• Fiona (she/her)🏳️‍⚧️
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    252 years ago

    Did you know that the official state religion of the Soviet Union was Music? And that they worshipped the V i o l i n G o d ? It’s true!

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik
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    242 years ago

    There’s really no aspect of Soviet life where Wikipedia won’t inappropriately digress to portray in the worst light possible. Friendships, romance, eating, sleeping, breathing, dreaming, walking, talking, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching, seeing, eye‐blinking—there was always something somewhere in the Soviet Union that somehow made it all worse. It’s a very unnatural way of discussing history.

    • JucheBot1988OP
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      182 years ago

      “Can’t remember where I put my apartment keys, gotta search through the pockets of all my clothes. Anywhere else in the world this would be a minor inconvenience, but thanks to the Soviet System, it’s an earth-shattering tragedy. DAMN YOU, LENIN!”

  • tribuneoftheplebs
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Wikipedia glows

    Do yourself a favor and don’t read anything remotely related to the social sciences in it

  • @Llyich
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    182 years ago

    Cause right wing extremists Jimmy Wales owns Wikipedia. Years ago it was fine but Wales has had his minions censor the shit out of it in the last decade.

  • @seanchai
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    1 year ago

    deleted by creator

    • @chinawatcherwatcher
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      132 years ago

      while many of the “greats” of classical music were german (the three b’s: bach, beethoven, brahms) or germanic (haydn, mozart, wagner, etc), there was also a rich history of russian composers essentially in the same vein (shostakovich, scriabin, rachmaninoff, but also composers like mussorgsky and rimsky-korsakov). we tend to forget that russia and the russian empire was seen both as part of the west and a part of europe for the entirety of its history, even though it played a minor role economically and culturally.

      after the october revolution, though, russian/soviet culture was othered and its culture/history was often seen as divorced from that of europe and “the west.” thus we have this claim of appropriation of the “classical musical heritage”: this is essentially claiming that russia was never part of western culture, and lenin appreciating beethoven piano sonatas was appropriation when it was in fact completely normal. this is probably the most ridiculous claim in the paragraph, because um you don’t even have to be of western heritage to enjoy beethoven piano sonatas in the first place, let alone how ahistorical the claim is.

      the rest is essentially describing rudimentary levels of musical education: some will be masters that will need specialized training from older masters, some will be lower-level teachers, and some will learn just enough that they can better appreciate classical music. the fact of the matter is that the soviet union was a cultural powerhouse during the cold war, in competition with the west. i’m not totally familiar with the topic, but the two main styles of piano playing are either french or russian, and the russian style is predominant all across the US today. like i said there’s a history of russian pianists, but there’s no doubt that the USSR’s cultural education amplified this, possibly to the extent that it became dominant. this is why van cliburn winning the tchaikovsky piano competition in the USSR was such a big deal at the time, it was seen as a cultural victory over a field dominated by russians. same thing with chess, so far as i’m aware. so, portraying this education as evil and bad is explaining away a then-failure of the US and the west, in the same way that portraying china’s athletic system as evil and bad was a way of explaining away the possibility of the US losing this past olympics.

      • JucheBot1988OP
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        22 years ago

        Case in point: Volkov’s Testimony, the Unpublished Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, which portrays the composer as a secret dissident and is very probably a fabrication.

        • @chinawatcherwatcher
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          22 years ago

          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.

          • JucheBot1988OP
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            2 years ago

            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.)

            • @chinawatcherwatcher
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              22 years ago

              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.

    • JucheBot1988OP
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      92 years ago

      That’s a real thing, actually: academic study of music.