Frolova Walker Nationalism

"National in Form, Socialist in Content": Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics
Author(s): Marina Frolova-Walker

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp.
331-371
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831980 .
Accessed: 10/12/2011 19:25
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
University of California Press and American Musicological Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society.
http://www.jstor.org
"National in Form, Socialist in Content":
Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet
Republics
MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER
The developmentof culturesnationalin formandsocialistin contentis nec-

essaryfor the purposeof theirultimatefusioninto one GeneralCulture,so-
cialistas to formandcontent,and expressedin one generallanguage.
-I. V. Stalin,Marksizmi natsional'no-kolonial'niy
vopros(1934)
Comrades,we want-we passionatelywish-to have our own "Mighty

Handful."
-A. A. Zhdanov,Sovetskayamuzika(1948)
My subject is a unique and bizarre project: the attempt to create,

withinthe Caucasianand CentralAsianrepublicsof the USSR,
national musical cultures that would reflect the musical nation-
alism that grew up in Moscow and St. Petersburg during the previous cen-
tury. This project took shape during the early 1930s at the behest of Stalin,
and did not lose momentum until some years after his death. Even today,
however, as former Soviet republics enjoy their independence, they still
feed on the results of the Soviet-instigated revolution in their cultures,
while paying lip service to the task of undoing the consequences of Rus-
sification. In the Almati Conservatory of Kazakhstan, for example, the
principal language of instruction is shifting from Russian to Kazakh-a
fairlysimplematterfor lecturingon historicaltopics, but not for, say, de-
tailed discussion of sixteenth-century counterpoint, which is still an essen-
tial part of the theory curriculum. On the other hand, no fundamental
objectionshave been raisedabout the existenceof the Conservatory,al-
though its presence in Almati is, of course, a result of Soviet Russification
policies. The opera house and concert hall similarly arrived in Kazakhstan
as pillarsof importedSoviet culture,but are now acceptedas legitimate
platformsfor the promotionof Kazakhstan's culturalagenda.Becausethe
transferof sovereignty from Moscow to Almati is no longer in doubt, the
legacy of Soviet culturalpolicy need not be rejectedas a foreign imposition.
Rather, it can safely be taken for granted, with piecemeal changes made to
reflectthe complexionof the new states.As recentlyas the 1980s, scores
[JournaloftheAmericanMusicological
Society1998, vol. 51, no. 2]
? 1998 by the AmericanMusicologicalSociety. All rights reserved.0003-0139/98/5102-0004$2.00
332 Journalof the American Society
Musicological
and recordings of music resulting from those policies could still be found
in abundance in Moscow music shops. Today they have all but disap-
peared, forlornly consigned to the dustiest corners of libraries, and to for-
gotten cupboards in the back rooms of schools and colleges. Natives of the
former Soviet republics and Russians alikeconsider most of this music dead
and unworthy of revival.Not only is it tainted with Stalinism, but for those
old enough to remember, it is associated with the tedium of the routine
tributes to the achievements of each republic that could be found in text-
books, concert seasons, and the examination and competition programs of
the recent yet now so remote past. For the purposes of musicology in the
late 1990s, however, the study of this music holds great promise, provok-
ing reflection on a constellation of topics: nationalism, culturalcolonialism,
orientalism, and the history of socialist realism.'
The main focus of this article is the renaissanceof romantic nineteenth-
century nationalism within a socialist multinational state. Such a combi-
nation may seem strange to those who have learned to assign Marxism and
nationalism to distinct and irreconcilable categories, and indeed, the sep-
aration is not entirely inaccurateon the level of pure theory: national self-
consciousness was supposed to be symptomatic of high capitalism, and
both were destined to collapse together. Nevertheless, the practical appli-
cation and development of Soviet Marxism-Leninism acknowledged the
realities of the age of nation-states, and employed nationalist ideology for
socialist ends without losing sight of the eventual and inevitable advent of
a nationless and stateless future-or so the Party ideologues declared. The
mutual adjustment between nationalist and socialist mythologies was a
complex process. As we shall see, in the case of music the rhetorical strat-
egies of romantic nationalism were retained but yoked to new purposes,
with results that were sometimes remarkablygrotesque, sometimes simply
self-defeating. We can be thankful that, although equivocation and obfus-
1. See Gregory Salmon's entries on Alma-Ata, Askhabad, Baku, Bishkek, Dushanbe, Ere-
van, Tashkent, and Tbilisi in the New GroveDictionaryofOpera,ed. Stanley Sadie (London and
New York: Macmillan, 1992). As Salmon's bibliographies attest, there is as yet no substantial
treatment of these repertories in the English-language musicological literature. Prior to the
Salmon articles,the only information in English availableon many of the composers discussed
in the present article could be found in Stanley Dale Krebs, SovietComposers and the Develop-
ment of SovietMusic (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970); and Rena Moisenko, Realist Music:
Twenty-fiveSoviet Composers(London: Meridian Books, 1949). The latter is of interest as a
faithful-indeed credulous--precis of the standard Soviet line, but it offers no independent
assessment of events. Ethnomusicologists who carried out fieldwork in the republics occa-
sionally commented on the interaction of traditional culture with Soviet ideology: see Mark
Slobin, "Conversationsin Tashkent,"AsianMusic 2, no. 2 (1971): 7-13; and also Theodore
C. Levin, "Music in Modern Uzbekistan: The Convergence of Marxist Aesthetics and Central
Asian Tradition,"AsianMusic 12, no. 1 (1979): 149-58. There is a brief but very penetrating
description of the matter in question in Richard Taruskin,Defining RussiaMusically:Historical
and HermeneuticalEssays(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), xvi-xvii.
"Nationalin Form,Socialistin Content" 333
cation were raised to dogma in this era, negotiating the resulting ideolog-
ical hall of mirrors, difficult as it still is for a researcher, is no longer the
life-and-death matter it once was for Soviet composers and musicologists.
National in Form
For the first few years of the Bolshevik state, musical nationalism in its
nineteenth-century form was certainly out of favor. Indeed, the cosmopol-
itanism and avant-gardismof the immediate prerevolutionaryyears had al-
readylargely ousted nationalism. The aristocraticor bourgeois background
of Russian composers, past and present, rendered them members of the
enemy culture, and only Musorgsky's operas, now styled as "dramasof the
people," were spared by the zealous left Bolsheviks of the RAPM (Russian
Association of ProletarianMusicians). For the rival ASM (Association for
Contemporary Music), which drew its sustenance from Mahler, Schoen-
berg, and Krenek, casting The Five overboard seemed the proper solution
to what its members perceived as the problem of Russian musical provin-
cialism.
Attitudes toward folk music also changed. Though it might be expected
that the slogan of bringing high culture closer to the masses would en-
courage interest in folk music, the Bolshevik view of the peasant class as
reactionaryshifted attention from ruralto urban, and specificallyproletar-
ian, popular musical culture. For the first time, disseminators of folk music
had to find in it something specifically "revolutionary"or "progressive"
ratherthan merely national. For example, Arseny Avraamov-an early So-
viet experimental composer, sometime exponent of forty-eight-note equal
temperament, and pioneer of film sound-track synchronization methods,
who is remembered principally for his "Symphony of
Klaxons"--saw
"highly revolutionary elements" in the still unexplored modal structure
of folk music. He even hinted that startling intonational discoveries would
prove crucial for the development of "contemporarymusic, suffocating in
the grip of twelve-note temperament."2But as expectations of imminent
world revolution waned and the new regime began to come to terms with
the prospect of continuing indefinitely contra mundum, official Soviet
rhetoric returned to the familiarverities of nationalism. The turning point
was the disbanding of both the RAPM and the ASM in 1932, and their
replacement by the Union of Composers and its mouthpiece, the journal
Sovetskayamuzika. Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and The Five were then swiftly
rehabilitated, mythologized, and presented as the only legitimate starting
point for the future development of Soviet music.
2. Avraamov'scomments first appearedin Sovremennaya
muzika 22 (1927): 287; quoted
in I. Zemtsovsky, Fol'klori kompozitor(Leningrad and Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor,
1978), 10-11.
334 Journalof the American
Musicological
Society
This revived musical nationalism had to be fitted into a new mold, of

course. It could not be exclusively Russian, since the nationalities of the
sister republics had to be acknowledged; even the Russian federation was
itself now understood to be a multinational entity. Imperial Russia, "the
prison of the peoples" as it was now styled, had passed, and every Soviet
nation now had the right to express itself on an equal footing with Russia
-at least according to the new doctrine. In the January 1934 issue of
Sovetskayamuzika, we find for the first time a slogan that was intended to
shape the cultural revolution. Stalin himself provided the words for the
heading: 'The Development of Cultures National in Form and Socialist in
Content."3 Soviet musicians had to ensure that their music was not "na-
tional in content," for that would be bourgeois nationalistic art, according
to the code. Only the outward forms, the technical means of expression,
might reflect the nationality of each republic, and even this was meant as
a temporary concession, until all the national tributaries could merge into
a single mighty river of international Soviet culture, socialist in both form
and content.4 We need not doubt the attribution of this idea to Stalin him-
self, for if one issue gripped his imagination, it was how to deal with the
different nationalities of the union. He had turned his thoughts toward this
question even before the revolution, when in 1913 Lenin assigned him the
task of developing the Party's policy regarding nationality. Stalin under-
took his charge conscientiously, and the eventual product of his research
was the essay "Marxism and the National Question." Here we encounter
his definition of "nation,"later memorized by countless students during his
rule: "A nation is an historically constituted, stable community of people
formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and
psychological character,manifested in a common culture."5
The word territorywas Stalin's peculiar addition to an otherwise un-
controversial, nonprescriptive definition. Had he remained in obscurity,
his interpretation would have been of no consequence, but he had every
intention of seeing his definition reflected in the republics of the Soviet
Union--and Stalin, unlike other men, had the power to adjust the world
to match his words. The practical realization of the definition, so far as
musical activities were concerned, was readily apparent in the admini-
strative structure of the Soviet Union. The federation came to consist of
3. Sovetskayamuzika (January 1934): 3.

4. "Under the conditions of a dictatorship of the proletariatwithin a single country, the
rise of cultures national in form and socialist in content has to take place, so that when the
proletariatwins in the whole world and socialism is a part of ordinary life, these cultures will
merge into one culture, socialist both in form and in content with a common language--this
is the dialectics of Lenin's approach to the issue of national culture" (I. V. Stalin, Marksizmi
natsional'no-kolonial'n'yvopros[Moscow, 1934], 195).
5. J. V. Stalin, Works,13 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952-
55), 2:307.
hierarchicallyorganized ethno-territorial units with sometimes arbitrarily

