Marina Frolova-Walker
To cite this article: Marina Frolova-Walker (2018) An Inclusive History for a Divided World?,
Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 143:1, 1-20, DOI: 10.1080/02690403.2018.1434308
Article views: 55
The course of thought I pursue here began with a hunch: namely that the Wikipedia
entry on ‘20th-Century Music’ would fail to mention Shostakovich. I checked,
and my suspicions were confirmed.1 Shostakovich, certainly among the handful of
twentieth-century composers whose music is standard concert repertoire, and possibly
the best known of all in wider cultural discourse, simply doesn’t feature in this article.
But this was not merely a wild guess of mine, and the lacuna in the Wikipedia entry
was not a random oversight. The category ‘twentieth-century music’ has, after all,
become entrenched as an ideological label even though it has the superficial form
of a simple chronological term. The writers of encyclopedia articles or textbooks on
‘twentieth-century music’ offer us their narratives of ‘modernism’ in music, but since
Shostakovich has been excluded from such narratives, the mere accident of a lifespan
falling within the twentieth century cannot help him. And if even the world-famous
Shostakovich is an outsider, what hope is there for all the other music of ‘socialist
realism’?
Now it is true that Shostakovich has received his share of musicological attention
elsewhere: in his homeland, every note of his music and every day of his life are
examined with endless care, while in the West, his life’s story provoked what was
probably the most exciting debate musicology has ever seen.2 But precisely because of
this, he remains in a historical and methodological ghetto, trapped within narratives
of oppression and resistance, collaboration and victimhood.3 He is ruled out of the
modernist narrative of technical progress, despite the fact that in his earlier years he
was aggressively modernist, whether in his hectic First Piano Sonata, the Third and
Email: mfw263@googlemail.com
This text is based on the speech I gave as the Dent Medal address during the September 2016 conference
of the Royal Musical Association in London. I have added several references and asides in preparing it
for publication, but it has otherwise been left with only minimal alterations; it therefore retains all the
rhetorical idiosyncrasies and limitations of its original genre.
1 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th-century_music> (accessed 8 December 2016).
2 The so-called ‘Shostakovich Wars’ stemmed from the debate around the authenticity of Shostakovich’s
purported memoir, Solomon Volkov, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, trans. Antonina
W. Bouis (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979).
3 There is, of course, literature that presents a more balanced view: scholars like Laurel Fay and Leonid
Maximenkov have presented evidence of Shostakovich’s privileged position within Soviet society.
However, this has had little effect on musicologists outside Russian music studies, and has left music
journalism virtually untouched.
Fourth Symphonies or his absurdist ‘anti-opera’ The Nose; the impenetrably dense
textures in the opening minutes of his Second Symphony (1927) remained without
rival until the 1960s. Similarly, the recent surge of interest in Prokofiev is welcome
in itself, but also locates him as a victim of oppression, still more helpless than
Shostakovich.4
With regard to the Wikipedia entry, some sceptical readers might still suspect that
the absence of Shostakovich is just an aberration of the rather informal collective-
authorship approach of that internet resource. Let us then survey the printed
textbooks that form the backbone of twentieth-century music courses. Here we find
the same behaviour. Robert Morgan’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century Music doesn’t
include a single example from Prokofiev or Shostakovich.5 Eric Salzman’s Twentieth-
Century Music: An Introduction devotes three perfunctory pages to them (out of a
total of 250 pages); the lack of interest in Soviet music results in careless errors such
as the suppositions that Edison Denisov was a ‘Kiev composer’, Arvo Pärt a ‘Latvian
composer’.6 This amounts to contempt: imagine such a book telling us of ‘the Berlin
composer Schoenberg’ or of ‘Bartók, the leading light of Czech music’.
Admittedly, these are both older books, although they have been printed many
times without any improvement or correction in these areas. Surely we can expect
some sort of corrective in a recent ‘twentieth-century music’ textbook. And so we turn
to Elliott Antokoletz’s A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic-Analytical
Context, published in 2013.7 But this palms us off with much the same old story:
the book devotes its first three chapters to Schoenberg alone, while Prokofiev and
Shostakovich jointly have to wait until Chapter 13, entitled ‘The Music of Soviet
Composers and Socialist Realism’; tellingly, Antokoletz abandons his ‘theoretic-
analytical’ approach here, and instead offers us a rather rudimentary account of the
Soviet political context. Like his predecessors, he shows no interest in Shostakovich’s
and Prokofiev’s modernism: instead, every Russian composer is discussed as a bearer of
‘national traits’ – even Scriabin is submitted to this approach. By Antokoletz’s standards,
Shostakovich and Prokofiev are doubly excluded from the musical mainstream: first,
they supposedly failed to rise to the modernist challenge, and secondly, they are in
any case only fancy-dress composers of the distant East. Similarly, all post-war eastern
European composers are lumped together in a chapter entitled ‘Synthesis of National
Characteristics’.
This ghettoization has even influenced writers like Alex Ross, whose widely
acclaimed book The Rest Is Noise set out to challenge precisely this modernism-led
4 Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
5 Anthology of Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Robert Morgan, The Norton Introduction to Music History
(New York and London: Norton, 1992).
6 Eric Salzman, Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction, Prentice-Hall History of Music Series, 4th
8 Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2007).
9 In fact, the use of the word ‘ghetto’ for historiographical exclusion is very much associated with
Taruskin (‘P. I. Chaikovsky and the Ghetto’ is a chapter title in his Defining Russia Musically: Historical
and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)), and I am using it here
in the same vein.
