Songs My Mother Taught Me Crossover and Double Recycling in Soviet and Post-Soviet Music Who’s afraid of Socialist Realism?

Old Songs, New Voices

Soviet popular music changed little over the decades, forming a huge hoard that still feeds Soviet nostalgia from the repertoire of 1950s to the 1980s. Nothing essentially happened between the 1930s and the early 1980s. Maybe the orchestrations changed or the arrangements became more modern, but the idea remained the same: very repetitive, and quite meaningless, emotional images that need to be repeated. But the character of the singers’ voices, and their ways of presentation, were changing significantly, reflecting the important ideological targets in different decades.

From the 1920s to the mid-1950s, many popular songs were sung by a saccharine, tender, high male voice (such as Alexander Vertinsky, Nikolai Alexandrovich, Alexei Vinogradov or Sergei Lemeshev). There was a need for this voice, which was never strong. The song Odinokaia Brodit Garmon’ [Lonely accordion] from the early 1940s (music by Boris Mokrousov, poem by Mikhail Isakovsky) was sung by a popular opera singer in the late 1940s, Sergei Lemeshev.⁶⁵ For many of Lemeshev’s female Soviet fans, hearing him was almost a physiological necessity at the time. The text of this song is quite an interesting example of what today we would call hidden eroticism.⁶⁶

Russians at that time were only allowed to be seen having platonic relationships. Sex was out of the question. Thus a strange half-male, half-female voice was highly suitable for the ‘purist’ mentality of the time. On the other hand, the institution of marriage was almost abandoned, and it wasn’t necessary for a couple to be in wedlock, even if they had children. So, the sweet male voice (and not a well-trained voice by Western standards) was a symbol of complete trust between the partners, without any church or civil ritual interference. Soviet couples found their own, Soviet, way in their relations. They needed no bourgeois Western theories, education or standards. The term meshchanstvo (petit-bourgeois mentality) was the worst possible insult.

Instead, the dances were very popular (and continued to be so up until the 1960s), especially in the villages, where tantsploshchadki (dance platforms, usually in the open air) were built. These offered outlets for expressing some quite obvious (and even exhibitionist) sexual feelings and movements.⁶⁷ Dancing (especially relatively slow dances such as the tango) offered a high degree of intimacy otherwise impossible in the USSR at the time.⁶⁸ Nobody knew about Astor Piazzolla then, but the Argentinian film La Edad del Amor [The age of love], 1954, featuring a young Lolita Torres, was one of the very few movies with erotic fados, tangos and foxtrots ever shown in the USSR.⁶⁹ It was an unprecedented and sensational success in Russia, with its nationwide hunger for sex and erotic impressions.⁷⁰

Most popular songs in late Soviet times were again based on tango (or foxtrot) rhythms and structures. Thus, David Tukhmanov’s Den’ Pobedy [Victory Day], 1975, was originally rejected by Soviet radio as an entirely unsuitable ‘foxtrot of a kind’.⁷¹ It later became one of the most popular songs ever, and an established part of all official victory celebrations of World War II, including the military parades on Red Square. This song was sung by all generations, from war participants to teenagers. Another Tukhmanov song, My address – the Soviet Union, was also based on a tango pattern, in sharp contrast to the typically Soviet, commonplace words (by Vladimir Kharitonov), telling us that ‘personal matters’ are not important, and that a hero belongs everywhere, throughout Soviet Union.⁷² This was a typical propaganda trick, suturing a song with erotic tango overtones in order to send the younger generation to Siberia or the Far East (as cheap labour), and promising them the illusion of personal freedom in exchange.⁷³

The message was very clear: go and work, and don’t think about your personal life; you are member of a large family—the nation.

Other changes in popular music occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, as well. A completely different kind of male voice was favoured, which targeted a certain type of audience at a certain time. Most of these singers lacked a serious voice, but this, once again, wasn’t important. The main social idea of that time was: anyone can sing, anyone can do anything—for instance go to Siberia, settle there forever and build the BAM (Baikal-Amour railway).⁷⁴ There was always a slight element of despair in this voice: it was typically slightly pessimistic, bittersweet. It tells you that you shouldn’t overestimate yourself; that you are as simple as everyone else; that you must have others around you and be content with being one of the crowd. This type of voice helped to create that mentality and to make life a little bit easier: survival in the years of stagnation (1970s–1980s). This, or sweet self-torture, was a common part of Soviet entertainment of the 1960s through to the 1980s.⁷⁵

In the 1990s, with so many changes occurring in Russian political, social and cultural life, the old Soviet tunes almost disappeared. Turning the radio on, I was surprised not to hear them. They were replaced for a while by the sound of gunshots in the streets at night: potential listeners were busy dividing Russian natural resources, and sharing the profits (or killing each other). They were not interested in Sovietlike tunes.

