September 2013 Review

Sooner or later, Love was gonna get him.
The cheapskate of Sheepsgate.
Shredded Memory Foam—Does it remember?

– Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

Icing the Body Electric

— A commentator whose cadence could have been truer to both Ray Bradbury and Walt Whitman

Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker (2012). MUSIC AND SOVIET POWER 1917–1932. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press. 404 pp., $99.00. ISBN 978-84383-703-9 (hardcover). “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Churchill famously cautioned in a radio broadcast of October 1939. “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” In the pell-mell era immediately following the October Revolution and ensuing Civil War, most Russians within the Soviet Union found themselves in the midst of no less puzzling a riddle. Pity, then, the Western musicologists who in our day seek to make sense of that political, social, and artistic foment. The Frolova-Walkers have done historians, musicologists, and Russophiles an exemplary service with a landmark volume of source documents, which step us year by year, from when the blank shot fired from the Aurora’s forecastle signaled the assault on the Winter Palace, to Prokofiev’s virtually permanent repatriation in November of 1932. The documents themselves range widely from reviews of stage events and philosophic discourses on the work of diverse composers, to Arseny Avraamov’s instructions (and argument) for his experimental Symphony of Sirens, to the text of the 1932 Resolution of the Central Committee On the Restructuring of Literary and Artistic Organizations. It is fascinating to read in voices of the time the various (and shifting) attitudes towards major musical figures, and it is at times chilling to review documents that, in hindsight, are emblematic of a steel curtain drawing down. For instance, it was possible for the State Cappella to program Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil (in the West, popularly miscalled Vespers) as late as February of 1926—but not without provoking scathing “previews” in print:
And what is the purpose of the State Cappella?
Today—to sing of the Revolution!
Tomorrow—the All-Night Vigil?
Somehow this two-faced nonsense does not sit well with a state institution, ideologically speaking. One position excludes the other. And the “historicity” of Rachmaninov’s Vigil is extremely dubious; no one is proposing to use it for educational purposes—there would be no reason to do so. It seems only right, then, to put a question to Rosfil the Russian Philharmonia]: Why did Rosfil make the secular State Cappella sing the “all-night vigil”? Or, if that’s not the case, then why has a sacred choir of church singers been named the “State Cappella”? (p. 171)
In the introductory section to each succeeding year, the authors of the present volume do an exemplary job of illuming the intellectual and political environment of the documents. The times were extraordinary, and the material does not lend itself readily to easy bullet-points. Not only are there many people (artists, officials, propagandists) and organizations (whose purpose did not necessarily remain consistent), but there is the truth illustrated by the quip, “In a room where you have four Communists, there are five opinions represented.” In spite of the thickets of the evolving situation, the Frolova-Walkers are lucid, helpful, and light of touch; they write with both a respect for accurate optics on the details, and with a sensitivity to the broader narrative. In 1927, for instance:
. . . a few months later, Prokofiev was able to read of Shostakovich’s great public success with his symphony To October (now usually known as the Symphony No. 2)—this was the commission which Prokofiev had summarily rejected, and which was then offered to Shostakovich, who took it up with alacrity. The 20-year-old composer, who had just become a celebrity among Leningrad concertgoers, thanks to his First Symphony, still lacked any funds to ensure the performance of his music, and the commission signaled the prospect of a change for the better, since it promised performance and publication shortly after completion. The commission was issued by Shulgin’s Agitational Department at Muzsector, and the only disadvantage was the stipulation that the work should include a setting of a rather clumsy political text by Alexander Bezïmensky. Shostakovich made no objection to this, and also followed Shulgin’s advice that a factory whistle would sit well within the kind of work they hoped to see. At first, his principal motivation was apparently the thought of the foreign trip the commission fee might possibly cover: “Every day I write four-score pages of ‘patriotic music’ while hearing the call: To Paris! To Paris!,” but in the end, he was proud of his new score. (p. 183)
The book capably serves a dual purpose. It is, of course, an anthology of period documents from which one might target a specific item or three; but its style and content are of an order which make the book an engaging cover-to-cover read. Nor does this reviewer feel that the reader need be a specialist in the period or in Russian music to approach Music and Soviet Power 1917–1932; but the reader who has more general musical or historic interests would likely find the book highly rewarding.
Karl Henning
Composer and Independent Scholar
Boston, MA