Ups and Downs of Russian Music Throughout

¶ … ups and downs of Russian music throughout the Soviet Union's tumultuous history and will also describe the impact that music has on the Russians today. This paper will describe the music during the pre-revolutionary years, post-revolutionary years, the Stalin years, the post-Stalin years and Gorbachev's perestroika years.

The years before the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Russian revolution of 1917 are considered the pre-revolutionary years. The Russian Revolution of 1905 was an unsuccessful attempt to topple the ruling czar and it all started with the Bloody Sunday Massacre. The Russian revolution of 1917 succeeded in overthrowing the imperial government and replacing them with the Bolsheviks.

The pre-revolutionary years, in Russia, were filled with Byzantium liturgical chants, nationalistic folk songs, operas, and symphonies. In 988, Prince Vladimir of Kiev decided that Russian's national religion would be Byzantine Orthodoxy and that's how the Byzantium liturgical chants ended up in Russia. However, after the Russians created their own style of liturgical chants, it was called znammeny chants. This type of music was entirely vocal and there were no musical instruments accompanying the chants.

Russian folk music had been around since the tenth century but really did not become great until the eighteenth and nineteenth century under the impact of Russian nationalism, which came at the expense of Napoleon's invasion and defeat in the nineteenth century (Spector 227).

Russian themes were evident in the folk songs and choral arrangements and in the creation of a new national opera (Spector 228). Three Russian empresses, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great, introduced opera to Russia. Because of Napoleon's invasion, the Russians had a lot of pride concerning their country, and the Russian operas that were written stemmed from that nationalistic pride.

Mikhail Glinka, the founder of national Russian music, composed music and operas such as Capriccio on Russian Themes, A Life for the Tsar, and Ruslan and Lyudmila, based on a popular fairy tale. He also introduced an Oriental effect in his music.

Other nationalistic composers of the nineteenth century are Mily Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov, Peter Illitch Tchaikovsky, and Igor Stravinsky, who was a pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary composer. All were contributors to the nationalistic movement but each with a style and message of their own. Each of their style ranged from folk music, symphonies that reflected the love of Russia, operas, and modern music.

In the post-revolutionary years, after 1917, when the Soviet Bolsheviks were in power, music began to change from the traditions of the great Russian composers to extreme Western modernism and revolutionary labor class music (Spector 516). This was the point that the Soviet government felt that interference of creativity was necessary. "They demanded conformity with socialist realism -- that is, music that is 'socialist in content but national in form,' designed for the masses" (Spector 516). High truths were not to be questioned and "ideas are not derived from or tested by experience; instead, experience is catalogued into the preconceived verbal pigeonholes provided by ideology" (Daniels 284).

During this time of change, Soviet composers found it safer to compose vocal music, which celebrated Russia's past. Singing was a way for workers and military personnel to improve their moral. Nicholas Myaskovsky, Sergei S. Prokofiev, Dmitry Shostakovitch, who learned how to conform to the strict guidelines of the arts by getting his knuckles rapped, and Aram Khatchaturian were some of the composers during the post-revolutionary era.

Joseph Stalin was the dictator of Russia from 1928 until his death in 1953. He defined how "social realism" should be applied to the music composed so there would be no misunderstanding. "Social realism' meant highly conventional premodernist forms and a banal, propagandistic content, avoiding any critical treatment of actuality (as in Western 'realist' arts) and instead depicting what Soviet life was supposed to be or would someday be" (Daniels 181-182).

In other words, "music was to follow the traditional (that is, nineteenth century) forms and the content was expected to be optimistic and hortatory. Pessimism, introspection, and serious social criticism -- not to mention religious subjects and political dissent -- were firmly repressed" (Daniels 311).

Stalin had squelched creativity and individuality and traded those things for the heroic classics.

Dmitry Shostakovitch lost favor with Stalin when he composed his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which vividly portrayed the position of women in pre-revolutionary Russia. Women were regarded very highly back in those days, as were the three empresses who were mentioned in this paper. Shostakovitch's opera was banned in 1936 for its "jarring, irritating, and affected intonations" (Spector 518). Shostakovitch redeemed himself by composing the Fifth Symphony two years later. After that, he was in hot water again when he composed the Eighth Symphony because of its "subversive ideological content" (Gunther 412).

After the Stalin years, the strict guidelines relaxed and creative freedom was loosened. Leadership did continue to frown on foreign influences and did continue to encourage social realism, but they allowed outside musicians, such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and American violinist Isaac Stern, to entertain the Russian masses.

Phonograph records were available and in demand, but the Russians wanted more music. They had an insatiable appetite for music. Black market prices for American jazz was extraordinary, an average of one hundred dollars for a single record. The black market recordings "were taken on tape from Voice of America or other broadcasts, and then reproduced on discs made of discarded X-ray plates salvaged from the hospital (Gunther 322).