Frolova Walker Nationalism

"National in Form, Socialist in Content": Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet RepublicsAuthor(s): Marina Frolova-WalkerReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp.331-371Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831980 .Accessed: 10/12/2011 19:25

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

The development of cultures national in form and socialist in content is necessary for the purpose of their ultimate fusion into one General Culture, socialist as to form and content, and expressed in one general language.

-I. V. Stalin, Marksizm i natsional'no-kolonial'niy vopros (1934) Comrades, we want-we passionately wish-to have our own "Mighty Handful."

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

within the Caucasian and Central Asian republics of the USSR, national musical cultures that would reflect the musical nation-

alism that grew up in Moscow and St. Petersburg during the previous century. 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 fairly simple matter for lecturing on historical topics, 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 objections have been raised about the existence of the Conservatory, although its presence in Almati is, of course, a result of Soviet Russification policies. The opera house and concert hall similarly arrived in Kazakhstan as pillars of imported Soviet culture, but are now accepted as legitimate platforms for the promotion of Kazakhstan's cultural agenda. Because the transfer of sovereignty from Moscow to Almati is no longer in doubt, the legacy of Soviet cultural policy need not be rejected as a foreign imposition. Rather, it can safely be taken for granted, with piecemeal changes made to reflect the complexion of the new states. As recently as the 1980s, scores

[Journal of the American Musicological Society 1998, vol. 51, no. 2] ? 1998 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. 0003-0139/98/5102-0004$2.00

332 Journal of the American Musicological Society

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 alike consider 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, cultural colonialism, orientalism, and the history of socialist realism.'

The main focus of this article is the renaissance of romantic nineteenth- century nationalism within a socialist multinational state. Such a combination 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 inaccurate on 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 strategies of romantic nationalism were retained but yoked to new purposes, with results that were sometimes remarkably grotesque, 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 Grove Dictionary ofOpera, 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 available on many of the composers discussed in the present article could be found in Stanley Dale Krebs, Soviet Composers and the Develop- ment of SovietMusic (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970); and Rena Moisenko, Realist Music: Twenty-five Soviet 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 occasionally commented on the interaction of traditional culture with Soviet ideology: see Mark Slobin, "Conversations in Tashkent,"Asian Music 2, no. 2 (1971): 7-13; and also Theodore C. Levin, "Music in Modern Uzbekistan: The Convergence of Marxist Aesthetics and Central Asian Tradition,"Asian Music 12, no. 1 (1979): 149-58. There is a brief but very penetrating description of the matter in question in Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), xvi-xvii.

"National in Form, Socialist in Content" 333

cation were raised to dogma in this era, negotiating the resulting ideological 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-gardism of the immediate prerevolutionary years had already largely ousted nationalism. The aristocratic or bourgeois background of Russian composers, past and present, rendered them members of the enemy culture, and only Musorgsky's operas, now styled as "dramas of the people," were spared by the zealous left Bolsheviks of the RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians). 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 reactionary shifted attention from rural to urban, and specifically proletarian, popular musical culture. For the first time, disseminators of folk music had to find in it something specifically "revolutionary" or "progressive" rather than 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 "contemporary music, suffocating in the grip of twelve-note temperament."2 But 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 familiar verities 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 Sovetskaya muzika. 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's comments first appeared in Sovremennaya muzika 22 (1927): 287; quoted in I. Zemtsovsky, Fol'klor i kompozitor (Leningrad and Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1978), 10-11.


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 Sovetskaya muzika, 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 "national 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 himself, 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 territory was 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. Sovetskaya muzika (January 1934): 3. 4. "Under the conditions of a dictatorship of the proletariat within a single country, the

rise of cultures national in form and socialist in content has to take place, so that when the proletariat wins 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, Marksizm i natsional'no-kolonial'n'y vopros [Moscow, 1934], 195).

5. J. V. Stalin, Works, 13 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952- 55), 2:307.


hierarchically organized ethno-territorial units with sometimes arbitrarily drawn borders. Beneath the level of the entire union were the national republics; 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 hierarchy, 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 artificially created territory: since the boundaries of a national republic 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 Azerbaijani nation. Minority ethnic groups were required to assimilate, for ethnic and territorial complications 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 bureaucracy realized 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 carried out simultaneously across the union, even in seminomadic Central Asia, where Western cultural in- stitutions were a complete novelty. Because Uzbeks and Kazakhs were clearly unable to take such a cultural leap without substantial external help, members of the Composers' Union from Moscow and Leningrad were re- cruited to oversee the project. Indeed, in many cases they wrote the required 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: Essays in 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 reversed in the absence of a restraining Soviet authority.