drawn borders. Beneath the level of the entire union were the national re-
publics; within some of these were created the autonomous republics or
the smaller autonomous regions; at the bottom of the hierarchy were the
national districts. Depending on a unit's importance within the hierarchy,
its task of nation building proceeded at different paces and with different
aims: each national republic was required to build a national opera house
and to create a repertory for it-certainly including at least one large,
through-composed work--by the end of the 1930s. Lower in the hierar-
chy, an autonomous republic within the Russian federation was expected
to produce a full compendium of its folk-song repertory; in addition it
would perhaps receive an overture or two from Russian composers. Some
of the furthest-flung districts with populations of nomadic peoples were
simply left alone. That many of the republics contained a mixture of ethnic
groupings was largely ignored: only their titular nationality mattered. The
newly named republic of Azerbaijan was one of the more blatant examples
of an artificiallycreated territory: since the boundaries of a national repub-
lic had been drawn around it, a distinct nation was required to inhabit it.
In 1937 the majority population of the republic, formerly known as
'Tiirk," suddenly became known as the Azerbaijanination. Minority ethnic
groups were required to assimilate, for ethnic and territorialcomplications
were not to be tolerated.6 Ethnic groups falling outside the territory that
Moscow had defined as their national unit were encouraged, or often
forced, to move to where the map of the union said they belonged. Mi-
norities too small to become the titular nationality of any unit drifted into
oblivion. Thus, the Soviet bureaucracyrealized a tidy scheme of matching
nations and national territories; all future cultural development was
planned within this structure.
Territories of equivalent status were supposed to proceed at the same
pace of cultural development. If the initial goal was the production of a
national opera, then the project was to be carriedout simultaneously across
the union, even in seminomadic Central Asia, where Western cultural in-
stitutions were a complete novelty. Because Uzbeks and Kazakhs were
clearlyunable to take such a cultural leap without substantialexternalhelp,
members of the Composers' Union from Moscow and Leningrad were re-
cruited to oversee the project. Indeed, in many cases they wrote the re-
quired operas themselves, in what they perceived to be the appropriate
national style. Cooperation thus extended far beyond the construction of
opera houses and conservatories;the notes sung and played therein were as
6. Mark Saroyan, "Beyond the Nation-State: Culture and Ethnic Politics in Soviet Trans-
caucasia,"in Transcaucasia,Nationalism, and Social Change: Essaysin the History ofArmenia,
Azerbaijan, and Georgia,ed. R. G. Suny (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996),
403-4. Today we can see how such policies can still be reversedin the absence of a restraining
Soviet authority.
Musicological
often as not the fruits of Russian labor. Since the creation of music was
regarded as much the same as any industrial process, composers, as
"culture-workers,"were expected to serve the state, often as members of a
collective. They were accorded specific tasks by the Party, which in general
followed the much-trumpeted "unanimous Soviet public opinion on mu-
sical issues" of Sovetskayamuzika.7 Constructing a national musical culture
was, like the building of a gigantic dam, a matter of concern for the whole
country.
The results were sometimes bizarre beyond any expectation. One small
collective consisting of two Russian composers and one native, known
under their combined surnames, Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev,produced half a
dozen operas for the Uzbek nation. Another composer, Sergei Balasanian,
was of Armenian origin, though he was born in Turkmenistan. And whose
national composer did he become? Why, the Tajiks'. Reinhold Gliere,
after collecting every available award for composing the first Azerbaijani
national opera, moved on to Uzbekistan, where the Party thought his ex-
perience and talents were needed most urgently. Almost every Soviet com-
poser soon became involved in this campaign; it was by no means merely
a shrewd careermove for mediocrities. By way of illustration, consider the
fate of Alexander Mosolov and Nikolai Roslavets, known in the West as
early Soviet modernists. Mosolov became the first producer of a Turkmen
symphonic suite,8 while Roslavets composed a string quartet on Turkmen
themes; the latter also compiled and harmonized a collection of Uzbek folk
songs. The incentive to produce such music was indeed strong, for even the
ablest composers, since the Party's stated policy on music left but the nar-
rowest of straits between the Scylla of formalism and the Charybdis of ba-
nality. Folk music, it was even declared, was the only proper source for art
music:
All greatmasters,all great composersof the past (of all peoples,without
exception!)proceededfrom this [i.e., folk music]. And, on the contrary,
thosewho werelockedin a narrowworldof shallow,subjectivefeelings,and
who triedto "create[music]out theirown selves"--eventually found they
7. From Comrade Chelyapov's speech to the Moscow Union of Composers, Sovetskaya

muzika(March1936): 19.
8. The case is complicated by the fact that Mosolov had displayed a spontaneous interest
in Turkmen folk music long before the Party's call to create art music for the republics. The
finale of his Fifth Piano Sonata (1926) is a rendering of two folk songs, one Turkmen, one
Russian, within the characteristicallydense and demanding style of this leading figure of the
Soviet avant-garde. Later works, such as his Turkmen and Uzbek Suites (1936), already
showed evidence of compromise, but not enough to satisfy the authorities. It becomes im-
possible to discern the former avant-gardistin the works written from the late thirties onward:
his style had been irreversibly"corrected"by his experiences in a labor camp. It is enormously
sad to listen to the many bland pieces in the style of The Five, or to scan the list of his works
based on the folk music of a dozen regions of the USSR, indistinguishable from the output
of his colleagues engaged in the same project.
had departedfromthe cultureof the people.Theirfalsecreationswere re-

jectedby the people, becausethe peoplewill not toleratea fraud.9
Because the sheer scale of the national-music project prohibits its com-
prehensive treatment within a single article, I shall confine my discussion
to examples drawn from national opera. First, the story of this genre in
Uzbekistan can provide us with some understanding of the Central Asian
predicament. Like its neighbors, and in contrast to the Ukraine, Georgia,
and Armenia, Uzbekistan lacked even the barest prerequisites for the de-
velopment of opera, national or otherwise. One account described the task
facing Uzbek musicians involved in the opera project; having achieved the
first modest goal of a spoken play interspersed with monodic songs ac-
companied by national instruments, they were now expected to produce an
entire opera:
Owingto the maturingexpectationsof the Uzbekaudience,the furtherques-

tion of harmonizingthe opera arises,since the most culturedamong the
Uzbekscannotnow be satisfiedby monophony.This questionappearsever
more often on our agenda.It is mentionedin the resolutionon comrade
Ikramov'spaperat the fifthsessionof the Uzbek CommunistPartyCentral
Committee.Some steps are being takenin that direction:the orchestrais
being filledwith Europeaninstruments,and some numbersarebeing har-
monized.Pianoaccompaniment is being introduced,sometimescomposed
for the whole piece (e.g., Roslavets,UttanPachalyar).
In 1933-34 the work on harmonizationacquiredthe natureof a mass
productionprocess.Comrade[Nikolai]Mironov,who wasinvitedto do this
job, is fillingthe operasArshinmal alan, Purtana, and otherswith harmo-
nizednumbers....
The next step to whichhe [the simplelistener]will ascendis the percep-
tion of harmonicmusic.But for the furtherevolutionof the Uzbek opera,
harmonizationalonewill not suffice.The spectatorwill not be satisfiedby
emotionalempathyalone: he will demandthe reconstructionof the very
musicalforms constitutingthe opera-arias, choruses,finales.At present
therestill is absolutelyno recitative,which remainsunassimilated
by Uzbek
singers:immediatelyafter singing, their charactersswitch to spokendia-
logue.'0
With the help of composers from Russia, Uzbekistan was ready to present
its achievements as early as May 1937 at one of the early festivalsof national
cultures in Moscow."I By then it had produced ten plays with music,
9. GeorgiyKhubov,"Sovetskaya opera,"Sovetskayamuzika(January1938): 15.

10. E. Romanovskaya, "Muzikav Uzbekistane," muzika(September1934):
Sovetskaya
3-9, at 8.
11. The first,pre-warseriesof theDekadi'natsional'nogo (ten-dayfestivalsof na-
iskusstva
tionalart):
1936 March11-21, Ukraine;May 17-25, Kazakhstan
1937 January5-15, Georgia;May21-30, Uzbekistan
Musicological
Society
proudly called "operas,"though everyone was aware of the gaps yet to be

bridged. The earliest of these were imported wholesale, like the Azerbaijani
comic opera Arshin mal alan. Later efforts were collective creations like
Farkhad and Shirin, for which the Russian ethnomusicologist Viktor Us-
pensky notated three thousand bars of folk music that were then harmo-
nized and orchestrated by guest composers Georgiy Mushel' and Tsveyfel'.
In time, composers progressively eliminated spoken dialogue and national
instruments, and reduced the opera's dependence on the mere quotation of
folk sources. Gliere's Gyul'sara,for large symphony orchestra, began with
an imposing overture. At the festival in Moscow, the products of these
different stages of Uzbek opera were presented on an equal footing and
appeared to enjoy a uniformly warm reception. In a review of the Uzbek
contributions, the critic Georgiy model of Party orthodoxy--
Khubov--a
highly praised the newborn art of Uzbek opera, contrasting the works with
"the operatic inventions of the consumptive art of Western formalists":
"Like Antheus, revitalized by Mother Earth herself, Uzbek art gains
strength from the juices of the native soil," continued the critic, deftly ap-
propriating one of Stalin's favorite images.'2
While the careersof "guest composers" had peaked by the late 1930s, a
few Muscovites and Leningraders decided to take up permanent residence
in their adoptive republics. The founder of national opera in Kazakhstan,
for example, one Yevgeniy Brusilovsky, was still writing operas into the
1950s, by which time a new generation of conservatory-trained native
composers had been equipped to take over. But some of the republics later
preferredto forget about their Russian guest composers: the Azerbaijanis
went so far as to exclude all mention of the once-celebrated Gliere from
their music history texts. Still, the lasting influence of these "guests" on
indigenous composers was undeniable. As for the "more advanced"repub-
lics (in the sense that they required no external help in the 1930s), their
musical culture had in fact already been shaped by Russian influence prior
to the revolution.
These complex circumstancesmay be summarized as follows. First, the
culture of each republic developed according to Moscow's directives, mak-
ing them, to this extent, colonial cultures. Second, these cultural imports
were consistently presented as authentic indigenous developments. Third,
the burgeoning intelligentsia within each republic largely identified with
these cultural developments and made their own contributions within the
1938 April 5-15, Azerbaijan

1939 May 26-June 4, Kirgiziya; October 20-29, Armenia
1940 June 5-15, Belorussia; October 20-27, Buryat-Mongolia
1941 April 12-20, Tajikistan
12. Georgiy Khubov, "Muzikal'noe iskusstvo Uzbekistana," Sovetskayamuzika (March
1937): 7-14.
"Nationalin Form, Socialist in Content" 339
boundaries setbyMoscow'srules.Wecouldevensaythatlaterin thecen-

tury thesecolonial
creations hadbeenassimilated andendowedwithsome
of in
degree authenticity eyesthe of each republic's
populace.If, following
EricHobsbawm,we regardnationalism as a networkof inventedtradi-
tions,'3thenin the caseof the Sovietrepublics, we cansaythatvarious
peoplesacquiesced in the inventionof traditionsbyotherson theirbehalf
(indeed,someof the"peoples," liketheAzerbaijanis, werethemselves the
creationof Moscow).Inthesecondpartof thisarticle,weshallexamine the
modelforallof thesenationalcultures: theprofileof nationalism as it de-
velopedwithinRussianculturein thenineteenth century.Thiswillenable
us to explainandinterpret Moscow'sactionsas it soughtto replicate the
processelsewhere.
Whose Nationalism?
Sincemusicalnationalism in the Sovietrepublicswasdependenton the

modelof nineteenth-centuryRussia,thesestateswereexpectedto inaugu-
ratetheireraof nationalartmusicwithanopera,justasGlinkahaddone
for Russia.Moreover,theywereexpectedto approximate one or other
of thetwogenresderivedfromGlinkathathadbecomethetwinpillarsof
Russianmusicin thegeneration afterhim.Thefirst,in whichthetopicof
classstrugglewasparticularlyencouraged,wasthe "heroicdramaof the
people," represented by Glinka'sIvan Susanin, the ideologically acceptable
reworking ofA Lifefor the Tsar; the second was the national epic, written
in the manner of Glinka'sRuslan and Lyudmila. New operas from the re-
publics were thus always measured against the yardstick of the Russian
classics. For example, the Azerbaijaninational opera Keroglu by Uzeir Ga-
jibekov was officially deemed a successful embodiment of the national epic
type;'4 if it had a flaw, it was the lack of a monumental overture in the style
of Borodin's Prince Igor.'5 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.16 Such ideological pres-
sures left burgeoning national cultures little choice in their models.
13. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
14. "Keroglu"is also transliteratedvariously as "Ker-ogli"and "Kyor-Ogli";"Gajibekov"
similarly appears also as "Gadzhibekov"and "Hajibeyov."The complications arise from the
double transliteration, first from Arabic to Cyrillic, then from the latter to Roman.
15. Georgiy Khubov, "Iskusstvo Azerbaidzhanskogo naroda," Sovetskayamuzika (April
1938): 5-22.
16. Tamara Livanova's doctoral dissertation, "Istoriya russkoy muzikal'noy kul'turi"
("History of Russian Musical Culture,"Moscow Conservatory, 1938), was viciously attacked
by I. Martinov in his "Izkazhennayaistoriya" ("Distorted History"), Sovetskayamuzika (May
340 Journalof theAmerican
Musicological
Society
On the other hand, significant cultural forces in some of the republics