10 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), iv: The Early Twentieth Century, and v: The Late Twentieth Century.
11 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta,
2000).
12 Ian Wellens, Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle against Communism and Middlebrow
cold-war divide was concerned.13 In his reply to Rosen, Taruskin drew a wickedly
provocative parallel between Elliott Carter and Tikhon Khrennikov:
Carter was as emblematic a figure on the one side of the Cold War divide as was, say, Tikhon
Nikolayevich Khrennikov on the other. Both were well trained and highly competent makers;
both produced works that defined a standard of orthodoxy – of exemplary values given a
model realization – within their respective milieux; both were beneficiaries of organized
prestige machines; both were insulated from negative critique; both were rewarded with
every prize and perquisite of rank within the power of their respective milieux to bestow;
and both enjoyed major careers and achieved true historical significance (and in Carter’s
case, as he approached his hundredth birthday, genuine if relatively minor media celebrity)
without having any real audience for their work. That is one of the things that the Cold War
made possible. Any account of such careers that does not emphasize the role of propaganda
in their maintenance is an example of that propaganda.14
We could make one small correction to this comparison, because Khrennikov’s light
music, such as his popular songs and operettas, actually did enjoy a large audience,
which is only somewhat reduced in present-day Russia. Taruskin is no doubt aware
of this, but preferred not to blunt his rhetorical purpose in what was not, after all,
a scholarly article. Still, if we restrict the comparison to Khrennikov’s more earnest
works, the parallel does indeed hold.
Taruskin successfully put the post-war avant-garde in its proper social and political
context, but in the spirit of his project I suggest that we now take a further step
and bring Prokofiev and Shostakovich into the new and much enriched mainstream
historical narrative. Taruskin praises The Love for Three Oranges for breaking down the
fourth wall and drawing its alienating devices from the eighteenth century, declaring
that it thus becomes ‘an indispensable link in the history of twentieth-century opera’.15
But ‘in the final analysis, The Love for Three Oranges came by its irony the old-fashioned
way’, its music is ‘ingratiating’ and it makes an ‘unpretentious impression’.16 I think
reception history perhaps allows us to go further than this, since the first audiences
found the opera outrageously nonsensical, and in general there is still room for debate
over the importance of Prokofiev in the emergence of modernist neoclassicism, even
if Stravinsky remains pre-eminent here. Taruskin’s Shostakovich is still placed in a
chapter entitled ‘Music and Totalitarian Society’. I suggest we take the next step by, for
example, discussing how Lady Macbeth was given wide international exposure, leaving
its mark on the development of twentieth-century opera (on Britten, for example).
13 Charles Rosen, ‘From Troubadours to Frank Sinatra’, New York Review of Books, 53/3–4 (23 February
and 9 March 2006), <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/02/23/from-the-troubadours-to-
frank-sinatra> and <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/03/09/from-the-troubadours-to-sinatra-
part-ii> (accessed 1 August 2006).
14 Richard Taruskin, ‘Afterword: Nicht blutbefleckt?’, Journal of Musicology, 26 (2009), 274–84.
15 Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, iv, 499.
16 Ibid., 505.
AN INCLUSIVE HISTORY FOR A DIVIDED WORLD? 5
We could also explore the opera’s grotesque and dehumanizing element not only in
relation to its Stalinist context, but also in relation to Western modernist aesthetics,
as eloquently theorized by José Ortega y Gasset.
Taruskin’s model has engendered a whole trend of musicological cold-war studies,17
but unsurprisingly, this trend has largely been focused on the new positioning of US
music, while there are scant signs as yet of any reciprocal change in approaches to
socialist realism. But even if the cold-war angle has not so far transformed the study
of socialist realist music, we can confidently say that it has opened the way for future
studies that would have seemed illegitimate under the standard modernist narrative.
Returning to Taruskin’s critics, we shall now take an example that stands at the
opposite end of the spectrum from Rosen, namely, J. P. E. Harper-Scott, whose leftist
scholarship revolves around two relatively conservative English composers, Elgar
and Walton.18 Taruskin’s cold-war axis is an unwelcome development for Harper-
Scott because it seems to bypass Western Europe (or to present it merely as a US
colony), and it therefore sheds no new light on his own field. Harper-Scott sees fit
to devote about a fifth of his book to a polemical treatment of Taruskin’s alleged
ideological shortcomings, but for present purposes we will pass on to his own attempt
to reconceive modernism. His desire to ‘expand’ the concept, already evident in his
earlier study of Elgar, reaches its apogee in his book on Walton, where he presents
a ‘modernism without shores’, as he calls it: ‘The definition of modernism must
encompass all music of the twentieth century, and not just a privileged group of
works by a group of nominated composers’; ‘The idea of modernism is not a single
entity but a set of constructions of wildly differing ideologies.’19 Despite his recourse
to some heavy theoretical apparatus, Harper-Scott’s central idea can be expressed in
straightforward terms: he argues that the central event of modernism, the ‘emancipation
of dissonance’, affected every composer of the twentieth century, no matter whether
that composer defined himself as a modernist, or only assimilated some elements
of modernism, or even reacted against it. Harper-Scott thus places composers on a
modernist spectrum from ‘faithful’ to ‘reactive’; his hero, Walton, for example, passes
from youthful ‘faithfulness’ to a ‘reactive’ maturity. This double-sided modernism can
encompass even a composer like Rachmaninov, in spite of the fact that his style was
much the same either side of the modernist watershed: even if the difference cannot be
picked out from the details of the score, the later music should be seen in the context
of new anxieties and internal struggles. Subtle stylistic modernizations performed
by fundamentally ‘conservative’ composers are significant, and even when they are
17 Music in the Cold War, ed. Peter J. Schmelz and Elizabeth Bergman, special issue, Journal of Musicology,
26 (2009).
