Soviet Music and Society under Lenin and Stalin: The Baton and Sickle by Neil s> Edmunds (review)

Abstract

334 SEER, 83, 2, 2005 question:'Andis not Russian music destined, on the foundationsof a religious revival, to reveal a new blossoming of the elements of melodic and harmonic cells derivedfrom song?'(p. 258). Dr Campbell's anthology, like its predecessor,is attractivelyproduced and well selected for the variety and significance of the critical pieces. Many of them convey a strong impressionof the vitality and, particularly,direction of Russian music at this excitingperiod in its development. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ARNOLD MCMILLIN University College London Edmunds,Neil (ed.). Soviet MusicandSociety Under LeninandStalin.7heBatonand Sickle. BASEES/RoutledgeCurzon Serieson Russian and EastEuropean Studies,9. RoutledgeCurzon, London and New York,2004. Xi+ 240 PP. Illustrations.Figures.Notes. Index. [65.00. SOVIET music studiesoffera wealth of unchartedterritoryforthe musicologist and historianalike.With musicologistsstilllargelypreoccupiedwith Shostakovich and Prokof'ev (and only selected areas of their output at that), the way remains wide open for historiansto do theirwork for them. Neil Edmunds is not the firsthistorianto explore the murkiercornersof Soviet musicalculture but he is probably the scholar who has done most in recent years to bring neglected composers and their work out of obscurity.For a musicologist,the frequent references in this collection of essaysto relativelyancient texts such as Stanley Dale Krebs's SovietComposers and theDevelopment of SovietMusic (London, I970) and Michel Calvocoressi'sSurvey ofRussian Music(Harmondsworth , I944) are striking:these are books that have been gathering dust on libraryshelvesfor the last twenty years or more. Yet it is preciselyfrom these scholars that the work of Edmunds and some of his contributorshave taken their cue, since Anglo-American scholarship has resolutely ignored the composerswhose workthey discussed.The range of expertiseamassedin this volume is impressivelybroad:there are five essayson Soviet folk culture, two of them by noted ethnomusicologists, alongside excellent coverage of Soviet popular and avant-garde culture, as represented by song, music hall and ballet. Almost inevitably, there is a post-revisionisttinge to some of the essays;the fact that nearly all the music discussedin this volume has been neglected for so long in the West is hardlyaccidental. Hence it is not surprisingto discerna slight defensivenessin writingson musical life in the former Soviet Republics as well as that on amateur music-making.Edmunds'searlierbook, 7The Soviet Proletarian MusicMovement (Oxford, 2000) took a similarly polemical stance against the dismissalof the early proletarian chapter in Soviet music history by Western musicology; pressing his points home, Edmunds's own essay on proletarian music is a fascinating repository of ideas for furtherresearch. If there is a single thread running through all the essays, it is their challenge to the view that there was ever any such thing as a monolithic Soviet music policy, with the attendant assumptions about enforced participationin ersatz folk culture, proletarianmass songs and spectacles and collective farm music REVIEWS 335 festivals. While some contributors seem a little too eager to paint Western Soviet 'classical' musicology in these unfairly severe colours, it is true that there has been a subtext of easy cynicism about popular music-makingin the Soviet Union in much of itsworkand a seriouschallenge to it is long overdue. Several writers(Richard Stites, Andy Nercessian, Michael Rouland, Pekka Suutari, Matthew O'Brien) addressWestern suspicion of 'managed' popular culturefrom urban entertainmentto the contained nationalismof the former Soviet Republics. As Stites acknowledges,the phenomenon of Soviet 'folklorism ' and 'ethnicity' was largely manufactured in the Stalin period, as it was throughout Eastern Europe. It is precisely because of this tightly monitored attitude to national identity that Western as well as Russian scholarshiphas been waryof exploringit on its own terms.Just how sensitivean issuethis still is can be seen clearly in O'Brien's intemperate attacks on Marina FrolovaWalker 's I998 article on realizations of Stalin's demands for art 'national in form, socialist in content' in Azerbaidzhan and elsewhere. O'Brien's argumentswould certainlycarrymore weight ifhis researchhad gone substantially beyond perusal of the Uzeyir Hajibeyov website; as it is, it is difficultto take his argumentsseriously. While O'Brien's essay merely offers uncritical praise for its subject, the contributions by Suutari and Rouland on music in Soviet Karelia and Kazakhstan are impeccably researchedand argued with imposing authority. Suutari succinctly explains the basis of Soviet policy on musical nationalism: sincemusicwas consideredrelativelyharmless,itwas...