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 musical issues" of Sovetskaya muzika. 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 experience and talents were needed most urgently. Almost every Soviet composer soon became involved in this campaign; it was by no means merely a shrewd career move 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 great masters, all great composers of the past (of all peoples, without exception!) proceeded from this [i.e., folk music]. And, on the contrary, those who were locked in a narrow world of shallow, subjective feelings, and who tried to "create [music] out their own selves"--eventually found they 7. From Comrade Chelyapov's speech to the Moscow Union of Composers, Sovetskaya

muzika (March 1936): 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 characteristically dense 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 impossible to discern the former avant-gardist in 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 departed from the culture of the people. Their false creations were rejected by the people, because the people will not tolerate a 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 development 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:

Owing to the maturing expectations of the Uzbek audience, the further question of harmonizing the opera arises, since the most cultured among the Uzbeks cannot now be satisfied by monophony. This question appears ever more often on our agenda. It is mentioned in the resolution on comrade Ikramov's paper at the fifth session of the Uzbek Communist Party Central Committee. Some steps are being taken in that direction: the orchestra is being filled with European instruments, and some numbers are being harmonized. Piano accompaniment is being introduced, sometimes composed for the whole piece (e.g., Roslavets, Uttan Pachalyar).

In 1933-34 the work on harmonization acquired the nature of a mass production process. Comrade [Nikolai] Mironov, who was invited to do this job, is filling the operas Arshin mal alan, Purtana, and others with harmonized numbers....

The next step to which he [the simple listener] will ascend is the perception of harmonic music. But for the further evolution of the Uzbek opera, harmonization alone will not suffice. The spectator will not be satisfied by emotional empathy alone: he will demand the reconstruction of the very musical forms constituting the opera-arias, choruses, finales. At present there still is absolutely no recitative, which remains unassimilated by Uzbek singers: immediately after singing, their characters switch to spoken dialogue.'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 festivals of national cultures in Moscow."I By then it had produced ten plays with music,

9. Georgiy Khubov, "Sovetskaya opera," Sovetskaya muzika (January 1938): 15. 10. E. Romanovskaya, "Muzika v Uzbekistane," Sovetskaya muzika (September 1934):

3-9, at 8. 11. The first, pre-war series of the Dekadi' natsional'nogo iskusstva (ten-day festivals of na-

tional art): 1936 March 11-21, Ukraine; May 17-25, Kazakhstan 1937 January 5-15, Georgia; May 21-30, Uzbekistan


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 harmonized 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 Khubov--a

model of Party orthodoxy-- 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 careers of "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 preferred to 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" republics (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 circumstances may be summarized as follows. First, the culture of each republic developed according to Moscow's directives, making 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," Sovetskaya muzika (March 1937): 7-14.


boundaries set by Moscow's rules. We could even say that later in the century these colonial creations had been assimilated and endowed with some degree of authenticity in the eyes of each republic's populace. If, following Eric Hobsbawm, we regard nationalism as a network of invented traditions,'3 then in the case of the Soviet republics, we can say that various peoples acquiesced in the invention of traditions by others on their behalf (indeed, some of the "peoples," like the Azerbaijanis, were themselves the creation of Moscow). In the second part of this article, we shall examine the model for all of these national cultures: the profile of nationalism as it developed within Russian culture in the nineteenth century. This will enable us to explain and interpret Moscow's actions as it sought to replicate the process elsewhere.

Whose Nationalism?

Since musical nationalism in the Soviet republics was dependent on the model of nineteenth-century Russia, these states were expected to inaugu- rate their era of national art music with an opera, just as Glinka had done for Russia. Moreover, they were expected to approximate one or other of the two genres derived from Glinka that had become the twin pillars of Russian music in the generation after him. The first, in which the topic of class struggle was particularly encouraged, was the "heroic drama of the people," represented by Glinka's Ivan Susanin, the ideologically acceptable reworking ofA Life for the Tsar; the second was the national epic, written in the manner of Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila. New operas from the republics were thus always measured against the yardstick of the Russian classics. For example, the Azerbaijani national 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 transliterated variously 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," Sovetskaya muzika (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 "Izkazhennaya istoriya" ("Distorted History"), Sovetskaya muzika (May