18 J. P. E. Harper-Scott, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William
Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, The
Modernist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
19 Harper-Scott, The Quilting Points, xiv, xii.
6 MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER
The book aims to (re)insert totalitarian art in a theoretical space in which it can be analysed
together with the artistic movements surrounding it in the less totalitarian states – the
historical avant-gardes, classical modernism, and the more conservative neo-classical art
forms.24
This quotation already points to one of the approaches in the collection: it is that
phrase ‘the less totalitarian states’ which might strike you as rather novel. Indeed, one
of the key essays in the volume is Rasmussen’s own, ‘Approaching Totalitarianism
and Totalitarian Art’, which attempts to dismantle the cold-war opposition of
totalitarian states and the ‘free world’. The word ‘totalitarian’ has a long history.
Not only was it used for critical purposes, but it could be endorsed as a positive
system (as it was by Mussolini). However, as Rasmussen points out, in the wake
of the Second World War the word came to be used exclusively to condemn the
Nazi and Soviet systems in one breath, as if they were self-evidently evil twins. This
meaning of the word was sharply political and served as a bogeyman to scare off
any kind of opposition to liberal democracy, or indeed today’s neoliberalism. Slavoj
Žižek formulated this idea vividly:
Throughout its entire career, ‘totalitarianism’ was an ideological notion that sustained the
complex operation of […] guaranteeing the liberal-democratic hegemony, dismissing the
Leftist critique as the obverse, the ‘twin’, of the Rightist Fascist dictatorship. […] The
moment one accepts the notion of ‘totalitarianism’, one is firmly located within the
20 Before Harper-Scott, several others had examined more conservative musical styles within a modernist
framework, such as James Hepokoski (on Sibelius) and Daniel Grimley (on Nielsen), but none was
so radical.
21 Totalitarian Art and Modernity, ed. Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jacob Wamberg (Aarhus: Aarhus
University Press, 2010).
22 Art since 1900: Modernism, Anti-Modernism, and Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss
(London: Thames & Hudson, 2004). Totalitarian Art and Modernity, ed. Rasmussen and Wamberg, 7.
23 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press,
1961), 3–21.
24 Totalitarian Art and Modernity, ed. Rasmussen and Wamberg, 9.
AN INCLUSIVE HISTORY FOR A DIVIDED WORLD? 7
liberal-democratic horizon. […] The notion of ‘totalitarianism’, far from being an effective
theoretical concept, is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire
a new insight into the historical reality it describes, it relieves us of the duty to think, or
even actively prevents us from thinking. Today, reference to the ‘totalitarian’ threat sustains
a kind of unwritten Denkverbot. […] The moment one shows the slightest inclination to
engage in political projects that aim seriously to challenge the existing order, the answer is
immediately: ‘Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!’25
Western scholars have had difficulty approaching music from the East Bloc because the
aesthetic principles upon which much of this music is founded differ so strikingly from
our own, and they imply a scale of values many Westerners have learned to regard as
undesirable. This prejudice is also part of the historical picture, for it was formed largely
through reaction against the norms cultivated by governments in the East. By coming
to terms with the aesthetic principles that reigned in Eastern Europe, we may also gain
insight into the potent political forces that shaped our own musical values during the
cold war.28
Now let us look for signs of inclusive history from the other side, from post-Soviet
Russia. The majority of music educational institutions there still teach Russian music
history in courses sealed off from what they call ‘the history of foreign music’, a term
whose cold-war roots have been brilliantly exposed by Olga Manulkina in one of her
25 Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions on the (Mis)Use of a Notion (New
York and London: Verso Books, 2011).
26 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
27 Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, ‘Approaching Totalitarianism and Totalitarian Art’, Totalitarian Art and
Modernity, ed. Rasmussen and Wamberg, 109–29 (p. 112).
28 Danielle Fossler-Lussier, Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture (Berkeley, CA, and
London: University of California Press, 2007), xii.
8 MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER
recent essays.29 I have found only one institution, the Jewish Academy in Moscow,
where the history of music is taught in a single stream. This practice of separating
national music into a self-standing narrative is also prevalent in the countries of eastern
Europe, even those which were never part of the Eastern bloc, such as the successor
countries of the former Yugoslavia. It is so ingrained that colleagues over there could
not believe that we in Cambridge do not teach an obligatory course on English or
British music. (How come? Don’t you have to learn about your own first?)30 I thought
it best not to mention that students could spend their three years at Cambridge with
barely a note of English music to be heard.
This unquestioned teaching habit removes any pressing need to consider Russian
music in the world context, and so I have not been able to find anything useful
produced by Russian musicologists with the exception of one ambitious volume from
1997 entitled Russian Music and the Twentieth Century.31 This book is, in a sense,
limited by its own title and the use of the conjunction ‘and’, which indicates that
Russian music is still seen as being separate, somehow isolated from a ‘twentieth
century’ that was happening elsewhere. The book did not set out to provide an
integrated history of twentieth-century art music, but shouldered the more modest
burden of reuniting the two severed parts of Russian music, that of ‘Soviet’ Russia and
that of the émigrés. It was perhaps the first academic attempt to redefine Stravinsky
as a Russian, since he had featured only in the foreign-music courses since the 1960s
(and not at all in the previous three decades). By 2014, at the opening ceremony of
the Olympic Games at Sochi, Stravinsky’s complete acceptance in Russia was evident,
since the musical self-portrait Russia presented to the world included both The Firebird
and The Rite of Spring. Even so, absorbing Stravinsky into Russian music is one thing,
while assimilating Soviet Russian music into an international twentieth-century
narrative is quite another.