would have led them eagerly to accept the Russian model, even without
compulsion. More than mere sycophancy was at work here: large sectors of
the republics' urban elites were alreadyconvinced of the benefits of west-
ernization, and they saw Russia as the closest source of a westernizing in-
fluence. Azerbaijanwas one such republic. There Mustafa Kuliev, minister
of Education, had started a far-reachingmusical reform in the early 1920s,
long before the cultural revolution was imposed by Moscow. Azerbaijan
was one of the three Transcaucasianrepublics, and the only Moslem one
in the region. Considered more backward than its Christian neighbors,
Georgia and Armenia, it had been largely neglected by Moscow during
the previous hundred years of Russian government. In cultural terms this
meant that while Georgia produced its first national opera in 1908, fol-
lowed by Armenia in 1918 (written by Petersburg-educated composers
Zakhariy Paliashvili and Alexander Spendiarov respectively), Azerbaijan
could claim only a much more modest achievement-the so-called mugam
opera, a string of loosely connected solo improvisations.'7 Such operas--if
we can call them that--were largely monodic. Harmonized sections intro-
duced a clumsily rudimentary European tonal idiom, with startlingly in-
congruous effects. In 1924, Kuliev initiated a long-running discussion in
the press on the state of opera in Azerbaijan, calling for its radical mod-
ernization and criticizing mugam opera for its artistic and technical short-
comings. In accordance with the common practice of those days, this
initiative from the official cultural leader was supported by numerous col-
lective letters from the ranks of the proletariat. The workers of the oil in-
dustry and the railways suddenly developed a vigorous appetite for "real
opera": "We need new Azerbaijani operas," they wrote, along with such
slogans as "Cultured modern opera or nothing," and even "Ban the old
mugam opera" and 'Tirk opera must go, along with the Arabic alphabet
and the yashmak [veil]!"18
One aspect of Kuliev's program involved the commissioning of operas
from Russian composers. And so it came about that Gliere, one of the most
1939): 81-90. "Istoriya russkoy muziki" ("History of Russian Music"), edited by Mikhail
Pekelis (Moscow, 1940), was discussed in a meeting of Moscow composers and musicolo-
gists, reported in Sovetskayamuzfka (January-February 1948): 91: "Unfortunately, comrade
Pekelis did not subject his own work to sufficient criticism, particularlythe textbook on the
history of Russian music, which he edited and to which he contributed, and where, as he
himself admitted, the dependence of our musical culture on the West was unfoundedly em-
phasized, class struggle ignored, originality of Russian music and its leading position in world
music in the second half of the nineteenth century passed over."
17. Mugam (the same as Arabic maq'amand CentralAsian makom)is a traditional setting
of classicalpoetry (e.g., Nezami Genjavi) in the form of a large cyclic composition based on
elaborate vocal improvisation with instrumental accompaniment.
18. B. Zeidman, "Glibrei Azerbaijanskayamuzikal'nayakul'tura,"R. M. Glitre: Statyi,
vospominaniya,materialy,vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1966), 216-36.
"Nationalin Form, Socialistin Content" 341
prominent heirs to the Russian nationalist tradition of The Five, was sum-
moned to Baku. After conscientious study of the folk sources made avail-
able to him, he produced for the Azerbaijani nation an opera, Shahsenem,
which was first produced in Baku in 1927. Kuliev argued tirelessly for the
need to abandon the legacy of Persian cultural dominion, and to replace it
with a radicalwesternization of musical culture along Russian lines. One of
the main rebuttals offered by his opponents was that the non-European,
nondiatonic system of tuning employed in Azerbaijan constituted an in-
surmountable obstacle to westernization. Kuliev replied in this way:
Someof our musiciansarealwaysrepeatingthatTirk songscannotbe tran-
scribedwithinthe Europeansystem.ButRussianor Germansongscannotbe
fitted into the twelve-noteEuropeantemperamenteither.... Yet this did
not preventRussianmusicfroma wholesaleadoptionof Europeanfounda-
tions and techniques,or from developingthese to such heights as Glinka
did.19
Hyperbole aside, this statement demonstrates remarkableclear-sightedness

on the part of Kuliev, since Russian nationalist composers had never ac-
knowledged any discrepancy between the folk song they heard in the field
and its representation on the piano, even though in some Russian tradi-
tions this discrepancy was no less glaring than it was in Azerbaijan. Thus
sweeping aside the reasoning of his adversaries,Kuliev opened the door to
all manner of Russian influence.
Moscow therefore had no need to impose a Russian model on the de-
velopment of Azerbaijanimusic, since Kuliev and his like had already em-
braced it (although their enthusiasm was no doubt more easily sustained
because of the urgent necessity of pleasing Moscow's envoys). News of the
Azerbaijani project soon passed beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.
The first president and founder of the new Republic of Turkey, Kemal
Atatdirk,noticed the success in Baku of Glihre'sShahsenemand was suffi-
ciently inspired to invite the composer to his country on a similar mission.
Although Gliere did not go, Turkey eventually secured two far more em-
inent composers in its quest for far-reachingmusical reforms: Bart6k and
Hindemith. A group of Turkish nationalist composers, styling themselves
as The Five of their nation, thus poured out their 'Turkish soul" in the style
of Hindemith and Bart6k. Had Gliere been able to accept the original in-
vitation, they would no doubt have been equally happy to express their
identity in Russian accents.
Nineteenth-century Russian musical nationalism held a powerful appeal

for later national movements in music, owing to its international success.
The project of creating a distinctively Russian music, begun singlehandedly
by Glinka in the 1830s, had by the end of the century culminated in the
19. Mustafa Kuliev, quoted in Z. Safarova,Muzizkal'no-esteticheskiye
vzglyadyUzeira Ga-
jibekova(Moscow, 1973), 96.
Musicological
European-wide acknowledgment of an important "Russian school." This

recognition, even celebrity, nevertheless fell short of the higher purpose to
which Russian nationalists aspired in the late nineteenth century: to forge
a culture fully independent of Western influences, one whose profound
originality and spirituality would show "old hag Europe" the way for-
ward.20 In his final years, Rimsky-Korsakov frankly admitted that such
aspirations, at least in the musical domain, were unattainable:"In my opin-
ion, a distinctively 'Russian music' does not exist. Both harmony and mel-
ody are pan-European. Russian songs introduce into counterpoint a few
new technical devices, but to create a new, unique sort of music--this they
cannot do."21Russian nationalism, while successful as a creative stimulus,
therefore failed as a political program. Later musical nationalisms within
the Soviet Union never acknowledged this failure, however, but instead
accepted the Russian mythology unquestioningly. Composers not only
based their nationalist projects on the same romantic premises, such as the
primacyof folk music; they also borrowed the techniques used by Russians
to assimilate folk material, and, ironically, deployed some of the stylistic
features that Russian composers had supposedly derived from Russian folk
song. What had been initially designed as a representation of authentic
20. These ambitions, invoking the "Moscow as a third Rome" idea (a phrase currentsince
the fifteenth century), were voiced more by the coterie of nationalist writers associated with
The Five than by the composers themselves. Odoyevsky wrote of Glinka'sA Lifefor the Tsar:
"With Glinka's opera there appears something that has been long searched for and still not
found in Europe--namely, a new trend in art; and from thence a new period in art history
begins: the era of Russian music" (V. F. Odoyevsky, Muzikal'no-literaturnoyenaslediye[Mos-
cow: GMI, 1956], 119). Stasov was impatient to see Balakirev"foreverpart with the general
current of European music" and start creating Russian music that would be "new, great, like
nothing ever heard or seen before" (see his letter of 13 February 1861 in M. A. Balakirevand
V. V. Stasov, Perepiska,2 vols. [Moscow: Muzyka, 1970-71], 1:122). Cui, a nationalist in his
writings rather than in his music, said that "in Europe, music has grown so elderly that no
harmonic and orchestral spices can help it any more, whereas Russian music is fresh and full
of vigor" (Ts. A. Cui, Izbranniestat'i [Leningrad, 1952], 37). Underlying these remarkswas
the critics' propensity to exaggerate the extent to which compositions exhibited Russian char-
acteristics,as did, say, Nikolai Mel'gunov onA Lifefor the Tsar or Cui on Rimsky-Korsakov's
First Symphony (Mel'gunov, "Glinkai yego muzikal'niesochineniya" [1836], reprintedin T.
Livanova and V. Protopopov, Glinka, vol. 2 [Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye muzikal'noye iz-
datel'stvo, 1955], 202-9; and Cesar Cui, letter to Rimsky-Korsakov of 27 December 1863;
see N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, Polnoesobraniesochineniy:Literaturniyeproizvedeniyai perepiska,
7 vols. [Moscow: Muzgiz, 1955-70], 5:254). In music, as in other aspects of Russian na-
tionalism such as literature or religion, Russia tended to compare itself with Europe rather
than any particular country; see, for example, the musings of the young Taneyev, who
dreamedof reproducing the whole of European music history in Russia and to this end started
writing Palestrina-stylecounterpoints on Russian folk-song material (P. I. Tchaikovsky and
S. I. Taneyev, Pis'ma [Moscow: Goskul'tprosvetizdat, 1951], 56-61).
21. P. A. Karasyov, "Besedi s Nikolayem Andreyevichem Rimskim-Korsakov'im,"
Russkayamuzikal'nayagazeta 15, no. 49 (7 December 1908), cols. 1119-20; quoted in
Richard Taruskin, Stravinskyand the Russian Traditions:A Biographyof the WorksThrough
"Mavra,"2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 1:64.
Russianness was appropriatedby later composers trying to express the Ka-

zakh or Georgian spirit.
The attractions of Russian musical nationalism as a model are not hard
to see, for the movement was unique in many respects. It involved com-
posers of several generations whose music shared a significant degree of
continuity and common purpose; it pursued ambitious goals in creating
a national musical language; and, most importantly, it succeeded in pro-
ducing rich and diverse artistic results. Just as The Five once believed that
emulating Glinka guaranteed the Russianness of their works, so later did
nationalist composers elsewhere imagine that following the Russian model
would ensure the authenticity of their own efforts. Indeed, in the course of
their project, spanning three-quartersof a century, Russian composers had
at some stage addressed nearly all the possible issues arising from the at-
tempt to create a musical nationalism. Let us recall the most important
features of their experience.
The first group of problems arise when folk songs are collected, ar-
ranged, and imitated. In accordancewith the principles of German roman-
tic nationalism adopted by the collectors, the whole corpus of folk songs
found on Russian-populated territories was to be considered a national
treasure;the local thus acquired the status of the national, and the mutable
contours of everydaymusic making were fixed once and for all as a priceless
insight into the nation's soul. The massed riches of folk-song transcrip-
tions, though, were not immune to reevaluation. The most important re-
assessment occurred in the 1860s, when the rural/urbanopposition arose
(and, coordinated with this, old/new, Russian/westernized, pure/contami-
nated, and modal/tonal); the only the body of peasant songs worthy of
representing the Russian national identity, as defined by Slavophile doc-
trines, came to be those of supposedly pre-Petrine origin. The nineteenth
century saw several changes of fashion in Russian folk-song arrangements,
coinciding with each successive attempt to redefine the function of folk
song: it was successively regarded as a source of entertainment, a venerable
part of the nation's cultural heritage, and an object of scholarship. These
definitions gave rise to styles of harmonization marked in turn by the care-
free imposition of external conventions, then by what was thought to
be a more respectful approach, and finally by a style deemed to be au-
thentic.
Russian methods of bringing folk song into art music ranged from
quotationto the abstractionand assimilationof various
straightforward
perceived characteristics. But the ambitions of musical nationalism set a
further goal: the creation of a Russian musical language. The desire to
developmusic in parallelwith literaturedrew composersbeyondthe rel-
atively simple task of using Russian folk melodies: if the melodies were
the lexis of the language, a distinctively Russian musical syntax also had to
be found. Glinka, the first to set out on this path, sought in particularan
Musicological
Society
alternativeto symphonic development in the Germanic manner. The result

was the "changing-background"
variationtechnique,which was to prove
so fruitful for him and his successors. The next important step was the
discoveryby VladimirStasovof the law of Russianplagalism,which he
based solely on his examination of Glinka's compositional habits. This
was treated as evidence of a purportedly fundamental difference between
Russian harmony, articulatedaround IV, and Western harmony, in which
the role of V is central.22Anotherdevelopmentthat cameto be regarded
as part of an authenticallyRussianmusicalsyntaxwas the declamatory
styleMusorgskyextractedfromthe melodyof Russianspeech.And so the
innovations of individual composers were recast as discoveries of an im-
manentRussianness.Once again,however,Rimsky-Korsakov
punctured
these pretensions:
Russiantraits--andnationaltraitsin general--areacquirednot by writing
accordingto specificrules,but ratherby removingfrom the commonlan-
guageof musicthosedeviceswhichareinappropriate to a Russianstyle.The
method is of a negativecharacter,a techniqueof avoidingcertaindevices.
Thus, for example,I would not use this turnof phrase:
A'.
if I werewritingin a Russianstyle,as it wouldbe inappropriate,

