Popular Music, the Devil, and Aerobics

This chapter advances the argument of Sonic Overload by turning to the interactions between art and popular music in Schnittke’s Symphony No. 1, Requiem (1975), Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977), Piano Concerto (1979), Symphony no. 3 (1976–81), and Faust Cantata (Seid nüchtern und wachet, 1983), as well as several of his film scores. It considers for the first time Schnittke’s ongoing negotiations between high and low across his entire career, giving careful scrutiny to his declaration in the late 1980s that “pop culture is a good disguise for any kind of devilry.” Schnittke’s change of heart, from embracing popular music—and specifically jazz and rock—from the late 1960s through the 1970s, to expressing grave concerns about its effects a decade later, mirrored the sentiments of many. In the turbulent final years of the Soviet Union, rock supplanted poetry as the conscience of the nation yet it still inspired deep anxiety among those embracing traditional Soviet conceptions of being “cultured.” Schnittke’s apprehensions about popular music in the 1980s stemmed from its growing presence in the fragmented late-Soviet soundscape and its growing prestige among newly influential tastemakers, chief among them younger intellectuals and other cultural figures. The elevation of pop music in the USSR (as in the West) expanded a growing generational divide. Schnittke’s own rejection of popular music seems to have been instigated in part by his son, Andrey, who in the early 1980s was a member of the noted Moscow rock group Center (Tsentr), a fact overlooked by previous scholars.

Conclusion

A new ignorance is on the horizon, an ignorance borne not of a lack of knowledge but of too much knowledge, too much data, too many theories, too little time. —Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 3 (2015). It seems to me that our time is already not a time of fundamental, revolutionary innovations. Our time is a time of synthesis. But the synthesis is not like that in polystylism. That period has passed....

Ghosts and Shadow Sounds

Chapter 9 begins studying Alfred Schnittke’s lengthy retreat from polystylism by looking at several of his key compositions from the 1980s, among them his Piano Sonata no. 2, Violin Concerto no. 4, String Trio, and Viola Concerto. In these works, polystylism began to fade as Schnittke emphasized the grotesque, artificial nature of his quotations. He also began speaking more about what he called “shadow sounds,” which soon took precedence in his aesthetic schema, largely replacing polystylism. Yet by the end of the 1980s, as polystylism dissipated, it remained a central category for critics and listeners. Schnittke himself became more unrooted; he emigrated from the USSR to Germany but continued to express a deep ambivalence about his true home.

Schnittke’s Path to Polystylism

Chapter 3 draws on unpublished correspondence and archival documents to offer a fuller accounting of the sources and development of Alfred Schnittke’s evolving concept of polystylism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It explores the first expressions of polystylism in his film scores for Elem Klimov and Andrey Khrzhanovsky. It also offers a close reading of Schnittke’s seminal 1971 polystylism manifesto, “Polystylistic Tendencies of Modern Music.” This analysis is based on a contextualization and comparison of all known existing sources of the essay. It considers Schnittke’s influences from the contemporary soundscape as well as the essay’s larger implications for understanding his goals for writing music, music that balanced innovation with familiar socialist realist demands for accessibility and “democratization.” It also returns to Schnittke’s Violin Sonata no. 2, “Quasi una Sonata,” further discussing it as an example of his early polystylistic practice.

Silvestrov the Centaur and Polystylism in the 1970s

Chapter 4 examines Valentin Silvestrov’s journey from avant-garde enfant terrible to neoromantic. It looks at Silvestrov’s goal of musical “unity” or “oneness” in the late 1960s and early 1970s as it developed as a specific inflection of polystylism, influenced by the theories of both Boris Asafyev and Yakov Druskin. This chapter also begins to distinguish Silvestrov’s polystylism from Schnittke’s. It concludes by positioning Silvestrov’s and Schnittke’s first polystylistic works against the reception of polystylism and collage by Soviet critics, composers, and audiences in the 1970s. Among the most potent examples came from an older composer: Dmitriy Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 15, which critics used as a testing ground for the viability of polystylism in the Soviet Union.

