Through the Iron Curtain, Darkly: Smuggling the Western Avant-Garde to Soviet Musicology

Contrary to the hitherto accepted view of Soviet musicology as operating in isolation from Western music and scholarship, European and American writings on music were constantly being smuggled through the Iron Curtain. One such conduit was a book entitled "On Music, Alive and Dead" published during the Khrushchev Thaw in 1960. Its author, musicologist Grigory Shneyerson, was a member of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, and was conversant with the latest Western repertory and the discourse around it. An overview of “new music from capitalist countries,” the book praised composers working in a “living,” tonal idiom (De Falla, Milhaud, Janáček) while disparaging the “dead” avant-garde (Stockhausen, Boulez, Cage) as well as Darmstadt’s elitism, formalism, and autonomy. And yet, several generations of Soviet composers availed themselves of the book’s information about the avant-garde: copious factual detail, translations from English, German, and French, and musical examples.
Like the latest monographs by Pauline Fairclough and Marina Frolova-Walker, my
paper adopts an approach grounded in a thick description of Soviet social practices. My argument is twofold. First, I argue that the subversive writing style typified by Shneyerson’s book—couching otherwise frowned-upon information in politically acceptable terms—belonged to the rich repertoire of strategies for circumventing ideological control in Soviet musicology. Second, this strategy had unintended consequences for the development of the discipline in Russia. This writing style fostered the perception that music history was the domain of the “extra-musical” (which could be compromised by political cooptation), and therefore was inferior to the more autonomous enterprise of music theory, as the theorist Yuri Kholopov argued in a major methodological quarrel of the 1970s. This writing style also inculcated the skill of reading between the lines—foraging for “objective” facts, discarding the “extra-musical” ideology—that survived into the post-Soviet period, thereby shaping the idea of what counts as valid knowledge today. Thus, I demonstrate that the current skepticism many Russian musicologists profess towards the study of cultural politics in Western academia is one of the symptoms of the post-Soviet allergy to the decades-long requirement to interpret the aesthetic in political terms.