but in other
contextsI might use it freely.Otherwiseit would not be a creativeprocess,
but only somekindof mechanicalprocessof writingin accordance with var-
iousrules.To achievea RussianstyleI wouldavoidsomedevices,for a Span-
ish styleI would avoidothers,and for a Germanstyle,still others.23
How veryprosaic.Herethe composeris not, afterall,theconduitfor
theineffable
groaningsof theRussiansoul,butmerelya practical
musician
who haslearnedthe trickof avoidingcertainturnsof phrasein orderto
create a distinctive stylistic ambience. The individuality and brilliance of
many a work of Rimsky-Korsakov or Borodin can conceal this negative
practice of shunning certain procedures, but if we turn to the more faceless
creations of, say, Alexander Olenin, a pupil of Balakirev, we can quickly
sense the truth of Rimsky-Korsakov's words. Olenin described his opera
Kudeyar thus: "It is like a Russian song taken to extremes, for no device
characteristicof the West is employed in this music, which is based, rather,
on Russian two-part textures with their peculiar features of voice lead-
ing."24Finished in 1911, this opera is now rarelyheard. The first impres-
22. I have examined the myth of "Russian plagalism"in my article "On Ruslan and Rus-
sianness," CambridgeOperaJournal 9, no. 1 (1997): 21-45.
23. Rimsky-Korsakov, quoted in Taruskin, Stravinskyand the Russian Traditions1:64.
24. Olenin, quoted inMiliyAlekseevichBalakirev:Vospominaniya ipis'ma, ed. E. Frid (Len-
ingrad: GMI, 1962), 344.
Example1 AlexanderOlenin,Opera-songKudeyar
(a) Orchestralpreludeto act 1
4 WIN
-.. ...
.a I-
sion the music creates is of an obsessive avoidance of standard "Western"

traits, such as a basic four-part texture, common modulations, chromati-
cism, and the leading tone in minor mode. Instead the composer maintains
a largely three-part texture, in which two parts usually proceed in parallel
thirds or sixths; he also generally restrictshis harmonic palette to a modal
diatonicism (Ex. la). Parallel fifths and octaves, a freely changing meter,
and a lack of transitions between keys or modal centers pervade the opera.
Where the plot requires Olenin to create dramatic tension, however, he
seems unable to stand by his principles, for he slips back into operatic cli-
ches that bring with them full four-part harmony and a more conventional
use of tonality (Ex. Ib). His occasional use of the whole-tone scale is also
incongruous, though he would not have acknowledged it so, since the scale
was considered Russian property on the grounds that Glinka was the first
to use it. Olenin could have presented a similar excuse for all his modula-
tions via an augmented triad as well. But what of the opera's clear use of
Leitmotiv?Surely this technique could not be claimed for Russia? Unfor-
tunately for Olenin, Kudeyar illustrates all too well how nationalist doc-
trines alone are not enough to produce gold, no matter how faithfully the
artist adheres to them. Without the support of considerable talent, skill,
and taste, the musical result can totter on the brink of absurdity.
By the turn of the century, it was already becoming painfully obvious
that Russian composers' claims to have created a national musical language
could no longer be taken at face value. Various harmonic novelties and one
characteristicvariation technique had been stamped with a Russian trade-
mark, but these hardly offered limitless possibilities for future develop-
ment. The surviving members of The Five gradually abandoned the
346 Journalof the AmericanMusicologicalSociety
Example 1 continued
(b) Sceneof KudeyarandNastyafromact 4
Kudeyar (Giving Nastya a lingering look) Broadly, freely
Ya lyub- lyu, lyub-lyu te-bya kra-
iiI
a,4r W,
K• y rF mF
._
-sa- vi-tsa! Ya lyub- lyu te- bya da zhar-che prezh-ne- vo! A ye-
He rushes towarda pile of weapons

and picks out some knivesand a mace.
-shcho lyub-lyuya vo-lyush-ku! ----------------------------------------------

8va.
I.,
SAw I
IW
[I love you, I love you, my beauty!

I love you even more thanever!
But I also love my freedom!]
nationalism they had so passionately espoused in earlier years. Balakirev

produceda Second Symphonythat Stasov regardedas disappointingly
conventional. And although Rimsky-Korsakov deliberately stopped short
of adopting Debussy's "decadent" harmony, contending that whatever
sounded suspiciously French in his music in fact derived from Glinka, the
words quoted above betray the depth of his disenchantment with nation-
alism. Glazunov, principal heir to the Russian style and the most beloved
child of The Five, chose to refine his motivic and contrapuntal writing
along overtly German lines, and to develop without compunction his pen-
chant for Wagnerisms. Other graduates of the St. Petersburg Conservatory
seemed more loyal to the forms they learned from A. B. Marx than to the
idea of creating new forms out of Russia's noble clay.
All the earliermyths of Russian nationalist music were resurrectedthree

decades later for the purposes of Soviet cultural policy. Ignoring the evi-
dent disillusionment in the words and music of those who had been at the
center of musical nationalism, policymakerspresented a fictional version of
this era of music history as a model whose successes commanded emulation
on the part of republics from the Black Sea to the frontier of China. Take,
for example, one of the founding fathers of Armenian national music,
Alexander Spendiarov. Born in the Crimea of Armenian parents, and a stu-
dent of Rimsky-Korsakov, he later devoted himself to the study of Arme-
nian folk music with the intention of creating a music for the nation he
chose to identify as his own, even though he never troubled to learn its
mother tongue. His operaAlmast (1918) was later appropriatedfor Soviet
purposes and praised as a worthy precursor to the new cultural policies,
despite mild criticism of the density of its musical language. Here is Spen-
diarov's appeal to nationalism:
Europeanmusicis alreadytoo refined;it has offeredus everythingit can. It

hasnothingmoreto sayand,to compensatefor the lackof anythingnew to
say,has to resortto variousmusicaltricks.In orderto introducesomething
fresh,Westernmusiciansturnto the East,and rightlyso.
I cannotunderstandmanyof our musicianssittingin Baku,Tbilisi,and
Yerevan,who conducttheir searchin the wrong direction.To arouseany
interestin Europe[atpresent],anArmenian,Azerbaijani, or Georgiancom-
posermust demonstratea talentat leastequalto Scriabin's.Nevertheless,a
moderatelygiftedmusician,if he wereto movein the right[i.e., nationalist]
direction,would [alsobe ableto] achieveresultsthatwouldcreateinterestin
Europe.25
These are familiar rhetorical strategies in a new context: the opposition
old Europe/young Russia, grist for the mill of Russian nationalism in the
previous century, is now simplified into the opposition old West/young
East. The composers of national music in the republics observed the success
of nineteenth-century Russian music in Europe and concluded that if the
West had found Russia's offerings so pleasingly exotic then, it would now
delight all the more in the "authentic" delicacies of oriental nationalism.
25. Alexander Spendiarov, interview for the newspaper Kommunist (Baku), 26 March
1925, no. 66. Reprinted in Spendiarovo muzike (Yerevan: Izd-vo Tsk Kp Armenii, 1971),
53-57.
Thisevinceda pragmatism fromwhichtheirRussiannationalist predeces-

sorshad,at leastin theirpublicstatements, distancedthemselves.
Thereareindeedmanysuchparallels--some intended,othersuncon-
scious-to be foundin theliterature of musicalnationalism in the repub-
lics. The Russiannationalistshad expendedmucheffortin attempting
to tracethe diatonicism of Russianfolksongbackto its allegedlyGreek
roots, and now the nationalcomposersof the republicsdid likewise.
Evenin a recentbookon Turkmen music,F. A. Abukovanotedthatthe
of
"synthesis Turkmen modes with the major-minor system"was easily
achievedowingto the closenessof the Turkmenmodesto thoseof the
Greeks; theauthorthuschoseto calltheresultsof thiscross"Phrygian" and
"Locrian."26 the
Or again, factthat Russian folk song was wronglyas-
sumedto havebeenmonodicmeantthattheproblems Russianshadfaced
overharmonization weremuchthe sameas thoseconfronted by the new
nationalcomposersattemptingto assimilategenuinelymonodicstyles.
Harmonization was,of course,a nonnegotiable, or indeeda defining,ele-
mentof boththeRussiannationalist andthelaterSovietprojects; therewas
no questionof remaining withinthe limitsof monody.The Azerbaijani
nationalcomposer Gajibekov offeredthefollowingadviceonthesubjectof
appropriate harmonizations:
Unskilledharmonization of anAzerbaijanimelodymaychangeits character,
neutralizeits modality,and even vulgarizeit. But this does not mean that
Azerbaijani musicshouldremainmonodicforever.... Polyphonyshouldbe
basednot on correctchordprogressionsor harmoniccadencesthat require
changesin modalstructure,but ratheron the combinationof logicallycon-
structedindependentmelodies.27
Theexample givenbyGajibekov (seeEx.2) demonstrates notso muchthe
independence of melodies,butrathertheavoidance of anythingthatwould
do violenceto the melody.His argumentis stronglyreminiscent of the
recommendations VladimirOdoyevsky hadmadein 1863:"Wetriedto
keepthe pianoaccompaniment as simpleas possible(sinequartaconso-
nante)... we did not dareto insert anyseventhchords... thiswould
distort
entirely thecharacterof Russian singing,bothsecular andsacred."28
Gajibekov'srecourse to imitativetexturesas a to
palliative four-parthar-
monicstylewasa strategythe Russiannationalists hadfrequentlyturned
to-imitation,no doubtbydintof itsgreaterantiquity, wasnotso strongly
associatedwithWesternmusic.Eachrepublicsoughtto drawthelinebe-
26. F. A. Abukova, Turkmenskayaopera:Putiformirovaniya,zhanrovayatipologiya(Ashkh-

abad: Ylym, 1987). Abukova seems unaware that the Gregorian and ancient Greek modes
were very different systems.
27. Uzeir Gajibekov, Osnoviazerbaidzhanskoynarodnoymuziki (Baku, 1945), 32.
28. Odoyevsky, "Starinnayapesnya," in Muzikal'no-literaturnoyenaslediye,252-54, at
253.
Example 2 Uzeir Gajibekov, two harmonizations of an Azerbaijani melody
"Strict"style
Folk
style
Folk style
• ! ! T t
!
'... ---,,-----
ld
J J -jJ
...• -J
. ,J .J -
tween its earliest, ad hoc "naive"harmonizations of monodies and its later,

systematic efforts, based on principles of appropriateness somehow de-
duced from properties of the monodic style. In Russia, this distinction had
been used to separatethe harmonized collections of Nikolai Lvov and Ivan
Pratsch from those of Balakirev;in Armenia, it likewise separatedthe work
of the collectors/composers Khristofor Kara-Murzaand Sogomon Komi-
tas. The Russian dream of new, authentically derived harmony and meth-
ods of development was ultimately a burden that the later, conservatory-
trained generations of local composers willingly shouldered, resulting in,
for example, the so-called mugam symphonies of Azerbaijan.
Many of these parallelswere at first encouraged, if not created, by the
Moscow and Leningrad composers offering "brotherlyhelp" to their col-
leagues in the republics. Take, for example, the group of composers gen-
erallyknown by the hyphenated triplet Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev,who were
assigned to the Kirghiz Republic. In their first full-blown opera, Ai-churek,
Abdilas Maldibayev, the native member of the collective, provided tran-
scriptions of original folk material and composed some melodies in a sim-
ilar style as well. This, however, was considered only as raw material,which
had to undergo a long process of refinement and shaping--a task carried
out entirely by Maldibayev's two Muscovite colleagues, Vladimir Vlasov
and Vladimir Fere. Their desire to create a Kirghiz style true to the mon-
odies they had in their hands led them back to the strategy Rimsky-
Korsakov so candidly revealed: the via negativa of avoiding anything that
would sound too blatantly Western. Attempting to purge themselves of
many compositional techniques that had become second nature, they in-
stead doubled the melody in fourths, on no better grounds than that the
Example 3 Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev, Ai-churek, act 2, orchestral introduction to Ai-

churek'sTale
Mosso
.' r4,=q
-i , 11F
4 -----
cresc. G G
fourthseparatedsuccessivestringsof the traditionalaccompanyinginstru-

ment, and likewisedoubledthe composedbassline at the fifth, simplyas
a meansof eschewingthe characteristic soundsof Westernharmonization.
The resultof this approachcan be seen in Example3.
Althoughthis negativeprocedurewas thus passedon fromthe Russian
nationaliststo the nationalcomposersof the republics,the latterdid not
treatthe peculiaritiesof the Russiannationaliststyle on a parwith other
nonindigenouscompositionalfeatures;indeed they apparentlyregarded
the styleas neutral.Glinkawas depictedas the fatherof allmusicalnation-
alism, to the extent that musicalproceduresstemmingfrom him, or by
extensionfrom The Five, were above suspicion.The Russiannationalist
devicesof flat VI within the major,chromaticcounterpointfor diatonic
melodies,and, aboveall, the changing-background variationtechniqueall
founda home in the nationaloperasof the republics.In the Caucasus,they
figuredin Paliashvili'sAbesalomi EteriandDaisi (Georgia),Spendiarov's
Almast (Armenia),and Gliere'sShahsenem(Azerbaijan);in CentralAsia
they could be heardin Brusilovsky'sZhalbir(Kazakhstan)and Gyul'sara
(Uzbekistan),and Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev's Ai-churek(Kirghizstan)...
andthe list goes on. Anothercharacteristictouch is the use of augmented
triadsto evokethe mysteriousor the fantasticin operaticscenarios:in Ai-
churek,for example,the appearanceof the dervishesis so marked,just as
Rimsky-Korsakov might havedone (Ex. 4).
Example5, from Ai-churek,is reminiscentof the clumsinessof Bala-
kirev'spupil Olenin,whose use of conventionalfour-partharmonyto un-
derscoremomentsof dramatictension was grotesquelyat odds with his
otherwiseaustereobservanceof the negationprinciple.Here the harmonic
Example4 Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev, act2, Kalhyman

