The first thing that struck me from the reading was the dominance of “Russian” music in the international sphere and the Soviet sphere. The distinctly Russian style that is regarded so highly internationally and within the Union clouds the nationalization project in a way that I don’t think we have observed with, for example, the theater. Frolova-Walker writes: “Official Soviet praise of the Russian classics at times knew no bounds: Russian opera was pronounced the best in the world, and any history of Russian music honestly acknowledging Western influence was castigated as a deliberate distortion. Such ideological pressures left burgeoning national cultures little choice in their models.” (pg 339) The reading talks about the dominance of this style — Soviet Officials either implemented it in other nation’s music or it was already so engrained throughout the Union that it didn’t need implementation from officials. “Soviet” music just seems to me to be “Russian” music, or at least that was how it was known. Though they hoped to get away from the style of the West, especially Europe, a lot of the operas and music composed in Russia had undeniable Western roots and have the grandiose bourgeois feel. With all of this though, the importance of folk music and folk style was claimed to be of the utmost importance. How can we square the importance of each nation’s folk music with the hegemony of the Russian style of music that the folk music was ultimately transformed into? The article delves into t his problem, too: “Russian nationalist composers had never acknowledged any discrepancy between the folk song they heard in the field and its representation on the piano” (pg 341) What does this transformation (i.e. the piano version of a folk song) do? Does it fit with the Soviet nationalization project?
Looking at videos 3 and 4 on the YouTube playlists demonstrates this question perfectly, I think. Video 3 shows a traditional song played on the qobyz from Kazakhstan, and video 4 shows a piece performed by a piano and a qobyz, introducing a Russian aspect. Through watching the video, it is obvious that each piece has a very different effect, with the second video obviously more Westernized (the huge pillars of the set behind the artists, the lavish outfits). I think looking at these two videos can start a discussion about orientalism (and Russia capitalizing off of the “exotic”) and the paradoxes of the nationalization project in music.
Finally, what is the significance of the sheet music included in the reading? Obviously, not every reader is accustomed to reading sheet music and the technical side of music. So, I think including the breakdown of notes to demonstrate some sort of formula that was followed when trying to make something uniquely Soviet, or uniquely Russian, or uniquely “Eastern”, is really significant. Does this formulaic construction of a national style of music signify that that national distinction is possible through a mere adhesion to these rules? Or does it signify the shortcomings of these rules in the nationalization project? Can sheet music and different types of technical style create socialist content? Or does its mere opposition to European composition (the “negative character” of Russian style) convey the socialist content? (pg 344)
I kept thinking about your last question throughout Frolova-Walker’s article! She began by talking about the “grotesque” and “self-defeating” results of this crash effort to create developed national musical cultures (p332) – and this was the case, she argues, of the chaotic environment composers worked within during the Stalinist 30s. Party pronouncements on acceptable composition technique could change overnight, and composers had to navigate the shifting limits of acceptable nationalism, “symphonic development” (363), and so on.
Her conclusion seems to be that “national style” was simply the product of Soviet politics, rather than an earnest attempt to theorise about culture! Frolova-Walker is scathing: she talks about “Party dogma and random phrases form music theory primers in order to end weight to arbitrary and uninformed personal tastes.” (368) Her article, then, doesn’t try to identify an “essence” of a national music school so much as shrug and say – “hey, Stalinism! What can you say?”
I still think your question can be answered, though. To ask how Soviet composers and arts officials thought national distinctions could be made, you’re now instead asking how these changing ideas of the acceptable flowed and took effect throughout the Soviet arts system. But that takes us far from cultural politics, to the workings of Stalinism in general.
“How can we square the importance of each nation’s folk music with the hegemony of the Russian style of music that the folk music was ultimately transformed into?”
The goal was to attempt to create a style that was distinct, founded upon the musical traditions located in ethnic folk songs. At the same time, this unique music had to be recognizably socialist, and for this it was necessary perhaps to draw upon Russian or generally Western models of composition to imbue the national music with a characteristic it otherwise lacked. Even if the result was an aesthetically displeasing mess of a composition, it would still achieve this distinctness that would mark it as being of a particular national style.
But a contradictory attitude apparently prevailed in which it was necessary to please people in order to achieve “National[ism] in form, Socialis[m] in content”; for the vagueness and imprecision in official criticism belies the arbitrariness in standards. It thus seemed necessary for the nationalist, Soviet music projects to adopt a Western flavor, and if they failed to do so, it would have been because it was practically impossible.
To respond to your first question, “How can we square the importance of each nation’s folk music with the hegemony of the Russian style of music that the folk music was ultimately transformed into?” there’s two statements in the text that come to mind.
