scholarly journals Boris Asafiev and soviet musical thought: Reputation and influence

Muzikologija ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 57-74
Author(s):  
Daniel Elphick
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
To Come ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
Soviet Music ◽  
Musical Process

The theories of Boris Asafiev, including musical process, symphonism, and intonatsiya, proved to be hugely influential in the Soviet Union and beyond. While Asafiev?s ideas were widely adopted by theorists and audiences alike, they were also appropriated by a generation of music critics. As composers struggled to come to terms with what might constitute socialist-realist music, critics built a discourse of projecting meaning onto works via Asafiev?s theories. At the same time, multiple theorists developed and expanded his ideas. The picture that emerges is of a multitude of applications and responses to a multivalent body of work that became a vital part of musical discourse in the latter half of the Soviet Union. In this article, I survey the main theories from Boris Asafiev?s writings on music, and their significance after his death. I begin by defining key terms such as symphonism, musical process, and especially intonatsiya. I then discuss the 1948 Zhdanovshchina and Asafiev?s involvement, and the less well-known 1949 discussions on Musicology. For the remainder of the article, I provide examples of key studies from Soviet music theorists using Asafiev?s terms to illustrate how their usage expanded and, in some cases, moved away from Asafiev?s myriad intentions.

scholarly journals Shostakovich’s Topics

Per Musi ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Luciano de Freitas Camargo
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Social Events ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
Political Background ◽  
Soviet Music ◽  
Structural Positions

The study of musical signification constitutes an important key for the comprehension of Shostakovich’s music. This becomes particularly evident when one observes that social and political background plays an important role in his compositional process through the configuration of specific musical topics on structural positions of his music. These specific topics have arisen after cultural and social events during the establishment of the Soviet Union and became typical elements of the Soviet Music. This paper aims to show the function of these elements as compositional roots in the creative concept of Shostakovich’s music. The rising of the concept of musical topic after Leonard Ratner (1980) has opened new paths for a consistent comprehension of the musical discourse, identifying social and cultural signs that may articulate ideas which go beyond the music itself: ideology, criticism and politics became elements of musical expression, composing a new soundscape of music in Revolutionary Russia.

Southern Baptists and Northern Evangelicals: Cultural Factors and the Nature of Religious Alliances

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-298
Author(s):  
Barry Hankins
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Southern Baptists ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Free Church ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
To Come

At times in history, groups of people with very different ideologies have allied with one another because of a common threat. The most striking example of this was the World War II alliance of the United States and the Soviet Union. In a religious matter, Baptists and other free-church evangelicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries joined with deists like Thomas Jefferson to combat the threat to religious liberty posed by the establishment of religion. At other times, groups with similar ideas have been unable to come together because they did not share similar attitudes toward or positions within their cultures. This essay is concerned with the latter phenomenon and uses Southern Baptists and northern evangelicals as a case study. The historical relationship of these two groups illustrates something profound about the very nature of religious alliances; specifically, it illustrates how cultural factors and intuitive notions of uneasiness about theological security determine whether or not religious groups with great theological similarities can find common ground.

Barbarism or Socialism: 1917–2017–2050 (?)

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minqi Li
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
First Century ◽  
New Era ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
To Come

Two decades after the end of the Soviet Union, the global capitalist economy narrowly escaped total collapse in the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008–2009. The world in the twenty-first century has entered into a new era of crisis, which is economic, political and environmental. What will happen between now and the mid-twenty-first century that may shape and largely determine the future of humanity for centuries to come. On the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the October Revolution, this article re-evaluates the trajectory of the twentieth century socialism and identifies its legacies. It also considers the unique character of contemporary contradictions and argues that the formation of new industrial working classes may fatally undermine the system’s political legitimacy and raise again the ‘spectre of communism’ that Marx and Engels predicted, this time not only in Europe but also in the entire globe.

The Adventures of Soviet Music in the West: Historical Highlights

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Levon Hakobian
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Musical Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Music

This chapter deals with the history of Soviet music’s relations with the outside world from the mid-1920s until the end of the millennium. During all these decades the Soviet musical production of any coloration was perceived by the free Western world as something largely strange or alien, often exotic, almost ‘barbarian’. The inevitable spiritual distance between the Soviet world and the ‘non-Soviet’ one resulted in some significant misunderstandings. Though some important recent publications by Western musicologists display a well qualified view on the music and musical life in the Soviet Union, the traces of past naiveties and/or prejudices are still felt quite often even in the writings of major specialists.

