Orthodoxy, Music, Politics and Art in Russia and Eastern Europe by Moody Ivan (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 351 Moody, Ivan and Medić, Ivana (eds). Orthodoxy, Music, Politics and Art in Russia and Eastern Europe. Centre for Russian Music, Goldsmiths, University of London and Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, London and Belgrade, 2020. 263 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. Available at http://dais. sanu.ac.rs/bitstream/id/42626/Orthdoxy, Music, Politics and Art.pdf. The relationship between the Orthodox Church and politics in Russia and Eastern Europe has often been tense and contradictory. Much the same might be said of the intersection between nationalism and Marxist-Leninist doctrine during the Soviet era, when a need to appeal to nationalism in its various guises often broke the surface of public discourse, problematizing a seemingly inherent connection between Orthodoxy and national identity that highlighted some uncomfortable contradictions vis-à-vis the official atheism of the state. This volume, edited by Ivan Moody and Ivana Medić, presents a collection of thirteen papers by an international roster of scholars that begin to scrutinize the highly complex relationship between Orthodoxy, culture and politics in Eastern Europe and Russia. The outcome of a conference held at Goldsmiths, University of London in March 2013, this publication is dedicated to the memory of Alexander Ivashkin (1948–2014), and contains a number of chapters by his colleagues and former students at Goldsmith’s Centre for Russian Music. The volume is admirable in scope, covering a diverse range of contexts and topics from Achilleas G. Chaldaeakes’s exploration of eighteenth-century ecclesiastical policy in the sacred music of Patriarch Athanasios V (c.1655–60–after 1721) which opens the volume (and includes some beautiful facsimile reproductions of Byzantine manuscripts) to Tara Wilson’s closing chapter on the influence of Russian Orthodoxy on the ‘post-post-modern’ aesthetics of the redoubtable Vladimir Martynov (b.1946). Beside the range of topics covered, a major strength of the volume is the consideration of figures from Russian, Latvian, Serbian and Bulgarian traditions that remain somewhat underappreciated in Western scholarship such as Sergei Vasilenko, Stepan Smolenskii, Nikolai Korndorf, Vladimir and Juri Glagolev, Andrejs Selickis, Stevan Mokranjac, his nephew Vasilije Mokranjac, Ljubica Marić, Vasil Kazandzhiev and Konstantin Iliev, to name just a few, whose activities are contextualized alongside more familiar names including Sergei Prokof´ev, Sergei Eizenshtein, Sofiia Gubaidulina, Galina Ustvol´skaia and Al´fred Shnitke. The volume’s origin as a record of conference proceedings is sometimes apparent, with some chapters offering a broad survey-format introduction to a particular topic and others adopting a more analytical approach to specific composers or repertoires. This is addressed to an extent in the Foreword with the acknowledgment that ‘the book comprises shorter essays, as well as longer, SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 352 thoroughly researched studies’ that seek to explore the topic ‘unhindered by specific ideological considerations or disciplinary straightjackets’ (p. 13). Such an approach often allows for a degree of discursive freedom throughout the volume, and many chapters complement one another in a number of illuminating ways: Medić’s survey of Serbian piano repertoire inspired by the Orthodox church works particularly well alongside Predrag Đoković’s overview of Serbian sacred music during the Communist era in this regard, while Moody’s central chapter functions as an effective locus to the volume in its consideration of the ways in which Orthodoxy can be understood to mediate a dialogue between politics, socialism and modernity in the art music of twentieth-century Russia, Bulgaria and Serbia. However, it does sometimes feel as though the publication lacks cohesion, and there are some areas that would benefit from a greater sense of continuity. Sofiia Gubaidulina, for example, is described as a ‘believer among atheists’ (p. 210) which, though used as a means of emphasizing her unique position as ‘a woman among men […] and a Tatar-Russian daughter among Muscovite Russians’ (p. 210), seems to be slightly at odds with the characterization of late-Soviet intellectual culture in other chapters, where religious (or at least spiritual) belief and the composing of religious music are presented as being fairly widespread amongst Gubaidulina’s contemporaries, despite Nikita Khrushchev’s reinvigoration of antireligious propaganda during the late 1950s and early 1960s — consider, for example, Moody’s...