Eschatology

The beginning of the third and final section of the book, Chapter 7, looks at another response to the anxieties accompanying the transition from Stagnation to Perestroika in the 1980s. The chapter studies the eschatological “postludes” cultivated by Valentin Silvestrov, including, most prominently, his monumental Fifth Symphony (1980–82), a nostalgic re-imagining of Bruckner and Mahler for the end of time. For Silvestrov the genre of the postlude represented a “collection of echoes, . . . a form . . . open not to the end, as is more usual, but to the beginning.” “It is not the end of music as art,” he added, “but the end of music, in which it may remain for a very long time.” This chapter thus considers the cultural work performed by Silvestrov’s resulting sense of “unending ending.” It treats his eschatology as a “useful fiction” to illuminate the conflicted sensations of stasis and acceleration that characterized the last decades of the USSR. Silvestrov, like many in the late twentieth century, began seeing the end everywhere. He responded by composing its echoes. The resulting music spoke to the sense of malaise and environmental catastrophe that gripped the USSR during its final years even as the promises of glasnost and perestroika took hold.

The Soviet Culture of Collage

Chapter 1 discusses the precursors for polystylism in the film, visual arts, and musicking of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s. It begins by considering two compositions that encapsulate the initial motivations and method for polystylism: Schnittke’s Violin Sonata no. 2, “Quasi una Sonata,” from 1968, and Silvestrov’s Drama for violin, cello, and piano, composed between 1970 and 1971. Both works juxtapose different techniques and approaches, shifting, often quite radically, from extremely dissonant, sonoristic gestures to quotations or pastiche. This chapter also presents a genealogy of polystylism, looking first at polystylistic antecedents in the music of Dmitriy Shostakovich, Gavriil Popov, Boris Asafyev, and other composers, as well as the general trend toward collage and montage in the Russian visual arts and film from the teens to the 1930s. It concludes by exploring the collage works that took hold in the 1960s in the USSR, starting with Arvo Pärt’s Collage on the Theme B-A-C-H, before spreading more widely, ultimately providing the fuel for Schnittke’s early polystylistic compositions and his theorizing of polystylism by the end of the decade.

The Collage Wave Breaks

As Chapter 9 shows, Schnittke’s final move away from polystylism to a more introspective, personal style can be heard most audibly in his opera Life with an Idiot and in his Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. These works show the collapse of Schnittke’s previously ecumenical—or apparently ecumenical—musical Weltanschauung. For many, they also bore witness to his declining health and the collapse and fall of the Soviet Union. This chapter explores the musical changes of the final period of his life, including his growing fame worldwide. Chief among these changes is the apparent paradox offered by Schnittke’s retreat from the multiplicity of polystylism even as the Soviet Union during glasnost witnessed an explosion of divergent voices.

Kitsch

Chapter 5 explores contemporary Soviet anxieties about mass media and popular culture by detailing Valentin Silvestrov’s shift in the 1970s from avant-garde cacophony to a quiet, nostalgic style that he unironically called “kitsch.” During this dark economic period, when he also was persona non grata in the Ukrainian Union of Composers, Silvestrov hoped to earn money by writing pop songs, a failed venture that resulted in his unpublished Kitsch Songs (1973), a cycle that sounds closer to Schubert and nineteenth-century Russian romances than the Beatles or contemporary Soviet pop. Silvestrov’s next works, including the important cycle Quiet Songs for voice and piano (1973–77), continued his resuscitation of earlier styles, usually involving texts by canonic Russian and Ukrainian poets (e.g., Pushkin, Lermontov, Mandelstam, and Shevchenko). In the preface to his 1977 Kitsch-Music for piano, Silvestrov claimed that he “regard[ed] the term ‘kitsch’ (weak, rejected, abortive) in an elegiac rather than an ironic sense.” In other words, he hoped that by taking “trivial,” overly familiar sources seriously, he might redeem them. His audiences often had other ideas, laughing at what they assumed was a parody. Others were captivated by his meditative evocations of the past.

Introduction

The Introduction to Sonic Overload explains the motivations for the book and sets in play its general themes. Taking stock of the contemporary overabundance of information, the introduction asks how we reached this point. It focuses on the late USSR for an answer by first looking at paradoxical accounts about information overload in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and early 1980s. Valentin Silvestrov and Alfred Schnittke serve as guides for considering further how information overload affected and was affected by music in the USSR. Schnittke’s and Silvestrov’s evocations of the past range across a spectrum from overmuch to not enough. Each composer engaged with overabundance, using music as a means to articulate a sense of self amid the often overwhelming sensations of too much. The introduction presents the main premises of the book by defining polystylism and style before tying style to fundamental senses of identity, purpose, and meaning both within and against society. The remainder of the introduction discusses the overall argument of the book, from embracing to rejecting polystylism, as well as the contents of each chapter and its role in the ongoing narrative.