The less prosperous wanted to attend concerts, but they couldn’t afford it. Tickets to the concert halls and opera performances became too expensive for many. Concert halls were half-empty, as never before. After so many years, the standard Soviet cultural pattern and centralised funding system was almost destroyed in the 1990s. Movie theatres were bought by car dealers or converted into shopping malls. Those remaining had to change their repertoire. Russian-made films disappeared; instead, American movies were offered, to the great enjoyment of the younger generation, who could suddenly see what had been forbidden fruits for many years. Only in the mid-2000s did new Russian films start to be shown in Moscow’s cinemas again, albeit on an extremely limited basis.

Very soon, though, Russians started to feel much more secure, creating a new culture of nostalgia. These New Russians (or nuovorish) are normally middle-aged people who grew up with Soviet songs, and they want to claim them back. Consequently, Soviet songs and Soviet pop culture have made a triumphant return to Russian radio and TV programmes, together with new features: endless soap operas in the South American style. The singers’ voices, however, are totally different in the 2000s: they are passionless, more like those of formal waiters in a prestige restaurant, or in an office conversation, or even on computer-generated devices. The voices reveal no sentiments whatsoever: you hear what you hear—no more, no less. If you want to hear more, or feel more, you pay more. Everything is for sale, and there are no illusions. You have to be self-reliant and vigilant. With these new voices, and the new, rather hostile social context, the standard Soviet repertoire is very much in demand again.
Soviet rubbish bins and double recycling

In 1987 I received a New Year postcard from the composer Valentin Silvestrov (born 1937). He wrote: ‘There is an invisible work here which is rooted in a “genetic aural well”. It is difficult for me to find a different wording for this. Compositions like this are not composed, but just written down [zapisyvaiutsia].’⁷⁶ His ‘genetic well’ is a perfect image for the Russian passion of recycling. There is always a ‘genetic well’, which—like Orthodox prayer—cannot be learnt as the text, but exists beyond any text.⁷⁷ It is like a song your mother taught you. In Soviet music, recycling material was always important—first, for the composers of Soviet film and mass songs music; and later, for Schnittke, Silvestrov, Pärt, and finally for Desiatnikov and Martynov.

Silvestrov, sometimes associated with Russian minimalism, told me: ‘Our music—is not just music, it’s something different: it is a meta-music, or post-music.’⁷⁸ The titles of his compositions confirm this idea: Postlude, Post-Symphony, Metamusic. In Silvestrov’s own words, ‘Postlude is a certain existential state of today’s culture. Thanks to the avant-garde, we have passed the borders of the tone world. Instead of forms similar to musical drama, we are dealing now with new open forms. These forms do not represent an action; they are rather free commentaries.’⁷⁹

His Tikhie Pesni [Silent songs] of 1974–1977 surprised the audiences by their extreme simplicity. In the 1970s, at the peak of Soviet esoteric, encrypted language, this felt almost like a vulgar offence. Half Lieder, half Soviet mass song, the cycle of twenty-four songs lasting almost two hours mixed together allusions of different styles: lowbrow, with no pathos, no hidden agenda. Silvestrov’s latest compositions of the 2000s (mostly short, aphoristic compositions, often for solo piano, or voice and piano, or cello) show the same attitude. In one of his Silent songs he recycles ‘Delilah’s aria’, Saint-Saëns’s Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix. But, once again, it’s not Saint-Saëns’s original melody: rather, its cliché, which was overused for all sorts of background music in Soviet times. Silvestrov in fact is trying to take ‘Soviet’ rust and dust off this most beautiful melody (in his own words) in the work.⁸⁰

Alfred Schnittke’s recycling is something of a double recycling. Where Luciano Berio quotes from others’ scores (or, with Umberto Eco’s help, from mythological texts, in his Sinfonia), Schnittke recycles the contents of Soviet rubbish bins: garbage already used by the Soviet propaganda machine, which, in its turn, had recycled many classical clichés. In Schnittke, even though you can hear tunes in theory written by Tchaikovsky or Chopin or Johann Strauss, it doesn’t feel like music quoted from their scores. It comes crippled by accidents and battered by everyday life, by official funerals, weddings, TV clips. These quotes come from what Soviet people were used to hearing: songs, marches and dances, the singing of the drunk.⁸¹ Sometimes they come all at once, as in the finale of Schnittke’s First Symphony: Tchaikovsky isn’t quite Tchaikovsky, Chopin isn’t quite Chopin. And this recycling itself produces the effect of an outside commentary, where any direct utterance is not really possible.