Ai-churek, andothergirlsdriveaway
the witch anddervishes
PI udim."
f
Sf dim.
i b N
. .. 11"dl
6 6
palette of Vlasov and Fere is crudely disturbed when, after singing in a

simple and "appropriately"harmonized style, the eponymous heroine
"joyfully embraces her girlfriends" to the sound of distinctly Western
seventh-chord progressions.
It should be clear by now that in comparison with its more highly
regarded Russian prototype, this music often seems to be of a weaker, hot-
house variety, the result of the hurried cultivation of an externally formu-
lated Soviet-style nationalism within the ecology of equally artificialnation-
states. Even for the indigenous composers who gradually supplanted the
Russians, it was extremely hard, if not impossible, to overcome the inertia
of the Russian models. Nationalist composers from regions in the Caucasus
and Central Asia whose musical idioms had already been appropriated to
some extent by Russian and European music also had the legacy of orien-
talism to overcome. The very concepts of nationalism and orientalism, as
formulated by Edward Said, are of course closely related: the former in-
vents a national "Self,"while the latter invents a contrasting "Other"with
the ultimate purpose of reinforcing the national self.29 But what happens
to nationalism in "oriental"countries? Are Western images of the East re-
jected as misrepresentations, or are they incorporated to some extent into
the national consciousness? For our present purposes, orientalism encom-
passes Western/Russian musical idioms developed as representations of
the East. But to complicate matters, Russia has often seen itself as mediator
between East and West. True, Russian orientalism created images of a
29. EdwardW. Said,Orientalism

(London:RoutledgeandKeganPaul, 1978).
Example 5 Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev,Ai-churek, act 2, Ai-churek joyfully embraces Kaliy-

man andthe girls
3 m.d. 3
433 3
3-3
3
3
rI
•-]:
L F ; f"
I IL II1 1I-: ~ 1~ r
4- .#
10
rit.
3
aI 33
L--3. 8 5 ? . ?"
fairy-taleEast, but Russian composers were also happy to cultivate the ex-
otic, oriental image they enjoyed in the West. For the eastern republics,
however, Russia was a Western power, with a Western culture, and they
could not identify with it. Westernizing intellectuals within these societies
only reinforced the point: they wanted to emulate Russian culture because
its occidentalism was progressive, not because its oriental qualities could
be easily assimilated. Let us now explore the musical consequences of this
conceptual tangle.
Shadowsof Orientalism
WhenGlinkaset out to representRussiamusically,he had only a few

Russified Italians and Germans of local significance to compete with, and
Beethoven's RazumovskyQuartets seemed to flatternationalists ratherthan
invite reproach for misrepresentation. But for the burgeoning nationalism
in the republics there was a whole tradition of orientalism to take into ac-
count; this style, moreover, was not yet a thing of the past, for the progeny
of The Five still worked within it. Gliere, for example, created Shahsenem
in good faith, since he felt empowered ratherthan inhibited by the Russian
orientalist tradition. Composed for a people whose company he had shared
for some years, and whose music he heard every day, it could not be a
fantasy about some vague Eastern paradise. Nevertheless, Gliere seems to
have been oblivious to the enormous advantage he had over his predeces-
sors: the style of Shahsenem'smusic shows little or no evidence of what he
had seen and heard. As we can see in Example 6, his key to the treasuresof
the Orient is the lowered sixth degree in the major. This he cultivates in
melody to form an augmented second with the leading note, and in har-
mony to form the minor subdominant chord. Both techniques had, of
course, been used in Russian and European orientalism throughout the
century preceding Gliere's exploits, and they did not now escape the at-
tention of the first native Azerbaijani composer of importance, Uzeir Ga-
jibekov, whose resentment of orientalism caused him to venture mild
criticism of the honored and renowned Reinhold Gliere, Order of Lenin:
"Augmented seconds in music, images of the nightingale and rose in po-
etry, flower-bud ornaments in the visual arts, multicolored costumes and
ceremonious bows in the theater: all this pseudo-Eastern style can only jar
on an Eastern people and violate their spirit and tastes."30In time, even the
Russian critics writing for Sovetskayamuzika began to play the game of
catching out any composer guilty of "conventional external exoticism" or
following "old and dead orientalist traditions," though on the whole they
considered orientalism a problem of the past.
In 1939, losif Rizhkin outlined three main differences between pre-
revolutionary Russian orientalism and the new Soviet music written for
the republics. First, the process before the revolution was unidirectional,
while in Soviet times it became reciprocal: while Russians (Sergei Va-
silenko, Gliere, Boris Shekhter, and Brusilovsky) depicted the East, east-
erners (Khachaturian, Gajibekov, and Mukhtar Ashrafi) returned the
compliment. Second, before the revolution only a few individuals sought
out the songs and dances of the East, while now a significant portion, per-
haps even the majority, of Soviet composers worked with this material:
30. Uzeir Gajibekov, quoted in Safarova,Muzfkal'no-esteticheskiye
vzglyadyUzeira Gajibe-
kova,45.
Example6 ReinholdGliere,Shahsenem,
act 1, Kerib'saria
1, r r Frmmfii
Ya Ke- rib, pe- vets vdokh-no- ven- nYy, Lyut-sya
,9 I.IVIIV
vdal' vse mo- i pes- ni, Svoy u-
1Y 4.0
0.•,- il
.. . . . r- r
. =",.
-del ya p0- stig sok-

0 ro- Fo yen- miy, V e-torn
IF
-z
..+ •- -. -II• :• -
-dl ,r- o- ve
-stgso ,-..- • nf,. , e tr
.,J.!+
a' WNW
1
?:0" F
I. 21'" IV- ?
slav- myj moy ye- nets.
"Soon the melodic richness of the East will become the common property
of Soviet music, and Soviet culture will incorporate not single streams, but
the full waters of Eastern music."31And third, the fairy-tale and fantastic
elements of Russian orientalism contrasted with Soviet music, which,
while legitimately open to the earlier styles, did not allow its conventions
to overshadow the whole, diverse reality of the East. But while Rizhkin's
smooth arguments consigned problematic orientalism to the past, com-
posers living thousands of miles from his Moscow office were still greatly
vexed by the task of producing music that representedthe East. They could
not simply repeat the familiarformulas of the old orientalism, and yet their
music still had to be filtered through Western notation and assimilated to
Western forms and genres. Let us trace Gajibekov's approach to these is-
sues, with particular reference to his epic opera Keroglu, which he con-
sciously wrote as a corrective to the orientalism of Gliere's Shahsenem.
In his effort to overcome orientalist conventions, Gajibekov began,
naturally enough, with a careful study of "Azerbaijani"folk music and
on the basis of his findings attempted a theory of melodic modes.32 This
assumed--wrongly, as we have seen-that Azerbaijanwas a single nation
with a single culture, but for the moment we can set aside this reservation.
While he was occupied with developing his arguments and definitions, all
was well. But when the time came for him to apply his theories to his opera,
he was immediately confronted with a series of excruciating problems
involving tuning, polyphony, harmony, and vocal style. He could not in-
dulge in hand wringing for long, however, since he had a job to carryout
at the behest of the Soviet authorities. In the end he was apparentlyunable
to reconcile the demands of his nationalist agenda with those of the task in
hand, for his earlier pronouncements are clearly at odds with the actual
score of Keroglu.
With regardto tuning, Gajibekov agreed from the start that Azerbaijani
composers should adopt twelve-note equal temperament. In this, he was
merely accepting the pronouncement of Kuliev, the minister of Education;
there was probably little room for disagreement. Still, he was frank in ad-
mitting various difficulties. On the traditional tar (a lute with adjustable
frets), there could be twelve, thirteen, seventeen, or nineteen pitches within
the octave: for example, either two or three pitches might exist between D
and E, depending on the context. Gajibekov lucidly described how a mod-
ern piano would completely distort a folk melody that had a tonic on E,
another degree roughly the same as the piano's Eb/D#, and a third, fimc-
tionally distinct degree falling between these two (on the piano, this last
31. Iosef Rizhkin, "Stileviye cherti sovetskoy

muziki," Sovetskayamuzika (March 1939):
47-52.
32. See Gajibekov, Osnoviazerbaidzhanskoynarodnoymuziki.
wouldhaveto beassimilated to oneof itsneighbors).33 By 1939,however,

he hadenacteda ratherbizarrevolte-face,sayingthatAzerbaijani music
possessed no intervalssmaller than the semitone and even adding, with
peculiarsatisfaction, that"oursemitone,in fact,is wider." 34By thisstage
of hiscareer,Gajibekov wasno longera merenationalist of localstanding,
buta celebrated composerof the SovietUnion.His changein statusap-
pearsto havecoloredhis judgmentconsiderably: "I myselfignorethe
groundlessclaimsof somemusicologists that the international musical
alphabetis not sufficientfor the representation of the characteristicsof
Azerbaijani music.Thisopinioniswrong,sincethechromatic scalesatisfies
us completely."'5 Gajibekov hadneveractuallyopposedthe adoptionof
the importedtuning,but ratherhadsimplypointedout problemsthat
mightarisein implementing it. Hischangeof opiniontherefore cannotbe
as a
regarded pragmatic politicalconcession. It would seem,instead,that
he hadsincerely convincedhimselfof thisorthodoxyof Sovietmusic.He
wasnow quitereconciled to equal-temperament representations of Azer-
baijani music "ifthe is
style right"(i.e., when not orientalistin his view),
andhereported approvingly thattarplayers hadbegunto adjusttheirmov-
ablefretsto conformmoreor lessto equaltemperament.36
Theadoptionof polyphonyalsoposedobviousproblems to Gajibekov.
Sinceit wasa definingfeatureof themusicrequired by Soviet culturalpol-
icies,therewasno pointinmountingachallenge; problems to beover-
had
come,not usedasanexcuseforrejecting polyphony. ThemostGajibekov
coulddo wasto adviseagainstthewholesaleadoptionof a four-part har-
monicstyle,andto recommend sparsercontrapuntal textures instead.As
evenhisownpractices attest,however,it is hard,aftertheintroduction of
polyphony, to avoiddrawing from the harmonic resources of Western mu-
sic,oratleastfromthosethathadbeenmastered bythesecomposers. Even
octavedoubling,Gajibekov knew,wouldoftenviolateAzerbaijani musical
practice,sinceits non-octave-based modesassigneddifferentfunctionsto
degreesanoctaveapart.
Whilefullsurrender to the Europeaninheritance of tuningandpoly-
phonywasvirtually unavoidable, at firstthereseemedto be greaterpos-
sibilitiesfor compromise in the tonalandmodalorganization of music.
Gajibekov believedthatit waspossibleto combinetonalharmony withthe
melodicmodeshe extracted fromAzerbaijani traditionalmusic,andthat
33. Uzeir Gajibekov, "Muzikal'noe razvitie v Azerbaydzhane,"first published in Maarif
ve medenijet (1926), no. 8 (in Azerbaijani); quoted in Safarova, Muzikal'no-esteticheskiye
vzglyadyUzeira Gafibekova,145.
34. Uzeir Gajibekov, "O narodnosti v muz'ike,"Revolyutsiyai kultura 5 (1939): 110 (in
Azerbaijani); quoted in Safarova,Muzikal'no-esteticheskiye
vzglyadyUzeira Gajibekova,146.
35. Gajibekov, "O narodnosti v muzifke,"reprinted in his O muzi'kal'nomiskusstveAzer-
baydzhana(Baku, 1968), 85.
36. V. Vinogradov, Uzeir Gajibekovi azerbaydzhanskaya muzika (Moscow, 1972), 13-14.
neither need suffer in the process. Indeed, he attributed the success of his
opera Keroglu among his own people to "purely national" modal writing:
It is suggestedthatifAzerbaijanimusic,whichis monodicby nature,wereto
be suppliedwith harmony,then all its modal characteristics
would be re-
duced to naught..... Unskillfulattachmentof harmonyto an Azerbaijani
melodycan changeits character,and neutralizeits vivid modaltraits,even
vulgarizeit. But this does not meanthatAzerbaijani
musicmustforeverre-
mainmonodic.37
Elsewhere he wrote:
Whileworkingon the operaKeroglu,I allowedmyselfto deviateoccasionally
fromthe strictframeworkof the folk style;that is, I composedit in a freer
manner.As the outcomeshowed,the operasucceeded,on the whole,to gain
accessto a wide stratumof listeners,becausethe modalsystemwasthe start-
ing point of its musicaltext and of my creativefantasy.38
Any idea we might form from these comments as to how Keroglu actually
sounds cannot help but be remote from the opera itself. As Example 7
demonstrates, Gajibekov employs Western tonal idioms more crudely than
his words suggested, and this tended to obliterate the modes he employed
in his melodies. What we hear in Example 7a is the minor subdominant in
a major key, fully in line with the orientalism of Glinka or Gliere, plus the
alternation of tonic major-minor, another cliche of exoticism. While it is
possible that a native Azerbaijanimight detect in Keroglusome faint traces
of national characteristics,just as Russian audiences perceive Glinka'sA
Lifefor the Tsarto be Russian in sound, westerners are unlikely to share this
perception. The music of the Russian nationalists had already demon-
strated that tonal harmony would always dominate and suppress the mo-
dality of a melody. Gajibekov made no substantial advances in assimilating
harmony to the modal characterof the melodies he used.
One perennial controversy arising from modality involved the notorious
augmented second. Though the use of this intervalwas purported to be an
invention of Russian orientalism, Armenians and Uzbeks considered it a
sign of Azerbaijani influence and thus sought to avoid it. Was it then an
authentic feature of Azerbaijani music? At the height of his early anti-
orientalist fervor, Gajibekov vehemently rejected any such notion: 'The
'oriental' style is a convention, a cliche that frees a composer from all re-
sponsibilities. It is largely representedby an abundant chromaticism, by the
augmented second, and by certain melodic idiosyncrasies. Azerbaijanimu-
sic has no chromaticism-we have, rather, the strictest diatonicism."39
Later, however, he conceded that two of the eight traditional modes did
37. Gajibekov,Osnovi'azerbaydzhanskoy muziki,32.