Although post-Soviet Russian musicology has failed to assemble such a narrative,
the feat has been successfully carried out in the historiography of architecture. The
crucial work here is Andrey Ikonnikov’s magisterial two-volume history, entitled
Twentieth-Century Architecture: Utopias and Reality.32 I would like now to look at this
work in some detail, since it would seem to offer a viable model for music historians.
29 Olga Manulkina, ‘“Foreign” Versus “Russian” in Soviet and Post-Soviet Musicology and Music
Education’, Russian Music after 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery, ed. Patrick Zuk and Marina Frolova-
Walker, Proceedings of the British Academy, 209 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 221–43.
30 For example, an investigation of how a ‘national music history’ was formed and entrenched in
Hungarian musicology during the times of state socialism can be found in Lóránt Péteri, ‘The
“Question of Nationalism” in Hungarian Musicology during the State Socialist Period’, Nationality vs
Universality: Music Historiographies in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Sławomira Żeranska-Kominek
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 125–44.
31 Russkaya muzïka i XX vek, ed. Mark Aranovskiy (Moscow: Gosudarstvennïy Institut Iskusstvoznaniya,
1997).
32 Andrey Ikonnikov, Arkhitektura XX veka: Utopii i real’nost’ (Moscow: Progress–Traditsiya, 2001).
AN INCLUSIVE HISTORY FOR A DIVIDED WORLD? 9
In the first stratum, which corresponds to the preferences of the cultural elite, new ideas
emerge and are tested, and an active attitude to life is channelled into a heuristic quest;
in this stratum we find an interaction [between architecture] and art with, above all, the
artistic avant-garde. The second stratum responds to the mass consumer who has mastered
basic cultural skills; it is based on professionally assimilated, established norms and values.
This stratum is nourished by the ideas which have been worked out in the first: risks are not
taken here, but tried and tested [elements] are combined. Tradition, which assimilates tested
innovations, ensures a stable level of professionalism. In the first stratum, activity is directed
towards the individual, the unusual, and sometimes the shocking, but in the second, activity
is directed towards […] the working-out of recognizable types and the perfecting of models.
The development of architecture is based on the interaction of these [two] strata.
The third, populist stratum is orientated towards those who have not yet assimilated
established cultural norms or the notions of good taste connected to these [we can take
the author’s point here without necessarily sharing his elitism – MFW]. When working
in this stratum, architects provide the sets for a game in which they are not participants.
They serve clients whose values they do not share, but they are obliged to fulfil these
clients’ demands.33
When applying this scheme to music during the heyday of socialist realism, roughly
between 1936 and 1956, we see that the top stratum was not available to Soviet
composers. This is, of course, a very important consideration which should never be
ignored: just as the modernist watershed demanded a reaction, positive or negative,
from all composers, so the later Soviet rejection of modernism in the 1930s demanded
a reaction from every Soviet composer. But we should not imagine that this local
Soviet event somehow reversed or eradicated the memory of modernism – it did not
do so at all; but it did manage to impose certain bounds.
The most promising of Ikonnikov’s strata, for our purposes, is surely the second, in
which work was nourished by ideas that had been worked out within elite modernism
but then defused and combined with traditional features, the resulting synthesis
executed with a high level of professionalism. This is where I would place the best of
Soviet music from that 20-year span – the symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and
Myaskovsky, for example, or the concertos of Khachaturian and Kabalevsky. It would
perhaps be going a little too far to say that all such music responded to the needs of
the mass consumer who had mastered basic cultural skills, but this is an adjustment
particular to art music, which generally commands a smaller audience than most of
the other arts (and certainly when compared with architecture, which can hardly be
avoided). But it would be true to say that this music was enjoyed and appreciated at
the very least by the Soviet intelligentsia, even though some of it was difficult listening.
Works like Shostakovich’s symphonies were challenging and strained listeners’ minds,
much as elite modernism did in the West. The third stratum, if we are still to keep
within the bounds of so-called serious music, would be pieces written to commission,
to fulfil the demands of clients that do not particularly coincide with the composer’s
wishes. Here we could place Prokofiev’s Songs of Our Days, op. 76, Shostakovich’s
Dolmatovsky Romances, op. 98, his film scores and perhaps even his oratorio Song of
the Forests.
If we look at Western music, we will see that these strata are equally apparent.
Elite modernism needs patronage if it is to spread beyond the narrowest circles of
devotees. Where such patronage is absent, as was the case in Britain, for example, we
find almost no trace of elite modernism.34 (Modernism took an equally long time to
win support in British architecture.) Walton switched from the top stratum to the
middle as a matter of survival once his connection with the wealthy Sitwell family
was broken.35 One can even say that Stravinsky’s pioneering experimentation with
styles ended with Diaghilev’s death. Generally, public taste became king again after
the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and the whole of elite modernism suffered a decline.
Neoclassicism itself, although it has long since been accepted into the fold of the
modernist narrative, proved to be a handy compromise with public taste and thus
quickly entered the middle stratum. The third stratum also exists, of course, for serious
34 The promotion of the most radical modernism by the BBC, as outlined by Jennifer Doctor, met
with great resistance from the public and most critics, and did not translate into commissioning
British composers’ works in this vein. See Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a discussion of a more conservative turn in
literature and the fine arts, see Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the
Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010).