Schnittke wrote music for more than 60 films and, unlike other composers, was able to use and reuse this music in his serious compositions. Take, for example, the film How Tsar Peter got the black man married, 1976 (based on real incidents from the life of Ibragim Petrovich Gannibal, engineer and protégé of Peter the Great, and great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin). The song from it—sung by the Russian pop-star legend and actor Vladimir Vysotsky, with his rather idiosyncratic voice similar to Louis Armstrong’s—appears again, almost unrecognisable in a Baroque dress, in the Rondo from Concerto Grosso No 1.⁸² ‘Highbrow’ Baroque rhetoric embellishments do indeed have very much in common with the typical gesture in ‘low’ genres of modern pop music. They both represent the same ever-fashionable idea of exaggeration articulated by excessive makeup, successfully used by some pop artists since 1960s, from the Swingle Singers and the Bee Gees to Madonna and Lady Gaga.

The same ‘double recycling’ can be seen in Arvo Pärt’s late Soviet works, before his homogeneous tintinnabuli style was established. Thus, in his Credo we hear not so much Bach’s prelude, but rather Gounod’s popular adaptation (Ave Maria). His quote from Tchaikovsky’s Sladkaia Greza [Sweet Dream] at the end of his Second Symphony also relates to far too frequent Soviet broadcasts of Tchaikovsky rather than to the Children’s Album original. In the context of Pärt’s energetic and witty symphony, it sounds like Tchaikovsky amplified by a didactic megaphone—a typical Soviet educational or even road-police device.⁸³

A similar replication issue is central to Rosenthal’s Children (2005), the opera by Leonid Desiatnikov (born 1955) based on Vladimir Sorokin’s (born 1955) libretto and staged at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on 23 March 2005.⁸⁴ The Desiatnikov/Sorokin opera is a brilliant example of the new recycling process in Russian music. In the opera, replicas, clichés and clones of Soviet culture, Soviet mentality, Soviet opera and Soviet everyday life are shown openly and objectively, without any nostalgia or contempt, and often with a clear sympathy or mild irony. Soviet clichés are recycled time and again. The Sorokin libretto deals with the story of Dr Alex Rosenthal, a German émigré in the Soviet Union, who invents a method of cloning human beings—in particular, the great human beings, such as composers. Five main heroes (clones of Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Wagner and Verdi) are all surrounded by very subtle allusions to their music. The Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky ones made by Desiatnikov are particularly funny, as here the composer is mocking not so much those composers’ own operatic styles, but instead the way their operas were staged in the Soviet Union. Most of the Tchaikovsky allusions come from Eugene Onegin and make clear parallels with the new, much-criticised Bolshoi production by the young stage director Dmitri Cherniakov, with his intentional mocking approach to the kitschy and dusty ‘Bolshoi Theatre’ Soviet style.

Allusions to classical repertoire are used by the composer to show the classically based aspects of Soviet art. They are not direct quotes, but quotes from ‘Soviet’ propaganda images, saturated by classical idioms. Thus, when a picture of Stalin is shown on a TV monitor on stage, the audience hears the first movement coda of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, with rather sombre lower strings pizzicati.⁸⁵

In both acts, the hero-composers sing the same tune: the Soviet pioneers’ song Ekh, khorosho v strane sovetskoi zhit’ [Ah, how good it is to live in a Soviet country], notably by Isaac Dunaevsky (1935). In the first act, the melody of this song—just as in Dunaevsky’s real creative practice—is borne out of phrases typical of two of the cloned heroes, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. The original melody is only found or recalled after a couple of attempts. In the second act, the same tune has already been adapted into a sweet, easy listening style, similar partly to Soviet mass songs of the 1930s and 1940s, partly to Verdi’s brilliant operatic finales. It sounds like a dreamy Grande Sestetto Italiano (five composers plus the prostitute Tania, whom they meet near Three Railway Station Square in Moscow in 1991). Curiously enough, Schnittke used the same tune in his opera Life with an idiot of 1991, with a metaphorical (almost cloned) Lenin as the main hero. But in Schnittke’s opera, the pioneers’ tune is used in its original form, like a document. In Desiatnikov’s opera, the same tune is a ‘cloned’ or ‘double-recycled’ Soviet symbol—strangely enough, one that is quite attractive to modern ears. And this attractiveness itself puts it out of the Soviet context.

