i have no clue about this in particular, but it wouldn’t surprise me if shostakovich and other modernist composers were secret dissidents. after all, there was rightfully a ban on modernist (essentially fascist, eugenicist, idealist and kind of shitty imo) music, but the vacuum was never really filled with a socialist fork and then i believe after stalin died (or at least in that era) the ban was lifted. that kind of banning was why many modernists immigrated to the US ofc, and while i’m sure they over-exaggerated the USSR to appease americans they were still personally affected by those kinds of policies.
i should probably amend the statement i made previously: the USSR was a cultural powerhouse in terms of cultural education and interpretation but not so much cultural production so far as i can tell. if this wasn’t the case before stalin’s death, then it definitely was afterwards. it’s also generally true that music lags behind other art forms, too, so a socialist fork of western music may not have had enough time to truly metastasize before the liberalization and collapse of the USSR began.
Yes, from what I’ve read nobody is quite sure what Shostakovich’s private political beliefs were, and modernist composers had (as you say) every motivation to be angry at the Soviet government. But the Testimony story is wild. Apparently just four years after Shostakovich’s death, a Russian emigre musicologist named Solomon Volkov showed up at Houghton Mifflin’s offices in New York, with a manuscript that he claimed was Shostakovich’s “unpublished memoirs;” he said, moreover, that the composer had given him a “sacred trust” to emigrate to the west and get the memoirs published. The book came out, in English, as Testimony, and claimed among other things that Shostakovich was a secret dissident, that he had a tense personal relationship with Stalin, and that his music contains coded anti-Soviet messages. Testimony has never been published in the original Russian – Volkov refuses to show his manuscript to anybody – and the current Russian edition is just a back-translation out of English.
The big problem here is that, since 1991, scholars have discovered that whole sections of the book seem to be lifted verbatim from various articles Shostakovich published in the 60s. This in itself isn’t too weird, since writers reuse stuff all the time. However, Volkov claims the book was written in a rather unique way: he interviewed Shostakovich, jotted down the composer’s responses in shorthand, and then rearranged the material into a complete narrative. Shostakovich reviewed each completed chapter and indicated the changes he wanted made, only adding his signature when he was satisfied with the result. So we are to assume: Shostakovich had various magazine articles he’d written, on random subjects for various music journals, complete and memorized in his head; and that when interviewed, he responded by reciting these articles, which then somehow survived Volkov’s rearranging. None of these things are impossible in themselves, but taken together it’s a pretty big (one might say Zenz-level) chain of coincidences.
(None of this, of course, has stopped western pop musicologists in the slightest. The British rock critic Ian MacDonald wrote in his book The New Shostakovich that a particular horn line in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is meant to parody “Soviet officialese.” Why? Because, MacDonald says, it sounds like a Russian folk song, but is pitched impossibly high. He seems unaware that horn parts are conventionally written a fifth above the actual sound, so that the line in question isn’t high at all, but pretty squarely in the normal range.)
yeah that sounds pretty wild in this case. i think we have to remember that musicology as an object of study actually had its roots in nazi germany of all places, and gained state funding by pandering to nazi ideology in various ways: all the great composers in the “classical” era were german, mozart and haydn were technically germans, handel only moved to england to spread the greatness of germany, etc. ofc that’s not to say that musicology is inherently anticommunist, but i guess it’s not surprising that a russian musicologist made some shit up to beef up an anticommunist reading of shostakovich.
as to your last paragraph, i see this everywhere in academic musicology and music theory journals and articles. i’ll never forget when my teacher told me to play a piece more “soviet-like,” i.e. barren and stark, even though the soviet composer was a modernist lol. and ofc liberalism and postmodernism is incredibly strong in music journals, leading to completely subjective analyses like the one you cite. it has been interesting to learn about marxist philosophy and historical materialism, and then to have the meaningless, obfuscating liberal/postmodern jargon smack me in the face practically anytime i do academic study.
