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

70 La Edad del Amor was seen by literally every adult citizen in the USSR in the 1950s , often twice or three times. Here is the film fragment with the song Coimbra Divina by Ramón Zarzoso:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTNd84D7PHo&feature=related

71 This song can be heard online:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEruDTulDgw&feature=related

Accessed 08.05.10

72 «Segodnia ne Lichnoe Glavnoe,

A Svodki Rabochego Dnia.

Zabotitsia Serdtse, Serdtse Volnuetsia,

Pochtovy Pakuetsia Gruz…

Moi Adres—Ne Dom I Ne Ulitsa,

Moi Adres—Sovetsky Soiuz!»

[Today the main issue is not a personal one

But the work information.

My heart is caring and excited;

My address—not a house number or a street,

My address—the Soviet Union!]

73 All graduates at Moscow and St Petersburg had to sign their compulsory contracts (offered at the graduation ceremonies) to leave Moscow and central Russia and go to Siberia or the Urals, or the Asian Soviet Republics, to teach or to perform there. This was one of the failed late Soviet attempts at decentralisation. Similarly, young soldiers had to do their military service away from their regions (thus a Moscow resident would normally be sent to the Far East, and vice versa). The propaganda machine needed a carrot to complement this stick, and in this manner the Soviet Romanticism was firmly associated with sentimental Romantic idioms of Tchaikovsky, Rakhmaninov and Mahler, and later with tango and other popular music genres. This helped to keep the ‘lost generation’ of the 1970s (with their rather surprising and absurd enthusiasm in ‘discovering new lands in Siberia) quiet and content.

74 This project started in 1932, with gulag prisoners used as cheap labour on the BAM up to the 1950s. The project, abandoned for a while, was revitalised again in 1974, and is still in the completion stages at present. I remember my concert in Tynda, the ‘capital’ of BAM, in the mid-1970s. The terrible living conditions and gloomy landscape were really depressing. It was one of several inhuman initiatives of the Soviet government in which at least one generation of people wasted their lives and missed their future.

75 This was expressed by Boris Pasternak in his Zhivago poems:

«Chtob Tainaia Struia Stradania

Sogrela Kholod Bytiia»

[to let a secret stream of suffering

warm the coldness of our lives]

Boris Pasternak, ‘Zemlia’ [Earth], from the novel Doktor Zhivago (1945–1955). The poem was first published in the Soviet Union as late as 1967, in Boris Pasternak, Stikhi [Poems] (Moscow, 1967), 266–268. The novel itself was not published in the USSR until 1988.

76 Postcard to the author, 27.12.87.

77 In contrast to the situation with regard to Western church practices, one cannot find books or publications containing the melodies for singing in the Russian church. One has to know them by heart, from one’s parents and friends, or from prayers.

78 Private talk with the author in London on 11.10.07.

79 Ibid.

80 In the 1990s Silvestrov wrote an open letter addressed to Western ‘dinosaurs of avant-garde’ (Lachenmann, Ferneyhough and others). Silvestrov (who hand-copied Edgard Varèse’s Octandre in order to learn more about modern technique in the 1960s) wrote : ‘Dear Colleagues, The winter is long over. It’s time now to produce fresh leaves. Music is unable to express only tension, horror, hissing, buzzing, it can not just scratch, gnash, even in a perfectly structural way…’ (quoted in Vladimir Martynov, Kazus Vita Nuova [The Case of Vita Nuova] (Moscow, 2010), 66). This sounds so similar to official criticism of Prokofiev and Shostakovich back in the 1930s and 1940s, despite a completely different social and cultural context.

81 Schnittke’s own music—more than anyone else’s—was much overused in Russian TV programmes of the 2000s, accompanying everything from documentaries on Khrushchev and Beriia to adverts for food.

82 Here is Vysotsky’s song from the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FsM4Pl7FIs

And here is the fragment from Concerto Grosso No. 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNKWoo9Fe40

83 Megaphone is widely used in Alexander Raskatov’s opera A Dog’s Heart (2010), after Mikhail Bulgakov, again related to the idea of ‘cloning’. Bulgakov’s story deals with an attempt to transform the dog (named Sharik) into a human being (with the new given name Sharikov). Megaphone helps to create a typical ‘proletarian’ intonation by transforming a human voice into inhuman noise.

84 In October 2009 Leonid Desiatnikov was appointed the music director of the Bolshoi Theatre. He resigned on 2 August 2010.

85 Interestingly, Sorokin’s latest novel, Metel‘ [The Blizzard] of 2010, which the writer himself calls Winterreise after Schubert, is written in the style of a classical Russian novel, with many quotes from Pushkin, Blok and other Russian writers inspired by blizzards. Sorokin uses ‘clones’ of classical language and images, stating, however, that ‘he is not a writer-realist’ and that he ‘always writes about something which doesn't exist.’ See ‘Obniat’ Metel’[Embracing the Blizzard], interview, Izvestia, April, 2, 2010.

86 Vladimir Yankilevsky, Anatomy of Feelings (London, 2009), 81–82.

87 Boleslav Yavorsky, Vospominaniya, stat’i i pis’ma [Memoirs, articles and letters], Second edition, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1972), 425.

88 An excellent concert complex has been built in, surprisingly, Khanty-Mansiisk in Siberia, a distant city with only 76,000 inhabitants. Its cultural centre, called Iurga-Classic, is one of the best halls worldwide; in 2010 they planned to start a 240 metre high skyscraper designed by Norman Foster. This project has now been delayed because of the lack of funds.

89 For more on ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ forms, see: Ivanka Stoianova, ‘Dallapicola-Berio: Estetika i Dramaturgiia v operakh ‘Uliss’ i ‘Utis’’ [Dallapicola-Berio: Aesthetics and Dramaturgy in the operas ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Utis’], in Festschrift Valentine Nikolaevne Kholopovoi, ed. O.V. Komarnitskaya (Moscow, 2007), 112–113. A more ‘classical’ account can be found in: Edison Denisov, ‘Stabil'nye i mobil'nye elementy muzykal'noi formy i ikh vzaimodeistvie’ [Stable and Mobile elements of musical form and their interralation], in Teoreticheskie Problemy Muzykal'nykh Form i Zhanrov, ed. A. Sokhor and Iu. Kholopov (Moscow, 1971), 95–133.

90 See: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Kak nam ob’ustroit’ Rossiiu [ How shall we manage Russia] (Moscow, 1990). http://solzhenicyn.ru/modules/myarticles/article_storyid_313.html

Accessed 3.05.10

91 Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London and New York, 1999), 183.

92 Paradoxically, this is exactly what happened to the archival documents and minutes of the Soviet Composers’ Union meetings from 1966 to the 1990s. When I tried to find them in Moscow, I was told they were literally immured in the former office of the Soviet Composers’ publishing house in Sadovaia-Triumphal’naia street (which no longer belongs to the Composers’ Union), before the building was officially given to a new tenant. The Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI), where all similar documents are normally forwarded, do not possess them. After some investigation I was informed the documents were buried between two concrete walls, so nobody can refer to them without bringing a powerful drill. This was an effective and easy solution, very much in the style of Joseph Stalin’s famous aphorism: ‘No man, no problem’. So, no documents, no problem. None of Tikhon Khrennikov’s comments from 1966 to the 1990s can be documented anymore. It’s as if they had never been made.