Power Chord, the Song of Soviet Music
Last week’s feature article touched on the myriad of attempts to curtail or censure musical culture in the city of New Orleans. From Congo Square to the Red-Light District, various forces of power had made their efforts in vain to silence expression. By the 1900s, jazz was beginning to take root, and this amalgamated genre, born in the heart of American creativity out of the heavy mixture of people groups that congregated there began to feed into all corners of life. The advent of recorded sound was a fast partner to its spread, but across the globe, a new type of experiment was brewing. In Russia, the early 1900s meant revolution, working class uprising, and an entirely different path for the modes of musical evolutions.
Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker write in “Music & Soviet Power” (Apr 2013) that as the 1917 revolution began, the orchestra in Petrograd kept playing, even as the battleship Aurora fired shots to signal its beginning, while the musicians in Moscow endured bloody fighting on the streets while sheltering in a building damaged by shelling. Once the powers of governance quelled the conflict and the communist party began reestablishing control, music was left to navigate its own idiom in creating popular identity for close to a decade. Many other forms, like literature and visual arts, were to fall under the watchful eye of regulation. Music would eventually become part of the state control and integral to establishing national pride, but for a time, the rules and guidance for sound and song were much an untethered sea of experimentation. The self-censorship, criticisms from within, and personal struggles to establish just what it meant to be “Soviet” is a fascinating story, and prior to Stalin’s first 5-year plan, it is mostly guided by the musicians themselves.
The authors of “Music & Soviet Power” contend that the situation in Petrograd stands for the continuity of culture through political upheaval: indeed, the Mariinsky Opera continued in existence throughout the Soviet period and still actively performs to this day. The accounts in Moscow, however, mostly spoke of the ruptures and signal only darkness ahead, exposing much of the turbulence composers endured through post-revolutionary Russia. Through this story, many experiments are tried, and even the jazz of the new world reaches Soviet sensibilities, making initial impressions that were favorable to the proletariat. A complicated partnership between Soviet ideals of the rise of the working class and its sensitivities to the struggles of black Americans made jazz music a natural friend to the ideals of communism. This love affair was short lived, however, as the participants in jazz culture quickly became associated with old bourgeois as the glitz and glamour of jazz speakeasys were too reminiscent of the rich and powerful upper classes. While jazz remained an underground influence, much the same way punk rock would become a voice of rebellion years later in Communist East Germany, its initiation to Russian people was quite favorable.
Many important and fascinating subjects evolve from the challenge to develop a cultural identity from the new communist system. The emerging Soviet music, in contrast to American popular music that often rose out of the oppression of lower classes, is typically built out of the government forced ideals of nationality, classlessness, and conformity. Initially, the attempt to build these identities come from musicians own self-imposed efforts, characterized by the alphabet soup of unions emerging, where various styles and composers banded together to help guide musical color of the new nations ears. Groups like the RAPM, ORKiMD, RFSFR, GIMN, and ASM were some of the main organizations, and this, in just the first few years after the revolution. Eventually, the Association of Contemporary Musicians (ASM) and the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) would rise to the top and be the two determining factions for much of the music composition prior to Stalin’s first 5-year plan. What follows is a long and winding history where some like Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky resign to exile, others like Sergei Prokofiev return to their homeland, and composers like Dmitri Shostakovich and Alexander Scriabin endure and adapt.
Dmitri Shostakovich is one of my favorite tales of musical historical record. He chronicles the Soviet heart to survive in WII with his 7th Symphony and comes back after the death of Stalin to expose its horror of anti-Semitism in his 13th Symphony. In the first movement, the 13th transforms the 1941 massacre by Nazis of Jews at Babi Yar, near Kiev, into a denunciation of anti-Semitism in all its forms. In this series, I will talk more about the fascinating subject of Soviet music, and its ties to our current freedoms and ability to create identity through song.
Enjoy this selection from Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, as we look back on its origins in today’s post.