The Making of a Soviet War Photographer and the German Occupation of Kerch

Grief ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 5-29
Author(s):  
David Shneer
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Entire Population ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Rapid Advance ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realist

This chapter introduces the reader to Dmitri Baltermants, beginning with his birth to a Warsaw-based Jewish family and then describing his development as a Soviet photographer in the 1930s. A second-generation Soviet photographer and master of the horizontal, Baltermants was trained in socialist realist aesthetics, which documented and elevated the revolutionary experiment that was Stalin’s Soviet Union. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Baltermants’s world turned upside down. The second half of the chapter focuses on the German invasion and its rapid advance through Soviet territory until its occupation of Kerch in November. The chapter walks the reader through the unfolding process of Kerch under German occupation. In a matter of two weeks, German authorities rounded up the entire population of Jews, drove them to an antitank trench in nearby Bagerovo, and then murdered them in a Holocaust by bullets. It concludes with Kerch’s liberation in late December.

Stalinallee

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Stangl
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
State Building ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Housing Issue ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Building Program

For more than a century before the war, debate over the “housing issue” engaged politicians and reformers in Berlin, although Communists refused to participate, seeking revolution rather than reform. After World War II, newly empowered Communists had no choice but to address the housing crisis. Initially they joined others in supporting modernist planning efforts, with a first “residential cell” that would be constructed along Frankfurter Allee in Friedrichshain. The introduction of socialist realism necessitated a halt in construction as new plans for a monumental Stalinallee were developed. This formed the centerpiece of the state building program until the 1953 Uprising, which along with a shift to industrialized construction in the Soviet Union would result in a search for a new “socialist architecture.” As a result, the section of the street between Straussbergerplatz and Alexanderplatz would be built combining some socialist-realist tenets with modernism, while highlighting technological power.

The Dynamics of Reputation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark J.C. Crescenzi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Dynamic Model ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Formation And Evolution ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
Global Relations

This chapter examines the study of reputation in world politics and provides a model of reputation formation and evolution, emphasizing that, paradoxically, the role and relevance of reputation in global relations has been both pervasive and evasive. The chapter identifies a functional, dynamic model of reputation, and introduces the key terms of “antagonist,” “protagonist,” and “proxy” states. This model places particular emphasis on states in the context of world politics, and argues that states and their leaders indeed have reputations, but these reputations are complex and multi-dimensional. The post-WWII relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union provides an illuminating example.

Arms Control and Nuclear Safety: The National and International Politics of Russia's Nuclear Arsenal

1995 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 510-532
Author(s):  
Christoph Bluth
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Independent State ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Foreign And Security Policy ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
To Come

RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IS STILL IN A STATE OF FLUX. LIKE the other former republics of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation seeks to come to terms with being an independent state needing to define its national interests and foreign and security policy objectives.The principal element in the new frame of reference for Moscow is the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself. For forty years, most of the territories controlled by Moscow were adjacent to territories protected by the United States, or else to China. The Russian Federation is now virtually surrounded by former Soviet republics, all with deep political, social and economic problems, and some of which are highly unstable and subject to violent civil conflicts. The territory of the Russian Federation itself, about 75 per cent of the territory of the former USSR with about 60 per cent of its population, is still not properly defined, given that significant sections of the borders are purely notional, and the degree of control that Moscow can exercise over the entire Federation is uncertain.

Drawing Between Reportage and Memory: Diego Rivera's Moscow Sketchbook

October ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 145 ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
Maria Gough
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Wall Painting ◽  
New Venture ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
To Come ◽  
Political Demonstrations

The extraordinary proliferation of political demonstrations around the world over the past several years has reminded us once again of the phenomenal power of the real-time convergence of people in public space, a power to which Diego Rivera's Moscow Sketchbook—a corpus of forty-five small watercolor drawings—bears graphic witness. The sketchbook dates from Rivera's seven- or eight-month sojourn in Moscow, which began in early November 1927 with his direct participation in the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the revolution as a delegate to the inaugural internat ional Congress of Friends. Publicly announcing the artist's arrival in Moscow on November 3, the Communist Party's national daily newspaper Pravda discussed his “extraordinary frescoes” in the new Secretar iat of Public Educat ion in Mexico City—which the poet Vladimir Mayakovski had earlier lauded as “the world's first Communist mural”—and went on to explain that, as a revolutionary artist, Rivera now prefers the collective address of “wall painting” over the private easel picture to which he had devoted himself for a decade or so in Paris before 1921. A new venture in Soviet cultural diplomacy, the Congress of Friends had as its objective the forging of a broad, cross-party international alliance of those willing and able to come to the defense of the Soviet Union in their home countries. Rivera, a member of the Mexican Communist Party at the time, participated in the congress at the invitation of the Comintern, which was responsible for hosting notable foreign communists when they were in town and, as such, played a major role in the organization of the three-day meeting. On the first day of the congress the artist was elected—from a pool of 947 delegates—to its Presidium (governing board) and press bureau as a member of the foreign intelligentsia.

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