35 Harper-Scott, The Quilting Points, 155.
AN INCLUSIVE HISTORY FOR A DIVIDED WORLD? 11
Western composers, mainly in the shape of film scores. And as for the flow of ideas
from top to bottom, we may recall the fashion for atonal scores in film and even
television from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.
I would be very interested to read a history of the twentieth-century middle stratum.
The related notion of the middlebrow was, of course, coined as a derogatory term,
notably by Greenberg, and then applied to music by Adorno:
[Middlebrow] culture presents a more serious threat to the genuine article than the old-time
pulp, dime-novel […]. Unlike the latter, which has its social limits clearly marked out for it,
middlebrow culture attacks distinctions as such and insinuates itself everywhere.36
This characterizes a musical type who, with undaunted pretensions to modernity and
seriousness, conforms with calculated idiocy to mass culture.37
36 Clement Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing’ (1948), quoted in Christopher Chowrimootoo,
‘Reviving the Middlebrow, or: Deconstructing Modernism from the Inside’, ‘Round Table: Modernism
and its Others’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 139 (2014), 187–93 (p. 187).
37 Theodor Adorno on Shostakovich and Britten, in Adorno, The Philosophy of New Music, trans. and
ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 9.
38 Chowrimootoo, ‘Reviving the Middlebrow’.
39 There are several prior treatments of a similar nature by Svetlana Boym, Katerina Clark, Evgeny
Dobrenko and Vera Dunham, among others, that cover arts other than music.
12 MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER
message with the prospect of an unforced pleasure. And ideally a study like this could
spread westwards, to Europe and the rest of the Western world, because ‘middlebrow
tastes’ around the world are often remarkably similar, as some postmodern artists
have demonstrated.40 This would be a history which not only nods to public
taste, but would be genuinely founded on statistics of popularity, on repertoire-
worthiness, rather than on the works that influenced other composers and impressed
musicologists.
To add my own 50 kopecks to the project of ‘inclusive history’, I shall outline two
potential approaches that would allow us to find new ways of talking about Prokofiev
and Shostakovich, and to find new and illuminating contexts for their music. On
the couple of occasions when I presented this material to a live audience, I played a
little trick at this point: I promised to play them a Shostakovich quartet, which I did
eventually; but first, unannounced, I played the opening movement of Hindemith’s
String Quartet op. 32. Some recognized the switch, but most were happy to accept this
as genuine Shostakovich. The mistake is by no means stupid: the music does indeed
sound very much like a Shostakovich quartet from the composer’s middle period,
even though it was written by Hindemith in 1923. I am not interested here in making
the simple point that Hindemith’s chamber music was an important ingredient of
Shostakovich’s style. What interests me is that in spite of the many striking similarities,
quartets like Hindemith’s op. 32 and Shostakovich’s Eighth seem to be confined to
non-overlapping magisteria within musicological discourse, such that a comparison
of the two works simply cannot arise. With Shostakovich, we are told, it is all about
the hidden programme, the guilt and shame over his failure to stand up to oppression,
the contemplation of suicide. It is all about the tortured artistic soul in its struggle
with the state, and the music is perceived as ardent, desperate, even hysterical. With
Hindemith, all we are told is that he wrote it very quickly and on the train, and we
presume that because it was written for the Amar Quartet it should be classified as
Gebrauchsmusik. All the musicological discussion of the work that I have been able
to find deals solely with matters of form, and in particular with its new engagement
with counterpoint.41
So there is a choice: in the blue corner, a tortured soul; in the red corner, some
interesting formal features. Obviously enough, the listening public clamours for the
tortured soul, so Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 8 is considered such a significant
cultural document that it must be studied by British schoolchildren, while Hindemith’s
op. 32 is perched on the brink of internet oblivion, with only a couple of recordings
on YouTube and no more than (at the time of writing) 3,000 hits. And yet, after all
40 I am referring here to Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid’s web project ‘The Most Wanted Paintings’. See
<http://www.diaart.org/program/exhibitions-projects/komar-melamid-the-most-wanted-paintings-
web-project> (accessed 9 December 2016).
41 See, for example, Michael Kube, Hindemiths frühe Streichquartette (1915–23): Studien zu Form, Faktur
und Harmonik (Kassel and London: Bärenreiter, 1997).
AN INCLUSIVE HISTORY FOR A DIVIDED WORLD? 13
that, audiences familiar with Shostakovich are still likely to hear the Hindemith as
Shostakovich, even though science has confirmed that there is no tortured soul in
the Hindemith. Although it is both amusing and instructive to see how biographical
hype can determine the perceived value of a piece in the most extreme manner, the
comparison may also be used to help readers see something that should be obvious but
which our musicological categories have obscured so thoroughly: that Shostakovich
is one of the major neoclassical composers of the twentieth century, sitting alongside
Stravinsky, Hindemith and Les Six. Shostakovich’s default musical materials were
neoclassical, revealing themselves even in the midst of his most expressionist works,
like the Fourth Symphony. He fills these materials with new meanings, and it is
worth tracing the neoclassical impulse throughout his long career, up to the almost
postmodern polystylism of his Fifteenth Symphony.
