soviet music. He
was now quite reconciled to equal-temperament representations of
Azer- baijani music "if the style is right" (i.e., when not
orientalist in his view), and he reported approvingly that tar
players had begun to adjust their mov- able frets to conform more
or less to equal temperament.36
The adoption of polyphony also posed obvious problems to
Gajibekov. Since it was a defining feature of the music required by
Soviet cultural pol- icies, there was no point in mounting a
challenge; problems had to be over- come, not used as an excuse for
rejecting polyphony. The most Gajibekov could do was to advise
against the wholesale adoption of a four-part har- monic style, and
to recommend sparser contrapuntal textures instead. As even his own
practices attest, however, it is hard, after the introduction of
polyphony, to avoid drawing from the harmonic resources of Western
mu- sic, or at least from those that had been mastered by these
composers. Even octave doubling, Gajibekov knew, would often
violate Azerbaijani musical practice, since its non-octave-based
modes assigned different functions to degrees an octave apart.
While full surrender to the European inheritance of tuning and
poly- phony was virtually unavoidable, at first there seemed to be
greater pos- sibilities for compromise in the tonal and modal
organization of music. Gajibekov believed that it was possible to
combine tonal harmony with the melodic modes he extracted from
Azerbaijani traditional music, and that
33. Uzeir Gajibekov, "Muzikal'noe razvitie v Azerbaydzhane,"
first published in Maarif ve medenijet (1926), no. 8 (in
Azerbaijani); quoted in Safarova, Muzikal'no-esteticheskiye
vzglyady Uzeira Gafibekova, 145.
34. Uzeir Gajibekov, "O narodnosti v muz'ike," Revolyutsiya i
kultura 5 (1939): 110 (in Azerbaijani); quoted in Safarova,
Muzikal'no-esteticheskiye vzglyady Uzeira Gajibekova, 146.
35. Gajibekov, "O narodnosti v muzifke," reprinted in his O
muzi'kal'nom iskusstve Azer- baydzhana (Baku, 1968), 85.
36. V. Vinogradov, Uzeir Gajibekov i azerbaydzhanskaya muzika
(Moscow, 1972), 13-14.
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 357
neither need suffer in the process. Indeed, he attributed the
success of his opera Keroglu among his own people to "purely
national" modal writing:
It is suggested that ifAzerbaijani music, which is monodic by
nature, were to be supplied with harmony, then all its modal
characteristics would be re- duced to naught. .... Unskillful
attachment of harmony to an Azerbaijani melody can change its
character, and neutralize its vivid modal traits, even vulgarize
it. But this does not mean that Azerbaijani music must forever re-
main monodic.37
Elsewhere he wrote: While working on the opera Keroglu, I
allowed myself to deviate occasionally from the strict framework of
the folk style; that is, I composed it in a freer manner. As the
outcome showed, the opera succeeded, on the whole, to gain access
to a wide stratum of listeners, because the modal system was the
start- ing point of its musical text and of my creative
fantasy.38
Any idea we might form from these comments as to how Keroglu
actually sounds cannot help but be remote from the opera itself. As
Example 7 demonstrates, Gajibekov employs Western tonal idioms more
crudely than his words suggested, and this tended to obliterate the
modes he employed in his melodies. What we hear in Example 7a is
the minor subdominant in a major key, fully in line with the
orientalism of Glinka or Gliere, plus the alternation of tonic
major-minor, another cliche of exoticism. While it is possible that
a native Azerbaijani might detect in Keroglu some faint traces of
national characteristics, just as Russian audiences perceive
Glinka's A Life for the Tsar to be Russian in sound, westerners are
unlikely to share this perception. The music of the Russian
nationalists had already demon- strated that tonal harmony would
always dominate and suppress the mo- dality of a melody. Gajibekov
made no substantial advances in assimilating harmony to the modal
character of the melodies he used.
One perennial controversy arising from modality involved the
notorious augmented second. Though the use of this interval was
purported to be an invention of Russian orientalism, Armenians and
Uzbeks considered it a sign of Azerbaijani influence and thus
sought to avoid it. Was it then an authentic feature of Azerbaijani
music? At the height of his early anti- orientalist fervor,
Gajibekov vehemently rejected any such notion: 'The 'oriental'
style is a convention, a cliche that frees a composer from all re-
sponsibilities. It is largely represented by an abundant
chromaticism, by the augmented second, and by certain melodic
idiosyncrasies. Azerbaijani mu- sic has no chromaticism-we have,
rather, the strictest diatonicism."39 Later, however, he conceded
that two of the eight traditional modes did
37. Gajibekov, Osnovi'azerbaydzhanskoy narodnoy muziki, 32. 38.
Gajibekov, "O narodnosti v muzike," 86. 39. Ibid., 85.