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 already convinced of the benefits of westernization, and they saw Russia as the closest source of a westernizing influence. Azerbaijan was one such republic. There Mustafa Kuliev, minister of Education, had started a far-reaching musical reform in the early 1920s, long before the cultural revolution was imposed by Moscow. Azerbaijan was one of the three Transcaucasian republics, 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, followed 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 introduced a clumsily rudimentary European tonal idiom, with startlingly incongruous 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 collective 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 musicologists, reported in Sovetskaya muzfka (January-February 1948): 91: "Unfortunately, comrade Pekelis did not subject his own work to sufficient criticism, particularly the 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 emphasized, 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'am and Central Asian makom) is a traditional setting of classical poetry (e.g., Nezami Genjavi) in the form of a large cyclic composition based on elaborate vocal improvisation with instrumental accompaniment.

18. B. Zeidman, "Glibre i Azerbaijanskaya muzikal'naya kul'tura," R. M. Glitre: Statyi, vospominaniya, materialy, vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1966), 216-36.


prominent heirs to the Russian nationalist tradition of The Five, was sum- moned to Baku. After conscientious study of the folk sources made available 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 radical westernization 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:

Some of our musicians are always repeating that Tirk songs cannot be tran- scribed within the European system. But Russian or German songs cannot be fitted into the twelve-note European temperament either.... Yet this did not prevent Russian music from a wholesale adoption of European founda- tions and techniques, or from developing these to such heights as Glinka did.19

Hyperbole aside, this statement demonstrates remarkable clear-sightedness on the part of Kuliev, since Russian nationalist composers had never acknowledged any discrepancy between the folk song they heard in the field and its representation on the piano, even though in some Russian traditions 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 development of Azerbaijani music, 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's Shahsenem and 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-reaching musical 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 vzglyady Uzeira Ga- jibekova (Moscow, 1973), 96.


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 opinion, a distinctively 'Russian music' does not exist. Both harmony and melody 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."21 Russian 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 primacy of 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 current since 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's A Life for 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-literaturnoye naslediye [Mos- cow: GMI, 1956], 119). Stasov was impatient to see Balakirev "forever part 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. Balakirev and 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, Izbrannie stat'i [Leningrad, 1952], 37). Underlying these remarks was the critics' propensity to exaggerate the extent to which compositions exhibited Russian characteristics, as did, say, Nikolai Mel'gunov onA Life for the Tsar or Cui on Rimsky-Korsakov's First Symphony (Mel'gunov, "Glinka i yego muzikal'nie sochineniya" [1836], reprinted in 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, Polnoe sobranie sochineniy: Literaturniye proizvedeniya i perepiska, 7 vols. [Moscow: Muzgiz, 1955-70], 5:254). In music, as in other aspects of Russian nationalism 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 dreamed of reproducing the whole of European music history in Russia and to this end started writing Palestrina-style counterpoints 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," Russkaya muzikal'nayagazeta 15, no. 49 (7 December 1908), cols. 1119-20; quoted in Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through "Mavra," 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 1:64.


Russianness was appropriated by 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 composers 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 producing 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-quarters of a century, Russian composers had at some stage addressed nearly all the possible issues arising from the attempt 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 accordance with the principles of German romantic 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 everyday music 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/urban opposition 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 authentic.

Russian methods of bringing folk song into art music ranged from straightforward quotation to the abstraction and assimilation of various perceived characteristics. But the ambitions of musical nationalism set a further goal: the creation of a Russian musical language. The desire to develop music in parallel with literature drew composers beyond the 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 particular an


alternative to symphonic development in the Germanic manner. The result was the "changing-background" variation technique, which was to prove so fruitful for him and his successors. The next important step was the discovery by Vladimir Stasov of the law of Russian plagalism, 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, articulated around IV, and Western harmony, in which the role of V is central.22 Another development that came to be regarded as part of an authentically Russian musical syntax was the declamatory style Musorgsky extracted from the melody of Russian speech. And so the innovations of individual composers were recast as discoveries of an im- manent Russianness. Once again, however, Rimsky-Korsakov punctured these pretensions:

Russian traits--and national traits in general--are acquired not by writing according to specific rules, but rather by removing from the common language of music those devices which are inappropriate to a Russian style. The method is of a negative character, a technique of avoiding certain devices. Thus, for example, I would not use this turn of phrase:

A'.