In Raskatov’s opera, the tunes of revolutionary songs, timbres of rather primitive Russian folk instruments (Raskatov introduces a small ‘band’ of balalaika, domra and rather rare contrabass-balalaika), Orthodox chorales, allusions to Romantic music (such as Wagner or Tchaikovsky) as well as Soviet chastushki (vulgar poems) are all mixed and melted together. At the moment of the dog’s successful transformation into a human being, Raskatov brings a quote from the opening chorus of Bach’s St Matthew Passion (just like Schnittke in his Life with an Idiot). Raskatov, however, takes the idea of polystylism much further and uses it in the paradoxical , almost absurdist context of a ‘black comedy’. The orthodox chorale is heard when Sharikov is vomiting on a luxury Persian carpet in the professor’s house. The voice of the dog is a weird combination of a female screaming into a megaphone and counter-tenor–like singing.

Soviet symbols mocked by the ‘Sots art’ leader painter Il’ia Kabakov (born 1933), or by Vitaly Komar (born 1943) and Alexander Melamid (born 1945), and always shown by them in a quasi-documentary context, are transformed into new poetry by their colleague Vladimir Yankilevsky (born 1938). Yankilevsky’s large exhibition in London in February 2010 presented the same ugly elements of Soviet life—stripped doors, people in boxes, shabby clothes—in a new context. Somehow the painter creates a new and beautiful picture out of them. The concentration of ugliness and rusty Soviet symbols results in a newborn beauty, new light and new aura. As Yankilevsky states, ‘I’d like to bring together the two aspects of the world: the ideal world of harmonious relations and human absurdity, which is part of the real world and society. They are in conflict. But there are moments of quiescence when the absurd settles down and becomes an element of new harmony.’⁸⁶

Most negative or absurdist features of Soviet wretchedness have indeed become a new fashion in many Russian films and musical works, installations and multimedia projects of the last decade. Russian art of the twenty-first century relishes old Soviet idioms and clichés as a unique and lasting style and mentality and also as a touchy physical image of the ugly duckling of Russia’s newfound prosperity.

The young generation of Russians isn’t much interested in the social or political contexts of Soviet-like clichés. It likes them for the possibilities of a new, lower style, without the typical monumental context, big gestures and propaganda exaggerations. A desperately needed attempt to escape the heavy Soviet context is another possible reason for the shockingly disgusting images and coarse language in Sorokin’s prose, or the hostile characters in the films by Valeria Gai Germanika (born 1984). Both artists found fresh inspiration, unused energy and sufficient productive resources in what was hated by the older generations that lived in the USSR. This natural and organic process of elimination of an obsolete social and political context helped them to see things in a new, objective light.

Post-Soviet Russian composers may think that they have demolished all the old Soviet patterns, but in fact they have merely used them in many different ways. Film music and mass songs in the Soviet Union form an important source for polystylism in the late Soviet period, and for minimalism in post-Soviet times. Many very simple, widely enjoyed features of Soviet popular music that were overused for decades have recently been rediscovered and transformed into a new language of post-Soviet serious music (Martynov, Silvestrov, Desiatnikov). Elements of Western art music, used by Dunaevsky, Shostakovich and Tariverdiev in their popular tunes from the 1930s to the 1970s, have been ‘double recycled’ over and over in serious music of the 1980s to the 02000s.

Mass songs and film music from the 1930s to the 1970s were based on classical idioms and tunes. Serious post-Soviet music is often based on elements of Soviet mass songs, film music and so-called ‘Socialist Realism’ works, based on classical tunes. Most certainly this is not just a nostalgic revival of Soviet aesthetics. It is an attempt to repair and revalue many Soviet idioms outside the Soviet context. Shostakovich’s friend the great Russian philosopher and musicologist Boleslav Yavorsky (1977–1942) wrote to him in one of his letters: ‘Usually people call the music of previous epoch “pure music”, when the perception of that music as today’s music has been lost, when the principles organising that music stopped organising the perception and memory.’⁸⁷ Thus, the so-called ‘Socialist Realism’ works and mass Soviet tunes sound today exactly like ‘pure music’, or modern classics, often with some quite attractive absurdist features and elements of narratives typical of popular music genres.