My second example comes from my recent research on Prokofiev’s French period,
which is usually overshadowed by what happened next in his biography, that is, by his
return to the Soviet Union. The traditions of Russian historiography obviously treat
this as some kind of transitional, marginal period, and in Stalin-period writings it was
an outright embarrassment. But Western scholars of the French musical scene also
tend either to expunge Prokofiev from the record or (if they acknowledge his presence)
to treat his work with indifference. I am glad that Jane Fulcher mentioned Prokofiev
twice in her book The Composer as Intellectual, but out of three dates she gives for
important premières, two are incorrect.42 I ask you to ponder this: here we have a
composer whose premières were regularly attended by Ravel, Stravinsky, Poulenc,
Milhaud, Roussel and the rest of the Paris musical beau monde; who routinely
received admiring reviews from French composers and critics in the press; and who
spent a decade working in Paris. Is it really credible that such a composer would leave
no trace worth mentioning in a history of twentieth-century French music, or indeed
in a history of twentieth-century Western music?43 Yet he is usually not even a token
presence in monographs on French composers, with the exception of a recent volume
on Poulenc by Hervé Lacombe, who traces Poulenc’s fascination with Prokofiev back
to 1917, when Prokofiev was still unknown outside Russia but the scores of explosive
42 Jane Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914 –1940 (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The ballet Chout was premièred in 1921, not in 1923, and
the ballet Le pas d’acier in 1927, not in 1928. See ibid., 95.
43 One notable exception is William W. Austin, Music in the 20th Century from Debussy through Stravinsky
(London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1966). For Austin, Prokofiev is one of the seven major composers
of the century, together with Bartók, Debussy, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Webern.
Austin noted that Prokofiev’s reputation rose in the decade after his death, and assembled several of
Prokofiev’s Western ‘friends’ (Bloch, Honegger, Milhaud, Szymanowski, Vaughan Williams, Villa-
Lobos and others) for a wider discussion in the Prokofiev-headed chapter. In contrast, Shostakovich’s
presence in the book is entirely marginal, reflecting Western audiences’ relative indifference to him
prior to the publication of Testimony.
14 MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER
piano pieces such as the Sarcasms, op. 17, and the Suggestion diabolique, op. 4, reached
Poulenc via Ricardo Viñes.44
There is a story to be told about the attraction of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto,
played in his unsentimental percussive style. As a successful commercial enterprise,
this prompted Stravinsky to write and perform his own, while its topics and textures
influenced Roussel’s Piano Concerto and Ravel’s G major Concerto.45 Prokofiev’s
Third Concerto in particular proved to be a moment of revelation for Poulenc, moving
him to extol the virtues of a C major triad over the plague of atonality.46 Outside
France, Britten’s Piano Concerto and Rawsthorne’s First Piano Concerto are deserving
of mention, as are, of course, many works by Kabalevsky, Shostakovich and other
Soviet composers who were strongly influenced by Prokofiev.
Out of this accumulation of such microhistories which cut across established
narratives, I see an inclusive history emerging– more likely to assemble itself in
piecemeal fashion than in a weighty compendium by a single scholar. Yet my worry is
that these efforts may prove to be at odds with their times. In conclusion, I am going
to touch upon a complex and painful issue, particularly difficult to discuss because
we have as yet no historical perspective from which to view it in a detached way. I
am talking about what has been named ‘the new cold war’ or ‘cold war II’. We have
recently seen the swift deterioration of relations between Russia and the West, and
we can now add to this the emerging divisions within Europe, prompted both by
the banks and by the refugee crisis. How does this new situation affect what we do,
including the cluster of issues I have discussed earlier?
Writings on Soviet music have never been free of politics. Take the attitudes of
Nicholas Nabokov, which were hostile before and after the Second World War,
but significantly softened during the war – all in pace with the changes in official
propaganda. The great progress of Soviet music studies in the past 25 years was mainly
due to the removal of ideological barriers, the opening of the archives and active
exchange and collaboration between post-Soviet and Western scholars. The financial
crisis of 2008, which severely shook general faith in capitalism, revived interest both
in Karl Marx and in communist alternatives; this is invoked by Harper-Scott in his
preface to justify his proposal for a ‘communist musicology’.47 More recent events,
however, have had the reverse effect: Russia is presented in the West as sliding ‘back
into the USSR’, and the military muscle-flexing between NATO and Russia reminds
us of the dangerous times when both sides trained children how to hide from a nuclear
attack. For me, at least, the experience of researching aspects of the Soviet Union differs
48 The advertisement was shown on CNN in 2015 and early 2016. See <http://theduran.com/watch-
tv-commercial-based-russia-shooting-nato-plane-video> (accessed 9 December 2016).
49 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/07/penguin-accused-of-misusing-ivan-turgenev-in-
anti-russian-ad-campaign> (accessed 9 December 2016).
16 MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER
either.’50 A number of oppositions should give us a rough guide to how these two
countries differ:
Thus, Russia is not the USSR and viewing it through the distorting lens of history is
wrong. Even in Chatham House, at the very centre of the British political establishment,
the researcher Andrew Monaghan suggests that this is a dangerous error:
This narrative, though seductive, is misleading. It too often frames the discussion in a
repetitive and simplistic polemic that inhibits understanding of Russia and its relationship
with the West. This makes it harder for the West to craft realistic policies with respect both
to the Ukraine crisis and Russia generally.
The ‘new Cold War’ debate traps Western thinking about Russia in the 20th century.
