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Pauline Fairclough
Yale University Press

Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin

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AuthorPauline Fairclough
PublisherYale University Press
PublishedMay 24 2016
Book FormatHardcover
ISBN-139780300217193
Dimensions9.4 X 6.4 X 1.1 inches
Weight 1.4 pounds
BISAC
CategoriesMusic > History & Criticism - General
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

Musicologist Pauline Fairclough explores the evolving role of music in shaping the cultural identity of the Soviet Union in a revelatory work that counters certain hitherto accepted views of an unbending, unchanging state policy of repression, censorship, and dissonance that existed in all areas of Soviet artistic endeavor. Newly opened archives from the Leninist and Stalinist eras have shed new light on Soviet concert life, demonstrating how the music of the past was used to help mold and deliver cultural policy, how undesirable repertoire was weeded out during the 1920s, and how Russian and non-Russian composers such as Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Bach, and Rachmaninov were canonized during different, distinct periods in Stalinist culture. Fairclough's fascinating study of the ever-shifting Soviet musical-political landscape identifies 1937 as the start of a cultural Cold War, rather than occurring post-World War Two, as is often maintained, while documenting the efforts of musicians and bureaucrats during this period to keep musical channels open between Russia and the West.

Author Bio

I am a cultural historian specialising in Soviet music and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. My first book, A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (Ashgate, 2006) was an in-depth study of Shostakovich's symphonic masterpiece, which had to wait twenty five years for its premiere in the post-Stalin era.

My second monograph, funded by an AHRC Early Career Fellowship and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, was Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin (Yale, 2016), which was co-winner of the BASEES Women's Forum Book Prize in 2018. I have edited four volumes: The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (with David Fanning, Cambridge University Press, 2008), Shostakovich Studies 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Twentieth Century Music and Politics: Essays in memory of Neil Edmunds (Ashgate, 2012) and 1917 and Beyond: Continuity, Rupture and Memory in Russian Music (MHRA, 2019, with Philip Bullock).

My biography of Shostakovich, written for Reaktion Books' 'Critical Lives' series, was published in 2019.

From 2021-23 I hold a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and will be writing a monograph on Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for Oxford University Press.

I am an elected Vice-President of the Royal Musical Association, co-editor of the CUP journal Twentieth-Century Music, General Editor of Routledge's Russian and East European Music series and I am on the editorial board of the Moscow journal Iskusstvo muzïki. Teoriya i istoriya (The Art of Music. Theory and History). Together with Olga Digonskaya of the Shostakovich Archive in Moscow,

I run the 'Shostakovich and his Epoch' study group of the International Musicological Society.

Source: University of Bristol

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