The first has to do with the negative procedure of creating a national music form through avoiding “western” patterns, that you’ve already pointed out. Frolova-Walker states “although this negative procedure was thus passed on from the Russian nationalists to the national composers of the republics, the latter did not treat the peculiarities of the Russian nationalist style on a par with other nonindigenous compositional features; indeed they apparently regarded the style as neutral” (350). First Russian history seems to create an idea of what national music style means through the idea of avoiding western musical tropes, but then in applying this to non-Russian republics, the republics now not only follow their process but also adopt the tropes associated with Russia.
The second quote is points out the inherent impossibility of trying to define a national music in a framework that is from a different culture. Frolova-Walker states “The authenticity that critics found lacking in Russian orientalism proved no easier for the nationalists of the republics to attain. Indeed, even the most obvious of orientalist conventions turned out, upon closer examination, to be the best possible approximations of genuine Eastern features by means of available Western idioms.” (361). The fact that republics needed to adopt the western tonal system meant that when trying to convert folk songs into piano or orchestral pieces, the orientalist patterns seemed to be unavoidable. This begs the question, why was it so necessary to convert the different tonal systems of the republics into the European and Russian 12-tone octave? If each republic already had musical systems, couldn’t harmony been created within their music systems (if harmony was really so necessary) or even just adopting new lyrics and operatic stories within the already existing forms? Hindsight is 20/20, but it still seems peculiar to me that the Soviet authorities insisted that the republics change the framework of their music while simultaneously trying to avoid “orientalism” or “exoticism.” Perhaps from the beginning the idea was to create the confusing, paradoxical, and ever-changing Stalinist trap to put artists in that Nick was talking about.
I was also interested in the question of orientalism in the performances we watched for today. The crux of the question in the fourth video, as you stated is the addition of the piano to traditional folk compositions. On the one hand this certainly may have served to transform national musical forms into something familiar to Russian audiences. On the other, the piano may highlight the perceived strangeness of the Central Asian music we see in the third and fourth videos; it sets up a contrast in which, to European audiences, the piano is the norm and the qobyz is a particular artifact allowed into the musical canon only on certain conditions. In any event, it is easiest to read these performances as oriented inward toward Russia and arranged to suit the viewership of Europeans. In this light, how do we consider Frolova-Walker’s discussion of the pre-revolutionary efforts to define Russian music separately from European music and her relation of this to the Soviet project of building a socialist folk-canon?
Regarding your questions about sheet music, “Does this formulaic construction of a national style of music signify that that national distinction is possible through a mere adhesion to these rules? Or does it signify the shortcomings of these rules in the nationalization project? Can sheet music and different types of technical style create socialist content? The first questions could be addressed by this quote,
“Russian methods of bringing folk song into art music ranged from straightforward quotation to the abstraction and assimilation of various perceived characteristics” (343). It seems like the influence of different cultures might be dependent on the music’s ability to be reduced to this form. For some of the traditional types of music described this might be more of a challenge and thus be a shortcoming of these rules. However problematic, the reduction of these culture to these elements or tropes does seem to lend itself to the formation of one unified Soviet culture, incorporating “perceived characteristics” of the various republics into one.
I think part of Frolova-Walker’s argument is that many of the new nations are Soviet rather than indigenous constructions. I want to be clear that this doesn’t mean we haven’t encountered other texts and arguments in this class that have presented indigenous autonomy and support for the Soviet regime (here’s looking at Jahon Obidova), but I do think Frolova-Walker’s conclusions about how “newly independent states” in the post-Soviet era formed due to “a legal–and apparently irreversible–political reality” rather than conscious choices. (370)
I think the inclusion of sheet music is pretty standard in musicological journals, since these are geared toward academics who specialize in music. That being said, I think the official documentation of musical notation speaks to the way national music styles developed in an era when Soviet officials were invested in creating and classifying records.
Was the Russian metropole trying to capitalize on the exotic? So far we have discussed culture to the extent that it helped the Soviets solidify their grasp on the periphery of their empire, but was the relationship so that the metropole gained some benefit from utilizing these “exotic” cultures in their quest for hegemony? If anything the street worked both ways, as many composers coming from periphery were trying to gain legitimacy through utilizing Western music.
“What does this transformation (i.e. the piano version of a folk song) do? Does it fit with the Soviet nationalization project?”
On page 355, eastern composer “Gajibekov lucidly described how a modern piano would completely distort a folk melody that had a tonic on E…” Later on, Frolova-Walker states that, “The underlying problem besetting national composers of the Soviet Asian republics was that they chose to represent their native musical cultures within an imported Western tradition, and thus inevitably entangled themselves in the orientalism they hoped to repudiate” (362-363).
So, I think that composers trying to “overcome orientalist conventions” through the adoption of the piano, for example, were faced with attempting to do so through a western framework, which prevented the nationalization project from succeeding as it placed said composers in a particularly problematic position (355).