It reflects, and encourages, a dangerous tendency on the part of politicians and military
strategists to prepare for past wars. It also offers a misleading sense of familiarity and
predictability about Russia that does not take into account either the different international
situation today or Russian adaptability to changing geopolitics.51
And indeed, we see in the Western media today the prevalence of clichés and
stereotypes about Russia, coupled with a profound lack of interest in the Ukraine
crisis – the scant reporting has been devoid of any deep analysis or coherence. We
see also a certain Denkverbot, where particular shades of debate become taboo and
anyone who deviates from the standard description of Russia as ‘the evil empire’
becomes a ‘Russia apologist’ or ‘Putin’s useful idiot’ (astonishingly, such labels have
been attached to figures as politically distant from each other as Boris Johnson and
Jeremy Corbyn).52 Russia has been blamed for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump
50 Alexander Etkind, ‘Post-Soviet Russia: The Land of the Oil Curse, Pussy Riot, and Magical
Historicism’, Boundary 2, 41/1 (spring 2014), 153–70 (p. 157).
51 Andrew Monaghan, ‘A “New Cold War”? Abusing History, Misunderstanding Russia’ (2015),
<https://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/new-cold-war-abusing-history-misunderstanding-
russia> (accessed 9 December 2016).
52 See, for example, <http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/jeremy-corbyn-putins-latest-useful-idiot-europe-1515028>
and <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-boris-johnson-accused-of-
being-an-apologist-for-putin-a7021296.html> (both accessed 9 December 2016).
AN INCLUSIVE HISTORY FOR A DIVIDED WORLD? 17
to the US presidency, and for almost any cyber attack, hacking or internet leak.53
It has become a useful bogeyman for any government politician wishing to deflect
blame for internal problems. The Russian media, of course, indulge in anti-Western
propaganda on a daily basis, varying its intensity according to the current level of
geopolitical tension. Cold-war stereotypes have once again taken hold among large
swathes of the population.
How is this relevant to us, as scholars in the humanities? Those who work in
Russian studies have noted that the resurgence of Russia on the world stage, even
when accompanied by negative press, has led to an increase of interest from potential
applicants. There is now a tentative upward trend in numbers, or at least a halt to
the steep decline in the funding of Russian programmes (and interest in them) that
took place during the 1990s.54 Nevertheless, traditional courses that have focused on
language, literature and culture are inappropriate to the needs of students whose main
interests lie in social and political matters. And the perception of Russia as a more
hostile and potentially dangerous country reduces the desirability of a ‘year abroad’
there or, in fact, any kind of fieldwork or language-learning trip.55
Visas have been more difficult to procure on both sides of the divide, especially
since Russia now forbids research access to those arriving on tourist visas. Contacts
between scholars have been detrimentally affected by the economic crisis in Russia:
scholars over there often find it too expensive to travel abroad to conferences or to
hire in scholars from the West. Without such regular personal contacts, which are
the ultimate remedy against stereotypes and dogma, scholars on both sides become
more susceptible to propaganda. My first monograph, Russian Music and Nationalism,56
received a very belated Russian review that was written in an ‘Us versus Them’ mode; if
the review had been written only five years earlier, both the wholesale rejection of the
53 The topic of alleged Russian influence on the US election has now received some scholarly coverage,
as in the special online issue of Slavic Review (1 August 2017); see <http://www.aseees.org/news-
events/aseees-news-feed/special-online-issue-slavic-review-available-free-access> (accessed 8 August
2017). Participants in the forum approach the topic from different political standpoints and with
varying degrees of scepticism towards the scant concrete evidence that has emerged, although no one
denies that ‘something must have gone on’. They issue stark warnings, however, against assuming
a causal link between the hacking and the outcome of the presidential election, as well as against
using inflated rhetoric with regard to Russia. As Julie Hemment writes, ‘We all lose when skepticism
becomes “treason”, and when statements about the desirability of having a good relationship with
Russia become marked as beyond the pale.’ Hemment, ‘Red Scares and Orange Mobilizations: A
Critical Anthropological Perspective on the Russian Hacking Scandal’, Slavic Review, 76 (2017),
66–80 (p. 69).
54 Steve Kolowich, ‘Russia Scholars Hope for an End to their Field’s Bear Market’, Chronicle of Higher
Education (17 February 2017). See also <http://www.sras.org/ccpcr_fall_2009_precollege_and_
college_russian_enrollment_trend_report> (accessed 7 August 2017).
55 I thank Connor Doak and Alexandra Smith for sharing their thoughts with me.
56 Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism from Glinka to Stalin (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2007).
18 MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER
‘Western’ view and the mocking tone would have been most unlikely to occur.57 The
reviewer did not have access to the actual book she was reviewing, but took delight
in calling me a ‘former compatriot’. As time goes on and the relations between Russia
and the West continue to deteriorate, the rhetoric of reviewers hardens further. Here
is one of the more extreme examples, from Alexander Belonenko’s review of Taruskin’s
Oxford History of Western Music. It has to be said that the review, taken as a whole, is
an expansive and attentive reading that is largely complimentary. In closing, however,
Belonenko evidently felt the need for a coup de théâtre, even at the cost of contradicting
some of his earlier points:
Richard Taruskin’s six-volume Oxford History of Western Music and the eponymous textbook,
co-authored with Christopher Gibbs, is of course, pure ideology. Such an expensive, loss-
making edition cannot appear by accident or be born purely out of publishers’ or academic
interest. As a rule, such weighty works are the result of a state commission. Thus, in this
case we are dealing with propaganda literature. The reason for the appearance of Taruskin’s
book, or, more precisely, the commission for it, is clear. It lies in the new historical situation
in which the USA began to feel as if they were the sole masters of the world, the new Rome
after the new Carthage had been destroyed, its culture brought down, after ‘the end of
Soviet music’. The works of Taruskin had to glorify the complete victory of the West, of
Western culture and of the Western value system, and ultimately the victory of globalization
and the proclamation of globalism as the new mainstream of Western elite culture. And of
course, American music now reigns supreme.58
57 Elvira Panayotidi, ‘“Novaya” istoriya russkoy muzïki’, Problemï muzïkal’noy nauki, 1/12 (2013),
164–7. The author assesses the revisionist trend in Western studies of Russian music (as exemplified
by Richard Taruskin, Francis Maes and myself ) as ‘grotesquely’ ideological and tendentious.