narodnoy
38. Gajibekov, "O narodnosti v muzike," 86.
39. Ibid., 85.
Example 7 Uzeir Gajibekov, Keroglu, act 1, Keroglu's aria

(a)
Sev- dim sa- ni man ei Ni-
-ga- rm, r'- na k6- za-
-lim shan- ba- ha- rim.
13
Sev- dim sa- nihm, ya-

Example7 continued
(a)
17
21
ol- maz 6z- kQ sev- ki- lim sin-
P o " o"r#
'' I -
i-.-... , , ,..
25
-dn, ai ,
Example7 continued
(b)
A 1$
4.,raoiI i
diish
dfish dim
dfim Ni-
Ni- gar!
gar!
fI - -
i TL f' "JI d l dbl ?
a .....+ •t. • ' " • . . .

IL. "g I I I
,"
UA
----
indeedcontaintetrachordswith augmentedseconds,and, moreover,that

thesetwo modeswereassociatedwith textsexpressingpassionateyearnings
and the painsof love. The undeniablemusicalevidencearoundGajibekov
thus forcedhim to admitthat his earlierviews were incorrect,and by the
time he composedKeroglu,he had acceptedthat the use of melodicaug-
mentedsecondswas legitimate.Not surprisingly,the resultsoundsto our
ears very much like a returnto orientalism(note, in Example7b, the
emphasison the augmentedsecond in the conventionalfinalcadenceof
Keroglu'saria).
With regardto vocalstyle,Gajibekovonce againwas of two minds:on

the one hand, he was uncomfortablewith the idea of introducinga bel
canto standardinto Azerbaijaninationalopera:"Europeansinging is, to
our ears,still somethingstrangeand unpleasant;sometimesit is found to
be such an irritantthat peoplewould ratherleavethe operahouse."40On
the other hand, he laterdeniedin print the very existenceof any charac-
teristicof folk musicthat would conflictwith bel canto.41
In 1937, Kerogluwas performedin Moscow, at the Festivalof Azerbai-
janiArt,togetherwith Gliere'sShahsenem. Not only did criticsfailto detect
anyopposition between Gajibekov Gliere;theychoseto praiseKeroglu
and
by comparing it to Borodin'sPrinceIgor, a touchstoneof Russianorien-
talism.In the followingdecades,Kerogluwas often singledout as a proof
of Sovietopera'shigh achievements;it wasjudgeda resoundingsuccessby
the criterion"nationalin form,socialistin substance."As ananti-orientalist
gesture,however,Kerogluwas a failure.The blendof EastandWest in the
musicof Rimsky-Korsakov, for example,at leastbenefitsfrom a sophisti-
catedtechnique,whichGajibekovsignallylacks.Kerogludoes not substan-
tially departfrom orientalistconventions,yet at the same time it is in a
senseoccidentalist,for it containsa collectionof deadconventions,suchas
da capoform,middle-sectionsequences,andfinalritardandi. Ultimately,it
is as much a partialtruthto treatthe idiomsof Westernmusicin this way
as it is to use augmentedsecondsto representthe East.
One myth, then, succeededanother:the authenticitythatcriticsfound
lackingin Russianorientalismprovedno easierfor the nationalistsof the
republicsto attain.Indeed,even the most obvious of orientalistconven-
tions often turnout, upon closerexamination,to be the best possibleap-
proximationsof genuine Easternfeaturesby meansof availableWestern
idioms. For instance,the alternationbetween major and minor third,
found in the orchestralpreludeto act 3 of Aida, is derivedfrom the
"neutral"third.In the firstdecadeof the twentiethcentury,the Armenian
composerandfolk-songcollectorNicogaiosTigranianarrivedat precisely
the same device to represent a feature of Armenian music. He also used
ornamental semitone figures to render the peculiarities of Armenian sing-
ing, in a manner that greatly resembles the decorated melodies of Russian
orientalism. Similarly, Gajibekov admitted that no instrument is closer to
40. Gajibekov, quoted in Safarova,Muzikal'no-esteticheskiye vzglyadyUzeira Gajibekova,
161-62.
41. Gajibekov, quoted in Safarova,Muzikal'no-esteticheskiye vzglyadyUzeira Gajibekova,
161. There was, in fact, an attempt to combine the characteristicsof bel canto and the Azer-
baijanifolk manner of singing in the school founded in 1932 by the famous singer Byul'-Byul'
Mamedov, who after study in Italy had emerged as a highly polished tenor. Mamedov also
tried to assimilate traits of ashug (folk epic singer) performances, such as a virtuosic high
register and the ability to sing tirelessly for hours. The extant recordings of his performances
on vinyl disc (in music by Gajibekov, for example) are striking for their microtonal ornamen-
tation and "neutral"thirds. For more on the achievements of his school see S. Khalfen, "Azer-
baydzhanskayashkola peniya," Sovetskayamuzika (March 1940): 81-82.
Musicological
the timbre of the zurna (a Middle Eastern shawm) than the same cor an-
glais favored by the orientalists. In the end, the achievement of the anti-
orientalists was limited to an extension of the range of conventions used to
represent their musical cultures, such as doubling in fourths or the use of
clusters.
Of all the Soviet composers who emerged from the nationalist project,
only Aram Khachaturianattained world renown. It is ironic that his music
in no way challenges the Russian orientalist style. Never dissociating him-
self from the traditions of Russian music, he came to be regarded in Mos-
cow as a mouthpiece of the entire Soviet Orient, gathering up all the
diverse traditions into a grand generalization. His music suggests that the
following remarkis more than a mere demonstration of loyalty to humor
the authorities:
[Russianorientalmusic] showed me not only the possibility,but also the
necessity,of a rapprochement between,and mutualenrichmentof, Eastern
and Westerncultures,of Transcaucasian musicand Russianmusic..... the
orientalelementsin Glinka'sRuslan,andin Balakirev's
TamaraandIslamey,
were strikingmodelsfor me, and provideda strongimpulsefor a new cre-
ativequestin this direction.42
It is hardly surprising that Khachaturian'smost popular piece, the Sabre
Dance, was parodied mercilessly by Nino Rota in the satirical orientalist
episode in Fellini'sAmarcord.And this leads us to ask whether any Eastern
nationalism can make a clean break with the orientalist tradition, at least
within the sphere of tonal harmony. Indeed, is any nationalism possible
beyond the limits of tonal harmony? An Armenian scholar (who must re-
main nameless) recently sought to convince me that an Armenian national
twelve-tone music could and did exist. But what would an Armenian au-
dience recognize with delight in a twelve-tone series?Would they be filled
with that immediate, irrationalpride in their nation that was so successfully
kindled by the nationalists of a previous generation? It was this need for
popular sympathy that caused the composers of the Soviet republics to
maintain a simple style: they were not merely responding to the strictures
of socialist realism. Often lacking the expertise and innovative spirit of the
composers of the Russian orientalist classics, the indigenous musicians had
only one potential advantage: their knowledge of a large corpus of folk
melodies. But these folk songs had lost many of their characteristicsin the
process of notation, and the composers' native experience of Eastern mu-
sical traditions proved next to useless, owing to the compromises they had
to make in the interests of the chosen Western genre and medium. The
Soviet project of creating a national system of harmony or counterpoint
was from the outset virtually doomed, as was the Russian nationalism be-
fore it. The underlying problem besetting national composers of the Soviet
42. Aram Khachaturian,quoted in D. A. Arutyunov,A. Khachaturiani muzikaSovetskogo
Vostoka:Yazik, stil, traditsii (Moscow, 1983), 15.
Asian republics was that they chose to represent their native musical cul-
tures within an imported Western tradition, and thus inevitably entangled
themselves in the orientalism they hoped to repudiate.
The investigation of musical nationalism in the Soviet republics would
be incomplete if we were not to place it within the context of socialist re-
alism. After all, in the Stalin slogan used as the title of the present article,
the diversifying tendency of "nationalin form" was counterbalancedby the
unifying tendency of "socialistin content." And while the national element
was a feature of the existing Soviet Union, the socialist element was meant
to usher in a nationless future. Let us then examine what was, in terms of
Stalin's version of Marxism-Leninism, the socialist dimension of the
project.
"Socialist in Content"
"Socialist in content": what is that supposed to mean when applied to mu-

sic? There were other slogans, too, which artists could ill afford to ignore:
they were told, for example, to "master Bolshevism." Such pronounce-
ments, though easy for Stalin to make, were much harder for musicians to
implement. At the joint conference of Soviet composers, musicologists,
and operatic producers in 1937, Stalin's speech on opera emphasized three
points: the subject matter was to be socialist, a realist musical language
bearing the imprint of its national origins was to be adopted, and a new
breed of hero was to be drawn from contemporary Soviet life. In effect, this
meant that the composer of an opera was obliged to place in his work not
only a bevy of folk songs but a popular uprising, led or inspired by a loyal
Bolshevik hero. One of the Party'sleading music critics, Georgiy Khubov,
reiterated Stalin's formula, adding to it a fourth point that was more spe-
cifically musical: "Our new operas must above all include these four ele-
ments: Soviet subject matter, narodnost'["nationality,"or "people-ness"],
realism, and the mastery of symphonic development."43But this was no
simple, foolproof method by which a composer could achieve success, for
each of the four points was double-edged. Too much of the national ele-
ment could be criticized as bourgeois nationalism, too much realism was
bourgeois naturalism, and too much symphonic development was bour-
geois formalism. Even Soviet subject matter could entrap the composer.
For example, Vano Muradeli, with his opera The Great Friendship,unwit-
tingly provoked the notorious 1948 resolution (ostensibly against formal-
ism), which brought composers to heel.44While on the face of it this work
43. Khubov, "Sovetskayaopera," 15.