The decentralisation of Russia is yet another reason for relishing old, previously hated, idioms. Soviet Russia was always a highly centralised state, with Moscow the centre of the empire. This was quite different from the structure in the US, where each state can be independent, and there is no centre of the country as such. In the USSR, Moscow was everything. Now it is all different. Art, music, a good quality of life, and investment in one’s future—everything is now spreading to the far ends of the new Russia.⁸⁸

Central control over the arts, economy, social life and ‘centred’ censorship is now almost over. Also over are musical forms, typical of the Soviet mentality. They have been replaced by far more open and more flexible patterns. ‘Strong forms’ of Soviet music, influenced by classical idioms of German philosophy and its patterns of typical fixed rules, have now been challenged by ‘weak forms’, which rediscover oral traditions and improvisations.⁸⁹ Old Soviet morphological elements sound completely different and fresh in this new, flexible situation of unfamiliar freedom, with its brand-new syntax.

In the West, the meaning of rubbish is different from that in Russia. Worn or faulty goods are usually not repaired—indeed, often cannot be—but rather are thrown away and replaced by new ones. The healthy, ancient idea of a repair is practically nonexistent. The cult of novelty—in composition, in performance, in show business—remains strong.⁹⁰

In Russia, you cannot really get rid of old things easily because everything means a lot, and everything matters. Nobody throws anything away without saying farewell to it. Rubbish recycling, as it were, is an important part of people’s life. And this is perhaps yet another reason for a revival of Soviet idioms in a changeable and dynamic post-Soviet society and culture.

‘Socialist Realism’ was the most successful attempt at early crossover. We should be ‘grateful’ to Joseph Stalin for demolishing any border between classical and popular music as early as in the 1930s. He was thinking of effective propaganda tools. Making Soviet pop hits out of Tchaikovsky and Rakhmaninov helped him to rule the country and to make the Communist propaganda more successful. Not only did Soviet popular songs absorb the idioms of Bach, Weber, Schumann, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Mahler, but also the symphonies and ballets of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were seen as a part of Soviet mass culture—a truly unique achievement!

Crossover has been quite a fashionable idea in trendy art experiments of the 2000s. But Soviet composers did it much earlier. Ives and Mahler pioneered this process in the early twentieth century. Korngold developed it further and brought his New Viennese School experience into the Hollywood film industry. Prokofiev opened up new dimensions for musical narrativity, typical for pop music, and based on ‘fascination’ with his simple, charismatic and repetitive melodies. Shostakovich used rock and roll idioms. Dunaevsky made elements of European highbrow culture in Soviet mass song a reflection of the everyday anxiety of ordinary Russian people. Schnittke and Pärt attempted ‘double recycling’, squeezing the rich remaining resources out of Soviet propaganda tools. Recent music by Giia Kancheli, who started as an extremely successful film composer, is a perfect example of ‘double recycling’, which makes his style highly expressive and modern. Finally, post-Soviet composers-minimalists, particularly Martynov and Desiatnikov, make their sophisticated operas and other serious compositions out of ‘old-fashioned’ popular dances, rituals and entertainment clichés, just as J.S. Bach did in his Partitas, Suites and Sonatas three centuries ago.

‘Moving within or across musical genres is more than a musical act: it is also an act of social creation.’⁹¹ New Russian art and music, based on the recycling of Soviet pop idioms, should be contrasted with their simple ‘regeneration’ in many radio, TV and concert programmes suitable for middle-aged ‘new Russians’, or nuovorish. Real social creation can be seen in the younger generation. They may be the children of those very nuovorish. But this new generation, with its sophisticated tastes, and studying in Oxford or Cambridge, is now in a unique position to properly reconsider and reuse the rich Soviet traditions.

Yet you can still recognise former Soviet people on the street. They have a very particular appearance. Even if they are dressed like Western models, their behaviour is unmistakable. Schnittke, Kancheli, Gubaidulina, Martynov, Pärt, Korndorf, Tarnopolski, Raskatov, Knaifel and Desiatnikov—all are Soviet composers. Soviet music still exists, whether they like it or not. The Soviet period lasted for only seventy-three years, but it made an enormous and important impact on post-Soviet and Western culture, and on Western understanding of Russian culture.

I am very much against removing Vladimir Lenin’s body from the Mausoleum on Red Square. Napoleon rests in Les Invalides as a national hero. Ivan the Terrible is buried in the Kremlin. And let them be there forever. I am also opposed to the renaming of streets in Russian cities, which is currently a fashionable thing. I don’t think we can or should wipe out or immure any aspect of Soviet history or culture.⁹² I am happy to hear all the songs my mother taught me. You may hate them or love them, yet they are undoubtedly an organic part of a new Russian mentality, new Russian music and new world history.