The Changing Style of Soviet Music

Abstract

discussions of a politically desirable style of composition.' Schematically, the evolution of Soviet music may be divided into three phases: (i) 1917-1927, when radical Russian musicians attempted to create a new revolutionary art on the ruins of the old; (2) 1927-1936, signalized by the emergence of socalled proletarian music; (3) 1936195o, when cosmopolitan modernism and proletarian sectarianism were abandoned, and the ideal of Socialist Realism, an art national in form and socialist in content, in Stalin's phrase, became the approved slogan. It is natural that in the first flush of the Revolution extreme tendencies