44. The 10 February 1948 Resolution of the Communist Party Central Committee, en-
titled "On V. Muradeli'sopera The GreatFriendship,"extended its criticism beyond Muradeli
and branded another six composers formalist: Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram
had appeared to enjoya safeplot concerningsocialistrevolutionin the

Caucasus, Stalin'smostloyalofficialsfoundintolerableits inevitablepor-
of
trayal many of Stalin's
Georgian compatriots opponentsof theSoviet
as
revolutionarystruggle.
Forourpurposes,it is important to notethatin Stalin'sandKhubov's
formulas,thenationalandsocialistarenottwoseparate entitiesto becom-
binedand reconciled; rather,the nationalis a necessarycomponentof
Oneof thefirstaccusations
socialism. leveledagainstShostakovich waspre-
cipitatedby his failureto quoteUkrainian melodiesin his balletabouta
Ukranian collectivefarm.Muradeli, twelveyearslaterin 1948,wassimi-
larlyreproached, thoughthistimeStalinwasmorepersonally concerned,
sinceanabsenceof Georgian folkmusicwasatissue.In thefollowingpas-
sagefroma speechby A. A. Zhdanov,we candetectStalin'sdisappoint-
mentat the lackof anyfamiliar lezghinkamelody:
If, in the courseof the action,the lezghinkais performed,then its melodyis
notreminiscent
certainly ofanypopular melodies.
lezhginka Inhispursuit
of
the composerofferedhis own musicfor the lezghinka,
originality, music
tedious,
barelycomprehensible, andfar lessmeaningfulor beautiful
than
normallezghinkafolkmusic.45
Althoughsuchcriticism spurred manycomposers to quotecopiouslyfrom
folksources,eventhistechnique no
provided safeguard. AmongtheParty's
musiccriticswerearbitersof professionalism who condemned"lazy"or
"naive" dependence on folkquotations. VlasovandFere,forexample, were
criticizedfor their"incorrect to
approach" harmonization, which arose
fromtheir"fearof distorting folkmelodies."46 Infact,no pathguaranteed
a composer's safety,for the strictures
of the critics
wereevermutable,ar-
and
bitrary, contradictory.
Thespecterof "bourgeois nationalism"couldbe invokedat anytime,
andthecriticswhosetthemselves thetaskof rootingit outdisplayed great
ingenuity."TheChuvashchoir,"notedone, "performs in nationalcos-
tumes;it is of greatimportance to the choristers,whichin itselfcounts
Khachaturian, Vissarion Shebalin, Gavriil Popov, and Nikolai Myaskovsky (published in

Sovetskayamuzika [January-February 1948]: 3-8). Subsequent meetings and discussions
concentrated mainly on castigating Prokoviev and Shostakovich (see "Vstupitel'naya rech'
tov. A. A. Zhdanova na soveshchanii deyateley sovetskoy muziki v TsK VKP(b)," ibid.,
9-13; and "Vistupleniya na sobranii kompozitorov i muzikovedov g. Moskvi," ibid., 63-
102). See also Alexander Werth, Musical Uproarin Moscow(London: Turnstile Press, 1949;
reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973).
45. A. A. Zhdanov, introductory speech at the meeting of Soviet musicians in the Central
Committee of the Communist Party, Sovetskayamuzika (January-February 1948), 10. The
lezghinkais a type of fast Georgian dance.
46. A. Lepin, "'Altin-Kiz': Kirgizskaya opera V. Vlasova i V. Fere," Sovetskayamuzi'ka
(December 1937): 48-55.
"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 365
againstthem.A desireto performas an 'ethnographic' choirsmacksof

nationalism" (i.e., of the wrong,bourgeoisvariety)."4 Another criticde-
tectedbourgeoisnationalism in the use of the characteristicUzbekvocal
stylewithintheoperahouse,aswellasin thepromotion of Uzbeknational
instruments overWesternones.48Littledid it matterthatothercritics
mighthavepraisedorcondonedanalogous practicesa fewyearsearlier,or
in a neighboring republic. Once a precedent had been set,composers had
to takenote.Theylearnedtheycouldno longerassumethatanyparticular
localtraditionmightbelegitimately andsafelydrawnon.Thedevelopment
of theBuryat-Mongol "Lamas' orchestra" (templeband)traditionproved
especiallytroublesome, forit was seen asa displayof chauvinism typicalof
bourgeois nationalism. For a time, the division of the republic'scultural
traditionsintothoseof the rulersandthoseof theoppressed wasnot, on
thewhole,rigidlyenforced;thisallowedcomposers to explore,forexam-
ple,the most developed mugam traditions.But a once-safecourseof action
might be condemned later,bringing retroactivepunishment on the com-
poser. In 1951, for instance, a musical purge took in
place Uzbekistan;
composers workingthereweredenouncedin thefollowingterms:
[They]do not understandthatthe old feudalandcourtsongs, full of mystic
and eroticmotives,areutterlyforeignto our people,the activebuildersof
communism.Theytend to forgetthe wordsof our greatLeninon the pres-
enceof twocultures
withineverynational thatis,of rulingclasses
culture,
andof theoppressed.
Theysneakin viewsthatarecontraryto Marxist
aes-
under
thetics, the pretextof deployingcultural
heritage.49
Afterthisattack,allSovietcomposers hadto avoidtraditionalmusicthat
mightbedeemedcharacteristic of theformerelites.Althoughpeasantmu-
sicandrecentproletariansongshada primafacieclaimto legitimacy,their
treatmentby composers wasalsoundercarefulscrutiny,aswe haveseen.
The followingquotation,althoughdatingfromthe veryendof Stalin's
rule,describes
thegeneraltendencyof officialpolicythroughout
the 1930s
and 1940s to exertpressureon composersto workwithinthe stylistic
boundariesof GlinkaandTheFive:
It is importantto stressthat folk melodies,when they are encounteredin
WestEuropeanmodernistmusic,areusedfor purposesthathavenothingin
common
withnationality Theyarenever
[narodnost']. usedforthepurposes
47. A. Livshits, "Puti razvitiya muzikal'noy kul'turi v sovetskoy Chuvashii," Sovetskaya

muzi'ka(September 1934): 16.
48. A report from a musical conference in Tashkent; see I. Martinov,
"Muzikal'nayakon-
ferentsiya v Tashkente," Sovetskayamuzika (March 1937): 102.
49. From the Resolution of the Central Committee of the Uzbek Communist (8 April
1951). First published in the editorial of Pravda vostoka(29 April 1951); quoted (approv-
ingly) in T. Vizgo, "O natsional'noy forme sovremennoy uzbekskoy muziki," Sovetskaya
muzika (May 1953): 45-50.
Musicological
Society
of realism,unlikefolk song in the Russianclassics. The conclusionto

....
drawfromthis is thatthe use of a folk themeis not in itselfa panacea.I am
afraidthatsomepersonsherehavedecidedthatwhereverthereis a folktune,
all is well. This is not true.We can convinceourselvesthat it is not true by
observingthe exampleof Stravinsky-beginningfromTheRiteofSpringand
Petrushka-orBart6k,or even Szymanowski.In Szymanowski's balletHar-
nasiethere are, indeed, some folk tunes from the Polish Tatras.But who
coulddenythatit is a formalistworkthroughout?!The methodsBelaBart6k
devisedto incorporatefolkmusicrepresenttheworstkindof formalism.Our
workwith folk melodiesmust be completelydifferent.50
The distinction between using folk music on the one hand for the sake
of narodnost'(easily recognizable folk elements within a listener-friendly
idiom) and on the other for the sake of technical display (encompassing any
devices outside those of the Russian classics) became very important for
Soviet musical ideology and survived as an article of the composer's ethical
code until at least the late 1960s. It seems remarkablethat even after the
post-Stalin thaw, such prescriptive elements continued to affect musicol-
ogy to some extent, although the motivation for using them no longer
existed. These traces of the past were found not merely in the writings of
timeservers; such an original as Izaliy Zemtsovsky, the doyen of Soviet
ethnomusicology, sometimes wrote in later life as if long-dead Stalin were
peering over his shoulder. In the following passages, for example, Zem-
tsovsky faults composers who appropriateelements of folk music in order
to expand their range of musical techniques. The whiff of Stalinism may
seem subtle, but it would be immediately apparentto anyone familiarwith
the criticisms characterizing Sovetskayamuzika in the 1930s and 1940s.
The use of such phrases as "trulynational" and the "national image" were
typicalof Stalinist
writingon nationalism,
while"hasty"
and"aesthetically
unconvincing" are drawn from the standard vocabulary of Stalinist con-
demnations.
Of course,a composerhas a rightto use folk musicas anobjectof indepen-
dent intonationalvalue,leavingasideits socialfunctionandpoetictext. But
if he wantsto be trulynational,he hasto penetratethe verymentalityof the
people [narod].
To developforeignfolk music, moreover,to developits "extreme,"little-
knownforms--thereis somethinghastyin this appeal.... In my opinion,it
is aesthetically to advisea Russiancomposerto use,forexample,
unconvincing
thefluidtuningsystemcharacteristicof the songsof the Setupeopleor of the
Yakuts.If a composerwantsto usethisslidingtuning,he canjustaseasilydo
it without turningto Setu folk music,which has not, by the way, been ex-
50. V. M. Gorodinsky's speech at the meeting of Moscow composers and musicologists,

Sovetskayamuzika (January-February 1948): 92.
ploredin anydepth.And anothermatter:if he is strivingto paintsome na-

tionalimage,then the folk experiencewill be of greatuse to him.51
The critics found still other grounds on which composers, through their
treatment of folk material, could be accused of arriving at unacceptable
results. Those who took folk melodies as their model accordingly wrote for
a narrower vocal range than was customary in Western opera or, more to
the point, in the classics of Russian opera. Indeed, the promotion of mod-
est folk tunes in opposition to the expansive, virtuoso range of the standard
operatic aria had been an important strategy both for Russians such as
Odoyevsky in the 1860s and later for musicians in the republics such as
Gajibekov in the 1930s. But in a 1948 speech, Zhdanov misapplied "Sta-
khanovite" criteria in his criticism of the Georgian composer Muradeli,
who had displayed similar preferences for a narrow vocal range that better
reflected the folk model: "One must not bury the talents of the Bolshoi
Theater singers by limiting their range to a half or two-thirds of the octave,
while they can produce two octaves. One ought not to impoverish the art
thus."52
Hand in hand with such assembly-linecriteriawent the demands of mu-
sical collectivism:
Another essentialsign of formalisttrends is the rejectionof polyphony,
whichis basedon simultaneouscombinationanddevelopmentof a number
of independentmelodiclines, in instrumentalmusic and singing; instead,
thereis a fondnessfor monotonous,unisonmusicandsinging,often word-
less,whichis in itselfa violationof the polyphonictraditioncharacteristic
of
our people,and leadsto the impoverishment anddeclineof music.53
The "unison, wordless singing" here singled out for reproach probably
lacks any referent; it was certainly not a general feature of Soviet national
operas. Some casual remarkof Stalin, made in ignorance of musical terms,
is the more probable origin of the phrase. As often happened, such remarks
were carefully noted and later reused in order to flatter the leader.54In
51. I. Zemtsovsky, "O fol'klore, istorizme i paradoksakh"(1968); reprinted in Zem-

tsovsky, Fol'klori kompozitor,31-37, at 32, 37; emphasis added.
52. Zhdanov's introductory speech at the meeting of Soviet musicians in the Central
Committee of the Communist Party, 10.
53. "Ob opere Velikayadruzhba V. Muradeli," Sovetskayamuzika
(January-February
1948): 5.
54. What makes me think that Stalin'smenacing shadow is behind various inconsistencies
and lapses in Zhdanov's speeches is one popular anecdote, which I am
prepared to believe,
regarding the puzzling asymmetry of the Moskva Hotel building in the center of Moscow.
The story runs thus: Stalin was offered a choice between two versions of the architectural
project, presented on a single sheet of paper. For reasons unknown, he placed his signature in
the middle, and the architects were too afraid to ask for clarification. The left
part of the
building was constructed according to one version, the right one to another. Stalin, it is said,
did not notice.
Musicological
Society
many ways, the style of Zhdanov's 1948 speech is a triumph of Soviet mu-
sic criticism: it mixes Party dogma and random phrases from music theory
primers in order to lend weight to arbitrary and uninformed personal
tastes, skillfully masked as careful deliberations underlying official policy.
For all that, of course, criticism did become policy.
"Socialist realism"was never worked out as a coherent theory, although
enormous efforts were expended in attempting to create the illusion of one.
Rather, it amounted only to a range of slogans with obscure gray valleys
between them. In truth, officials found this vagueness and lack of coher-
ence far too useful to be sacrificed,for it allowed them unlimited flexibility
in manipulating artists. Given two works of similarcharacter,one might be
praised and the other condemned, according to some momentary official
whim. Attacks on composers were sometimes based on nothing more than
fear that the absence of criticism might attractunwelcome attention to the
critic concerned: no one wanted to march out of step. Prokofiev and Shos-
takovich each composed a prizewinning Fifth Symphony, and each com-
posed a Sixth that won equal measures of condemnation; no one could
predict when and where the sword would fall. This was itself the guiding
idea behind the arbitrary and contradictory surface of policy decisions.
From our perspective, socialist realism in literature, painting, and music
alike was merely a futile recycling of nineteenth-century "criticalrealism"
into a prescribeduncritical utopianism. The forms of Tolstoy's novels, Re-
pin's pictures, and Musorgsky's operas were to be filled with positive he-
roes, happy faces, and triumphant sounds. In other words, socialist art was
to be familiar in form and anodyne in content. Or is this really a formula
for the abolition of art?Is not art without creativitythe perfect correlatefor
elections without choice and trials without law?
After the musical purge of 1948, when nearly all the leading Soviet com-
posers were declared formalists and even their names became taboo, the
music produced in the republics edged back into the foreground once
more, having been overshadowed in the late 1930s and early 1940s by the
prizewinning efforts of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Nikolai Myaskovsky.
The status that Prokofiev and Shostakovich had enjoyed proved to be frag-
ile, while Gajibekov's, for example, was entirely secure. One of the 1948
Stalin Prizes went to Estonia for a cantataloyally dedicated to Stalin by one
Tallat-Kelpsha.55This was seen as an event of some importance, since it
showed that a new sister republic was able to take part in the great cultural
project; the piece immediately received the highest praise. It would be fair
to conclude that the music written under the rubric "national in form,
55. The Stalin Prize was the main state award given to artists and scientists from 1940 to
1952. Reintroduced in 1966 under the name "State Prize of the USSR," it continued to be
awarded until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
socialistin content"was regardedby the authorities