i have no clue about this in particular, but it wouldn’t surprise me if shostakovich and other modernist composers were secret dissidents. after all, there was rightfully a ban on modernist (essentially fascist, eugenicist, idealist and kind of shitty imo) music, but the vacuum was never really filled with a socialist fork and then i believe after stalin died (or at least in that era) the ban was lifted. that kind of banning was why many modernists immigrated to the US ofc, and while i’m sure they over-exaggerated the USSR to appease americans they were still personally affected by those kinds of policies.
i should probably amend the statement i made previously: the USSR was a cultural powerhouse in terms of cultural education and interpretation but not so much cultural production so far as i can tell. if this wasn’t the case before stalin’s death, then it definitely was afterwards. it’s also generally true that music lags behind other art forms, too, so a socialist fork of western music may not have had enough time to truly metastasize before the liberalization and collapse of the USSR began.
Yes, from what I’ve read nobody is quite sure what Shostakovich’s private political beliefs were, and modernist composers had (as you say) every motivation to be angry at the Soviet government. But the Testimony story is wild. Apparently just four years after Shostakovich’s death, a Russian emigre musicologist named Solomon Volkov showed up at Houghton Mifflin’s offices in New York, with a manuscript that he claimed was Shostakovich’s “unpublished memoirs;” he said, moreover, that the composer had given him a “sacred trust” to emigrate to the west and get the memoirs published. The book came out, in English, as Testimony, and claimed among other things that Shostakovich was a secret dissident, that he had a tense personal relationship with Stalin, and that his music contains coded anti-Soviet messages. Testimony has never been published in the original Russian – Volkov refuses to show his manuscript to anybody – and the current Russian edition is just a back-translation out of English.
The big problem here is that, since 1991, scholars have discovered that whole sections of the book seem to be lifted verbatim from various articles Shostakovich published in the 60s. This in itself isn’t too weird, since writers reuse stuff all the time. However, Volkov claims the book was written in a rather unique way: he interviewed Shostakovich, jotted down the composer’s responses in shorthand, and then rearranged the material into a complete narrative. Shostakovich reviewed each completed chapter and indicated the changes he wanted made, only adding his signature when he was satisfied with the result. So we are to assume: Shostakovich had various magazine articles he’d written, on random subjects for various music journals, complete and memorized in his head; and that when interviewed, he responded by reciting these articles, which then somehow survived Volkov’s rearranging. None of these things are impossible in themselves, but taken together it’s a pretty big (one might say Zenz-level) chain of coincidences.
(None of this, of course, has stopped western pop musicologists in the slightest. The British rock critic Ian MacDonald wrote in his book The New Shostakovich that a particular horn line in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is meant to parody “Soviet officialese.” Why? Because, MacDonald says, it sounds like a Russian folk song, but is pitched impossibly high. He seems unaware that horn parts are conventionally written a fifth above the actual sound, so that the line in question isn’t high at all, but pretty squarely in the normal range.)
yeah that sounds pretty wild in this case. i think we have to remember that musicology as an object of study actually had its roots in nazi germany of all places, and gained state funding by pandering to nazi ideology in various ways: all the great composers in the “classical” era were german, mozart and haydn were technically germans, handel only moved to england to spread the greatness of germany, etc. ofc that’s not to say that musicology is inherently anticommunist, but i guess it’s not surprising that a russian musicologist made some shit up to beef up an anticommunist reading of shostakovich.
as to your last paragraph, i see this everywhere in academic musicology and music theory journals and articles. i’ll never forget when my teacher told me to play a piece more “soviet-like,” i.e. barren and stark, even though the soviet composer was a modernist lol. and ofc liberalism and postmodernism is incredibly strong in music journals, leading to completely subjective analyses like the one you cite. it has been interesting to learn about marxist philosophy and historical materialism, and then to have the meaningless, obfuscating liberal/postmodern jargon smack me in the face practically anytime i do academic study.