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358 Journal of the American Musicological Society
Example 7 Uzeir Gajibekov, Keroglu, act 1, Keroglu's aria
(a)
Sev- dim sa- ni man ei Ni-
-ga- rm, r'- na k6- za-
-lim shan- ba- ha- rim.
13
Sev- dim sa- ni ya- hm,
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 359
Example 7 continued (a) 17
21
ol- maz 6z- kQ sev- ki- lim sin-
25
-dn, ai ,
P o i-.-
...
" o "r# ''
, I
, ,.. -
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360 Journal of the American Musicological Society
Example 7 continued (b)
dfish dfim Ni- gar!
A 1$ 4.,raoiI i
fI - - diish dim Ni- gar!
i TL f' "JI d l dbl ?
... . ..+ t ' " . . . IL.
a "g
," I I I
UA ----
indeed contain tetrachords with augmented seconds, and,
moreover, that these two modes were associated with texts
expressing passionate yearnings and the pains of love. The
undeniable musical evidence around Gajibekov thus forced him to
admit that his earlier views were incorrect, and by the time he
composed Keroglu, he had accepted that the use of melodic aug-
mented seconds was legitimate. Not surprisingly, the result sounds
to our ears very much like a return to orientalism (note, in
Example 7b, the emphasis on the augmented second in the
conventional final cadence of Keroglu's aria).
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 361
With regard to vocal style, Gajibekov once again was of two
minds: on the one hand, he was uncomfortable with the idea of
introducing a bel canto standard into Azerbaijani national opera:
"European singing is, to our ears, still something strange and
unpleasant; sometimes it is found to be such an irritant that
people would rather leave the opera house."40 On the other hand, he
later denied in print the very existence of any charac- teristic of
folk music that would conflict with bel canto.41
In 1937, Keroglu was performed in Moscow, at the Festival of
Azerbai- jani Art, together with Gliere's Shahsenem. Not only did
critics fail to detect any opposition between Gajibekov and Gliere;
they chose to praise Keroglu by comparing it to Borodin's Prince
Igor, a touchstone of Russian orien- talism. In the following
decades, Keroglu was often singled out as a proof of Soviet opera's
high achievements; it was judged a resounding success by the
criterion "national in form, socialist in substance." As an
anti-orientalist gesture, however, Keroglu was a failure. The blend
of East and West in the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, for example, at
least benefits from a sophisti- cated technique, which Gajibekov
signally lacks. Keroglu does not substan- tially depart from
orientalist conventions, yet at the same time it is in a sense
occidentalist, for it contains a collection of dead conventions,
such as da capo form, middle-section sequences, and final
ritardandi. Ultimately, it is as much a partial truth to treat the
idioms of Western music in this way as it is to use augmented
seconds to represent the East.
One myth, then, succeeded another: the authenticity that critics
found lacking in Russian orientalism proved no easier for the
nationalists of the republics to attain. Indeed, even the most
obvious of orientalist conven- tions often turn out, upon closer
examination, to be the best possible ap- proximations of genuine
Eastern features by means of available Western idioms. For
instance, the alternation between major and minor third, found in
the orchestral prelude to act 3 of Aida, is derived from the
"neutral" third. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the
Armenian composer and folk-song collector Nicogaios Tigranian
arrived at precisely the same device to represent a feature of
Armenian music. He also used ornamental semitone figures to render
the peculiarities of Armenian sing- ing, in a manner that greatly
resembles the decorated melodies of Russian orientalism. Similarly,
Gajibekov admitted that no instrument is closer to
40. Gajibekov, quoted in Safarova, Muzikal'no-esteticheskiye
vzglyady Uzeira Gajibekova, 161-62.
