JOHN CAGE IN SOVIET RUSSIA

Tempo ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (266) ◽  
pp. 18-27
Author(s):  
Alexander Ivashkin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
York City ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
League Of Composers

AbstractJohn Cage's music was little known in the Soviet Union until the late 1960s, as official communist cultural policy would not allow his music to be performed or researched. This makes it all the more surprising that the only visit by the composer to Soviet Russia had become possible by 1988. The Soviet officials were planning a large festival of contemporary music in St Petersburg in 1988. With the changing climate Tikhon Khrennikov, the secretary of the All Soviet Union League of Composers, appointed by Stalin in 1948, was keen to be seen as a progressive at the time of Gorbachev's perestroika, and he approved the invitation for Cage to be present at the performances of his works in St Petersburg. This article includes interviews with the composer conducted by the author in 1987–1989, as well as recollections of the meetings with Cage at his home in New York City and in Moscow.

scholarly journals Tracing the Scholarly Legacy of I.M. Pul’ner: A Detour through the Pages of Sovetish Heymland

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-147
Author(s):  
Deborah Yalen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
York City ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Archival Document ◽  
State Museum ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals

This article explores the scholarly legacy of I.M. Pul’ner, director of the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad from the late 1930s until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and considers the significance of material culture for Soviet Jewish ethnography during the interwar period. It also traces the rediscovery of Pul’ner by Soviet Jewish intellectuals in the 1970s, and the global journey of a long-lost archival document, which is now preserved at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City.

“Ballet Is a Flower”

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-128
Author(s):  
Anne Searcy
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
York City ◽  
Soviet Government ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
The Soviet Union

Chapter 4 analyzes New York City Ballet’s (NYCB’s) 1962 tour of the Soviet Union and the Soviet reception of NYCB choreographer George Balanchine. Previous scholarly accounts have claimed the Soviet reviews of Balanchine’s works were heavily censored, and that, as a result, the tour undermined the authority of the Soviet government with the intelligentsia. Chapter 4 re-examines this tour, using transliteration as a way of modeling the Soviet response to Balanchine. This re-examination shows that Soviet cultural authorities were not at all hostile to the choreographer or his company. The Soviet critics mostly accepted Balanchine’s ballets, but they reframed his accomplishments within their own debates about drambalet and choreographic symphonism. According to Balanchine’s Soviet critics, his works were successful precisely because they reaffirmed the value of the Russian systems of training, artistry, and meaning.

Mobilising Maurya: J. M. Synge, Bertolt Brecht and the Revolutionary Mother

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Cannon Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Epic Theater ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Special Case

This chapter examines the impact on modern drama of the establishment of the Soviet Union, through in-depth investigation of a special case: Bertolt Brecht’s transformation of J. M. Synge’s 1904 Riders to the Sea into a 1937 Spanish Civil War play called Señora Carrar’s Rifles. Synge and Ireland were not, for their own sakes, important to Brecht; he was drawn to Riders as a model which might help him solve the problem of how to radicalise the working-class mother. After the disastrous 1935 production of Brecht’s The Mother by the New York City-based Theatre Union, Brecht concluded that the technical demands of epic theater were beyond the capacity of these amateur ensembles. Synge’s unusual treatment of maternal grief in Riders helped Brecht envision a means of producing the effects of epic theater while using the techniques of realism. Helene Weigel’s performance as Teresa Carrar was crucial to his later thinking about acting and spectator emotion. Re-presenting Maurya’s refusal to grieve for Bartley in both Senora Carrar’s Rifles and Mother Courage helped Brecht refine his understanding of alienation in ways which made epic theater more pleasurable for spectators without requiring Brecht to acknowledge that pleasure as a desired effect.

Culture, equity and social wellbeing in New York City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark J. Stern ◽  
Susan C. Seifert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Social Wellbeing

This chapter examines how the capability approach has been applied to cultural policymaking in New York City using a multidimensional index of social wellbeing for the city's neighbourhoods. The project was conceived based on the belief that cultural engagement is a core capability in its own right and that it can facilitate the achievement of other capabilities, the so-called ‘fertile functionings’. The chapter first provides an overview of the political context within which the current research has taken place before outlining three conceptual contributions to the discussion of capability-promoting policies: culture as a capability, the importance of neighbourhood context, and the tension between social justice and democratic decision making. It then describes a measure of cultural engagement based on the presence of institutions (non-profit and for-profit cultural resources), artists and cultural participants in a neighbourhood. Finally, it explains how capability-promoting cultural policy can be used to address long-term social inequality.

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