as exemplary,
para-
digmatic Sovietart.Thisviewremained in placethroughoutmostof the
Stalinistperiodandis thereforecrucialfor our understanding
of Soviet
musichistory.
Thediscussion of Sovietculturalpolicyin the republics leadsus inevi-
tablyto thegeneralproblemof Sovietimperialism. Therelationsbetween
the centerandthe republics withinthe Sovietstatewerebasedto a great
extenton theheritageof theRussianempire,althoughofficialrhetoricdid
its bestto obscurethe connection.It is now understood thatMuscovite
Russiaexpanded to thenorth,east,andsouthin searchof natural frontiers,
andin doingso gradually incorporated countlessnewpeoples.Onecannot
properly speakof Russianbordersasdistinctfromtheshiftingborderses-
tablished byimperial expansion.Asnewterritories becameabsorbed, issues
relatingto themwere,in administrative terms,no longerforeignaffairs
buthomeaffairs. Russianimperial expansion is oftenpresented asruthless
Russification,butthisis aninadequate generalization basedon a fewrather
exceptional cases,aboveallthepolicyfromthe 1860sto the 1880s,mainly
in the UkraineandFinland,of forcedconversion to Orthodoxyandthe
impositionof the Russianlanguage.Forthe mostpart,Russiawasper-
fectlycontentwith whatevereconomicadvantages accruedfromthe ac-
quiredterritories, andrarelyinterfered withlocalreligionandlanguage.
Longyearsof contactwith a "moreadvanced" culture,officialsvaguely
hoped,wouldeventually bringaboutassimilation.
In his bookArcticMirrors, YuriSlezkinecontrasts the conquestof the
New Worldwiththe Russianexpansionto the northandeastfromthe
fifteenththroughthe seventeenth centuries.56The Spanishswiftlytook
possession throughvariousactsof law,renamed theterritories,
andbegan
the taskof claimingthe inhabitants forthe Church.In alltheiraccounts,
writersmarveled atthestrangeness of theplacesandtheirpeople,andthey
endeavored to discoverandreportbackasmanydetailsaboutthenewpos-
sessionsastheycould.TheRussians,on thecontrary, showedno curiosity
abouttheirnewlyacquired lands.Theywerereadyto abandon themif they
foundno apparent sourceof profit;theydidnot botherto changethelocal
placenames;andfarfrompromoting theirownreligion,theyoftensought
the protectionof localspirits.True,the occidentalized courtof Peterthe
Greatintroduced someof theattitudestowardempirecurrentin Europe,
andin practicethe corruption of the localagentsof the statewasoften
In
harshlyoppressive. general,however,officialpolicyregarding thenew
56. Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoplesof the North (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 33-45. On the conquest of the New World, see
Stephen Greenblatt,MarvelousPossessions: The Wonderof theNew World(Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991).
territorieswas non-interventionist. The Russianempireis bestunderstood

if we assigna differentstatusto eachof its "colonies,"ratherthan assume
a single, all-encompassingrelationshipbetween "colonizer"and "colo-
nized":there were expansessuch as Siberia,which were soon assumed
to be unproblematically a part of Russia;there were distinctbut largely
neglectedregions,such as partsof the Caucasus;therewere landswhere
Russia'srulewasmerelynominal,suchascentralAsia;andthereweretrou-
blesomeareaswith "advanced" peoples,such as Polandand Finland.
In its Sovietversion,the Russianempirelost its troublemakers (at least
priorto Yalta)andcameto takeall otherlimbsof the empirefor granted.
Though the right of the Soviet republicsto leavethe USSR was written
into the constitution,Moscow neverregardedthis as a seriouspossibility;
the belief in the indissolubilityof the union was underlinedabove all by
Khrushchev,whose "gift"of the Crimeato the Ukrainelies at the root of
allthe presenttroublesoverthis regionandthe BlackSeafleet.Compared
to tsaristRussia,the Sovietempireexploitedits outlyingregionsin a much
more systematicand intensivefashion.For the firsttime, Russiatook an
interestin culturalissuesandcoveredits policieswith elaboraterhetoricof
"equality" and"thefriendshipof peoples."To be fair,this rhetoricwasnot
completelyunfounded:ratherthanbeing meresecond-classcitizens,non-
Russianssometimeshadprivilegessimilarto those accordedto the Russian
urbanworkingclass (therewere, for example,quotasfor entryto higher
education).Anotherinstanceof this"friendship" in actionis, of course,the
subject matterof the presentarticle.A change of rhetoric took placeduring
the GreatPatrioticWar, and especiallyafterthe victory,when Stalinini-
tiateda wave of Russianchauvinism(his own Georgianoriginsnotwith-
standing).This briefphasefailedto outliveits maker,althoughit no doubt
left in its wakea greatlyreinforcedbut still latentanti-Semitism.
The breakupof the Soviet Union spawnednew independentnation-
statesovernight,for the foundationswerealreadyin place,andonly a spirit
of resistancewas requiredfor independenceto becomea possibility.Their
nationhoodwas no longer an artifactof Moscow'spolicies,but a legal--
and apparentlyirreversible-politicalreality.As for the culturalnational-
ism that the new independentstatesinheritedfrom the Soviet period, it
was not thrownoverboardas a vestigeof colonialculture,but insteadwas
in each case tailoredto new circumstances.Althoughthis "socialist"cul-
turalnationalismhadbeenengineeredthousandsof milesawayin Moscow,
and imposedfromwithout, it was neverperceivedas entirelyalienby the
peoplesof the republics.So muchof the materialused in the construction
of "national"artifacts--thefolk tales,songs, and costumes-wasrecogniz-
ably their own that they assimilatedthe importednationalismwithout
much difficulty.Wherea folk song had come to be regardedas national
property,so too, by extension,did its operaticversion.A much-lovedtra-
ditional singer who began to modify his folk manner in the direction of bel
canto did not fade from popularity, but rather extended the limits of what
was heard as belonging to the nation.
At the same time, Soviet policies regarding industrialization and edu-
cation contributed to nation building in socioeconomic terms. The newly
built countries and their cultural nationalism were gradually meshing. Ar-
menians are proud of Khachaturian and consider him a national treasure,
even though he was born in Georgia, lived in Moscow, and, like everyone
else, followed the Party'sorders; there is no sign that they are disturbed by
his manifest acquiescence in Russian orientalism. A very different variety of
nationalism, promoting a culture of resistance, had arisen in the previous
century and had resulted in, for example, the invention of a special Arme-
nian musical notation. But this type of nationalism was completely eradi-
cated during the Soviet era as an atavistic bourgeois tendency; it is hardly
likely to flourish today in the majority of the newly independent states,
which now look beyond Russia toward the Western, democratic model.
We shall surely witness a new wave of musical nationalism in these coun-
tries, as well as increased interaction with the West-now without Russia
as mediator. Yet what happened to them in the Soviet past will never be
completely erased and will in some form continue to shape their future.
Abstract
The present article examines the Soviet project of developing national

musical cultures within the Caucasian and Central Asian republics of the
USSR. This undertaking effectively required the transplantingof the Rus-
sian nineteenth-century model of musical nationalism to the republics,
under the guidance of composers sent from Moscow and Leningrad. The
article investigates the relationship between this model and its imitations,
using examples from Caucasian and Asian operas, and touching upon the
connected discourses of orientalism and socialist realism.

Frolova Walker Nationalism

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Frolova Walker Nationalism

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Frolova Walker Nationalism

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

"National in Form, Socialist in Content": Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics

Author(s): Marina Frolova-Walker

The developmentof culturesnationalin formandsocialistin contentis nec-

Comrades,we want-we passionatelywish-to have our own "Mighty

My subject is a unique and bizarre project: the attempt to create,

This revived musical nationalism had to be fitted into a new mold, of

3. Sovetskayamuzika (January 1934): 3.

hierarchicallyorganized ethno-territorial units with sometimes arbitrarily

7. From Comrade Chelyapov's speech to the Moscow Union of Composers, Sovetskaya

had departedfromthe cultureof the people.Theirfalsecreationswere re-

Owingto the maturingexpectationsof the Uzbekaudience,the furtherques-

9. GeorgiyKhubov,"Sovetskaya opera,"Sovetskayamuzika(January1938): 15.

proudly called "operas,"though everyone was aware of the gaps yet to be

1938 April 5-15, Azerbaijan

boundaries setbyMoscow'srules.Wecouldevensaythatlaterin thecen-

Sincemusicalnationalism in the Sovietrepublicswasdependenton the

On the other hand, significant cultural forces in some of the republics

Hyperbole aside, this statement demonstrates remarkableclear-sightedness

Nineteenth-century Russian musical nationalism held a powerful appeal

European-wide acknowledgment of an important "Russian school." This

Russianness was appropriatedby later composers trying to express the Ka-

alternativeto symphonic development in the Germanic manner. The result

if I werewritingin a Russianstyle,as it wouldbe inappropriate,

sion the music creates is of an obsessive avoidance of standard "Western"

Kudeyar (Giving Nastya a lingering look) Broadly, freely

Ya lyub- lyu, lyub-lyu te-bya kra-

He rushes towarda pile of weapons

-shcho lyub-lyuya vo-lyush-ku! ----------------------------------------------

[I love you, I love you, my beauty!

nationalism they had so passionately espoused in earlier years. Balakirev

All the earliermyths of Russian nationalist music were resurrectedthree

Europeanmusicis alreadytoo refined;it has offeredus everythingit can. It

Thisevinceda pragmatism fromwhichtheirRussiannationalist predeces-

26. F. A. Abukova, Turkmenskayaopera:Putiformirovaniya,zhanrovayatipologiya(Ashkh-

Example 2 Uzeir Gajibekov, two harmonizations of an Azerbaijani melody

tween its earliest, ad hoc "naive"harmonizations of monodies and its later,

Example 3 Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev, Ai-churek, act 2, orchestral introduction to Ai-

fourthseparatedsuccessivestringsof the traditionalaccompanyinginstru-

Example4 Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev, act2, Kalhyman

palette of Vlasov and Fere is crudely disturbed when, after singing in a

29. EdwardW. Said,Orientalism

Example 5 Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev,Ai-churek, act 2, Ai-churek joyfully embraces Kaliy-

WhenGlinkaset out to representRussiamusically,he had only a few

vdal' vse mo- i pes- ni, Svoy u-

-del ya p0- stig sok-

31. Iosef Rizhkin, "Stileviye cherti sovetskoy

wouldhaveto beassimilated to oneof itsneighbors).33 By 1939,however,

37. Gajibekov,Osnovi'azerbaydzhanskoy muziki,32.

Example 7 Uzeir Gajibekov, Keroglu, act 1, Keroglu's aria

Sev- dim sa- ni man ei Ni-

-ga- rm, r'- na k6- za-

-lim shan- ba- ha- rim.

Sev- dim sa- nihm, ya-

ol- maz 6z- kQ sev- ki- lim sin-

a .....+ •t. • ' " • . . .

indeedcontaintetrachordswith augmentedseconds,and, moreover,that

With regardto vocalstyle,Gajibekovonce againwas of two minds:on

"Socialist in content": what is that supposed to mean when applied to mu-

43. Khubov, "Sovetskayaopera," 15.