41. Gajibekov, quoted in Safarova, Muzikal'no-esteticheskiye
vzglyady Uzeira Gajibekova, 161. There was, in fact, an attempt to
combine the characteristics of bel canto and the Azer- baijani folk
manner of singing in the school founded in 1932 by the famous
singer Byul'-Byul' Mamedov, who after study in Italy had emerged as
a highly polished tenor. Mamedov also tried to assimilate traits of
ashug (folk epic singer) performances, such as a virtuosic high
register and the ability to sing tirelessly for hours. The extant
recordings of his performances on vinyl disc (in music by
Gajibekov, for example) are striking for their microtonal ornamen-
tation and "neutral" thirds. For more on the achievements of his
school see S. Khalfen, "Azer- baydzhanskaya shkola peniya,"
Sovetskaya muzika (March 1940): 81-82.
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362 Journal of the American Musicological Society
the timbre of the zurna (a Middle Eastern shawm) than the same
cor an- glais favored by the orientalists. In the end, the
achievement of the anti- orientalists was limited to an extension
of the range of conventions used to represent their musical
cultures, such as doubling in fourths or the use of clusters.
Of all the Soviet composers who emerged from the nationalist
project, only Aram Khachaturian attained world renown. It is ironic
that his music in no way challenges the Russian orientalist style.
Never dissociating him- self from the traditions of Russian music,
he came to be regarded in Mos- cow as a mouthpiece of the entire
Soviet Orient, gathering up all the diverse traditions into a grand
generalization. His music suggests that the following remark is
more than a mere demonstration of loyalty to humor the
authorities:
[Russian oriental music] showed me not only the possibility, but
also the necessity, of a rapprochement between, and mutual
enrichment of, Eastern and Western cultures, of Transcaucasian
music and Russian music..... the oriental elements in Glinka's
Ruslan, and in Balakirev's Tamara and Islamey, were striking models
for me, and provided a strong impulse for a new cre- ative quest in
this direction.42
It is hardly surprising that Khachaturian's most popular piece,
the Sabre Dance, was parodied mercilessly by Nino Rota in the
satirical orientalist episode in Fellini's Amarcord. And this leads
us to ask whether any Eastern nationalism can make a clean break
with the orientalist tradition, at least within the sphere of tonal
harmony. Indeed, is any nationalism possible beyond the limits of
tonal harmony? An Armenian scholar (who must re- main nameless)
recently sought to convince me that an Armenian national
twelve-tone music could and did exist. But what would an Armenian
au- dience recognize with delight in a twelve-tone series? Would
they be filled with that immediate, irrational pride in their
nation that was so successfully kindled by the nationalists of a
previous generation? It was this need for popular sympathy that
caused the composers of the Soviet republics to maintain a simple
style: they were not merely responding to the strictures of
socialist realism. Often lacking the expertise and innovative
spirit of the composers of the Russian orientalist classics, the
indigenous musicians had only one potential advantage: their
knowledge of a large corpus of folk melodies. But these folk songs
had lost many of their characteristics in the process of notation,
and the composers' native experience of Eastern mu- sical
traditions proved next to useless, owing to the compromises they
had to make in the interests of the chosen Western genre and
medium. The Soviet project of creating a national system of harmony
or counterpoint was from the outset virtually doomed, as was the
Russian nationalism be- fore it. The underlying problem besetting
national composers of the Soviet
42. Aram Khachaturian, quoted in D. A. Arutyunov, A.
Khachaturian i muzika Sovetskogo Vostoka: Yazik, stil, traditsii
(Moscow, 1983), 15.
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 363
Asian republics was that they chose to represent their native
musical cul- tures within an imported Western tradition, and thus
inevitably entangled themselves in the orientalism they hoped to
repudiate.
The investigation of musical nationalism in the Soviet republics
would be incomplete if we were not to place it within the context
of socialist re- alism. After all, in the Stalin slogan used as the
title of the present article, the diversifying tendency of
"national in form" was counterbalanced by the unifying tendency of
"socialist in content." And while the national element was a
feature of the existing Soviet Union, the socialist element was
meant to usher in a nationless future. Let us then examine what
was, in terms of Stalin's version of Marxism-Leninism, the
socialist dimension of the project.
