How Soviet Music Became “Patriotic”, or: Re-inventing the Avant-garde in Late and Post-Soviet Socialism, 1970–1998

Abstract

During the last decades of the Soviet Union, composers and musicians witnessed a dissolution of the contexts in which they were used to inventing and performing music. “Soviet Music”, a vague but inclusive umbrella term for serious music production, took one of two different directions: on the one hand, it increasingly became part of a global musical avant-garde, on the other hand it was forced to adapt to increasingly narrow, Russocentric and even nationalistic attitudes. This contribution investigates ambiguities surrounding these attributes as well as the concrete problems they created for three composers - Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov. In particular, it concentrates on fictions of authenticity created by a milestone of Soviet cinema: Farewell to Matera by Ėlem Klimov and Larisa Shepitko. In doing so, the article questions “1991” as an important caesura and instead makes a case for conceptualizing late and post-Soviet socialism as one common period in Russian musical history.