58 Alexander Belonenko, ‘Proshloye i budushcheye klassicheskoy muzïki yevropeyskoy traditsii: Zametki
po povodu monografii The Oxford History of Western Music’, Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta,
15/3 (2015), 160–218 (214–15).
59 This story is related in Richard Taruskin, On Russian Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University
of California Press, 2009), 18.
AN INCLUSIVE HISTORY FOR A DIVIDED WORLD? 19
media and offer our own scholarly perspectives and nuanced narratives. And we
have to recognize the need to protect our community of scholars across borders. The
dangers facing the arts and humanities in our neo-liberal world are the same whether
we are in Russia, the UK or the US. I was struck that in the autumn of 2014 there
was a spate of casual humanities-bashing appearing alike on both sides of the new
cold-war divide. In January, Barack Obama casually suggested that an art-history
degree will get you less money than no degree at all.60 In September, the Russian
culture minister Vladimir Medinsky complained that Russia was overwhelmed by
humanities graduates.61 Two months later, Nicky Morgan, then Education Secretary
in the UK, warned that studying arts subjects at school would hamper pupils’ prospects
for life.62 As the Russian government began a ruthless cull of humanities jobs in
its higher-education institutions,63 the Finnish government closed down its world-
famous musicology department at Helsinki University (not for any lack of money),64
while the US continued its policy of casualizing labour in academia, keeping the
60 ‘But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades
than they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree – I love
art history. (Laughter).’ Remarks by the President on Opportunity for All and Skills for America’s
Workers, GE Energy Waukesha Gas Engines Facility, Waukesha, Wisconsin, 30 January 2014,
<https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/30/remarks-president-opportunity-all-and-
skills-americas-workers> (accessed 15 December 2016).
61 ‘We are oversaturated with people from the humanities. In this respect the problems of cultural
institutions of higher education stem from the general malaise in this country’s education system. As
they say: “You got into the Conservatoire, now start planning for your future: rent a [busker’s] spot
in the subway”’; <http://muzobozrenie.ru/postupil-v-konservatoriyu-podumaj-o-zavtrashnem-dne-
arenduj-mesto-v-podzemnom-perehode-v-medinskij> (accessed 5 August 2017).
62 Nicky Morgan, Your Life Campaign Launch in November 2014, London; <https://www.gov.uk/
government/speeches/nicky-morgan-speaks-at-launch-of-your-life-campaign> (accessed 15 December
2016).
63 This wave of redundancies, begun in 2015, was prompted by the president’s demand for state-sector
workers to have their salaries raised to more acceptable levels, but this coincided with the economic
crisis and an overall cut in funding for education (institutions of higher education, for example, had
to manage a 30% cut). To comply with the president’s instructions, educational institutions therefore
have to engage in a process of ‘optimization’ (as it is called), that is, they have to cut staff numbers
and increase teaching loads. At my own alma mater, the Academic Music College of the Moscow
Conservatoire, which provides specialized secondary education for 15- to 19-year-olds, the teachers’
contact time has been increased from 14 to 36 hours per week, leaving no time free for preparing
lessons or marking students’ work. Since doing the job under such conditions borders on physical
impossibility, individuals and institutions are pushed into cheating the system.
64 This move was part of the process of making wider cuts in the arts and humanities budget at Helsinki
University, begun in May 2016. The world-renowned Professor Eero Tarasti retired at this point
and was not replaced, but still greater outrage was caused when two prominent composers, Harri
Suilamo and Harri Vuori, were made redundant. The loss of these three faculty members meant the
end of music-theoretical teaching at the university, leaving music to be integrated into the general
arts programme. This decision was made on grounds of ‘economic efficiency’ and came as a complete
shock to members of the department. See <http://rondolehti.fi/rondo-lehti/alkusoitto/minne-menet-
musiikkitiede> (accessed 5 August 2017). I thank Elina Viljanen for this reference.
20 MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER
ever-growing army of adjuncts on the brink of poverty.65 Unlike the first cold-war
era, the spectre of Communism is not haunting the West any more, and there is no
longer the international rivalry between blocs that once helped to restrain tendencies
towards inequality in the capitalist world. Today, the lines dividing our world are
drawn differently, and we should recognize this and respond to this new situation.
ABSTRACT
The article discusses various historiographical problems created by Soviet music and, more
broadly, music under the so-called ‘totalitarian’ regimes for the conventional modernism-
driven narrative of the twentieth century. It reviews a number of existing challenges to the
dominant narrative within musicology and related fields such as art and architectural history,
and it proposes ways in which we can move forward. In conclusion, the author considers the
new challenges to the breaking down of cold-war barriers, not only in a historical sense, but
also today, in the midst of a new cold war.
65 <https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/nov/17/university-lecturers-uk-us-casual-posts-
food-stamps> (accessed 9 December 2016). See also Kevin Birmingham, ‘The Great Shame of our
Profession: How the Humanities Survive on Exploitation’, Chronicle of Higher Education (12 February
2017), <http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Shame-of-Our/239148> (accessed 7 August
2017).