"Socialist in Content"
"Socialist in content": what is that supposed to mean when
applied to mu- sic? There were other slogans, too, which artists
could ill afford to ignore: they were told, for example, to "master
Bolshevism." Such pronounce- ments, though easy for Stalin to make,
were much harder for musicians to implement. At the joint
conference of Soviet composers, musicologists, and operatic
producers in 1937, Stalin's speech on opera emphasized three
points: the subject matter was to be socialist, a realist musical
language bearing the imprint of its national origins was to be
adopted, and a new breed of hero was to be drawn from contemporary
Soviet life. In effect, this meant that the composer of an opera
was obliged to place in his work not only a bevy of folk songs but
a popular uprising, led or inspired by a loyal Bolshevik hero. One
of the Party's leading music critics, Georgiy Khubov, reiterated
Stalin's formula, adding to it a fourth point that was more spe-
cifically musical: "Our new operas must above all include these
four ele- ments: Soviet subject matter, narodnost' ["nationality,"
or "people-ness"], realism, and the mastery of symphonic
development."43 But this was no simple, foolproof method by which a
composer could achieve success, for each of the four points was
double-edged. Too much of the national ele- ment could be
criticized as bourgeois nationalism, too much realism was bourgeois
naturalism, and too much symphonic development was bour- geois
formalism. Even Soviet subject matter could entrap the composer.
For example, Vano Muradeli, with his opera The Great Friendship,
unwit- tingly provoked the notorious 1948 resolution (ostensibly
against formal- ism), which brought composers to heel.44 While on
the face of it this work
43. Khubov, "Sovetskaya opera," 15. 44. The 10 February 1948
Resolution of the Communist Party Central Committee, en-
titled "On V. Muradeli's opera The Great Friendship," extended
its criticism beyond Muradeli and branded another six composers
formalist: Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram
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364 Journal of the American Musicological Society
had appeared to enjoy a safe plot concerning socialist
revolution in the Caucasus, Stalin's most loyal officials found
intolerable its inevitable por- trayal of many of Stalin's Georgian
compatriots as opponents of the Soviet revolutionary struggle.
For our purposes, it is important to note that in Stalin's and
Khubov's formulas, the national and socialist are not two separate
entities to be com- bined and reconciled; rather, the national is a
necessary component of socialism. One of the first accusations
leveled against Shostakovich was pre- cipitated by his failure to
quote Ukrainian melodies in his ballet about a Ukranian collective
farm. Muradeli, twelve years later in 1948, was simi- larly
reproached, though this time Stalin was more personally concerned,
since an absence of Georgian folk music was at issue. In the
following pas- sage from a speech by A. A. Zhdanov, we can detect
Stalin's disappoint- ment at the lack of any familiar lezghinka
melody:
If, in the course of the action, the lezghinka is performed,
then its melody is certainly not reminiscent of any popular
lezhginka melodies. In his pursuit of originality, the composer
offered his own music for the lezghinka, music barely
comprehensible, tedious, and far less meaningful or beautiful than
normal lezghinka folk music.45
Although such criticism spurred many composers to quote
copiously from folk sources, even this technique provided no
safeguard. Among the Party's music critics were arbiters of
professionalism who condemned "lazy" or "naive" dependence on folk
quotations. Vlasov and Fere, for example, were criticized for their
"incorrect approach" to harmonization, which arose from their "fear
of distorting folk melodies."46 In fact, no path guaranteed a
composer's safety, for the strictures of the critics were ever
mutable, ar- bitrary, and contradictory.
The specter of "bourgeois nationalism" could be invoked at any
time, and the critics who set themselves the task of rooting it out
displayed great ingenuity. "The Chuvash choir," noted one,
"performs in national cos- tumes; it is of great importance to the
choristers, which in itself counts
Khachaturian, Vissarion Shebalin, Gavriil Popov, and Nikolai
Myaskovsky (published in Sovetskaya muzika [January-February 1948]:
3-8). Subsequent meetings and discussions concentrated mainly on
castigating Prokoviev and Shostakovich (see "Vstupitel'naya rech'
tov. A. A. Zhdanova na soveshchanii deyateley sovetskoy muziki v
TsK VKP(b)," ibid., 9-13; and "Vistupleniya na sobranii
kompozitorov i muzikovedov g. Moskvi," ibid., 63- 102). See also
Alexander Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow (London: Turnstile Press,
1949; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973).
45. A. A. Zhdanov, introductory speech at the meeting of Soviet
musicians in the Central Committee of the Communist Party,
Sovetskaya muzika (January-February 1948), 10. The lezghinka is a
type of fast Georgian dance.
46. A. Lepin, "'Altin-Kiz': Kirgizskaya opera V. Vlasova i V.
Fere," Sovetskaya muzi'ka (December 1937): 48-55.
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"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 365
against them. A desire to perform as an 'ethnographic' choir
smacks of nationalism" (i.e., of the wrong, bourgeois variety)."4
Another critic de- tect