if I were writing in a Russian style, as it would be inappropriate, but in other contexts I might use it freely. Otherwise it would not be a creative process, but only some kind of mechanical process of writing in accordance with various rules. To achieve a Russian style I would avoid some devices, for a Span- ish style I would avoid others, and for a German style, still others.23 How very prosaic. Here the composer is not, after all, the conduit for

the ineffable groanings of the Russian soul, but merely a practical musician who has learned the trick of avoiding certain turns of phrase in order to 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 characteristic of the West is employed in this music, which is based, rather, on Russian two-part textures with their peculiar features of voice leading."24 Finished in 1911, this opera is now rarely heard. The first impres-

22. I have examined the myth of "Russian plagalism" in my article "On Ruslan and Rus- sianness," Cambridge Opera Journal 9, no. 1 (1997): 21-45.

23. Rimsky-Korsakov, quoted in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions 1:64. 24. Olenin, quoted inMiliyAlekseevich Balakirev: Vospominaniya ipis'ma, ed. E. Frid (Len-

ingrad: GMI, 1962), 344.


Example 1 Alexander Olenin, Opera-song Kudeyar (a) Orchestral prelude to 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, chromaticism, 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 restricts his 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 modulations 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 characteristic variation technique had been stamped with a Russian trade- mark, but these hardly offered limitless possibilities for future development. The surviving members of The Five gradually abandoned the


Example 1 continued

(b) Scene of Kudeyar and Nastya from act 4

Kudeyar (Giving Nastya a lingering look) Broadly, freely

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

a,4r ii W, I K ._ y rF mF -sa- vi-tsa! Ya lyub- lyu te- bya da zhar-che prezh-ne- vo! A ye-

He rushes toward a pile of weapons and picks out some knives and a mace.

-shcho lyub-lyu ya vo-lyush-ku! 8va. ----------------------------------------------

I., SAw I IW

[I love you, I love you, my beauty! I love you even more than ever! But I also love my freedom!]

nationalism they had so passionately espoused in earlier years. Balakirev produced a Second Symphony that Stasov regarded as 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 earlier myths of Russian nationalist music were resurrected three 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, policymakers presented 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 appropriated for 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:

European music is already too refined; it has offered us everything it can. It has nothing more to say and, to compensate for the lack of anything new to say, has to resort to various musical tricks. In order to introduce something fresh, Western musicians turn to the East, and rightly so.

I cannot understand many of our musicians sitting in Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan, who conduct their search in the wrong direction. To arouse any interest in Europe [at present], an Armenian, Azerbaijani, or Georgian composer must demonstrate a talent at least equal to Scriabin's. Nevertheless, a moderately gifted musician, if he were to move in the right [i.e., nationalist] direction, would [also be able to] achieve results that would create interest in 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 Spendiarov o muzike (Yerevan: Izd-vo Tsk Kp Armenii, 1971), 53-57.


This evinced a pragmatism from which their Russian nationalist predeces- sors had, at least in their public statements, distanced themselves.

There are indeed many such parallels--some intended, others uncon- scious-to be found in the literature of musical nationalism in the republics. The Russian nationalists had expended much effort in attempting to trace the diatonicism of Russian folk song back to its allegedly Greek roots, and now the national composers of the republics did likewise. Even in a recent book on Turkmen music, F. A. Abukova noted that the "synthesis of Turkmen modes with the major-minor system" was easily achieved owing to the closeness of the Turkmen modes to those of the Greeks; the author thus chose to call the results of this cross "Phrygian" and "Locrian."26 Or again, the fact that Russian folk song was wrongly assumed to have been monodic meant that the problems Russians had faced over harmonization were much the same as those confronted by the new national composers attempting to assimilate genuinely monodic styles. Harmonization was, of course, a nonnegotiable, or indeed a defining, element of both the Russian nationalist and the later Soviet projects; there was no question of remaining within the limits of monody. The Azerbaijani national composer Gajibekov offered the following advice on the subject of appropriate harmonizations:

Unskilled harmonization of an Azerbaijani melody may change its character, neutralize its modality, and even vulgarize it. But this does not mean that Azerbaijani music should remain monodic forever. ... Polyphony should be based not on correct chord progressions or harmonic cadences that require changes in modal structure, but rather on the combination of logically con- structed independent melodies.27

The example given by Gajibekov (see Ex. 2) demonstrates not so much the independence of melodies, but rather the avoidance of anything that would do violence to the melody. His argument is strongly reminiscent of the recommendations Vladimir Odoyevsky had made in 1863: "We tried to keep the piano accompaniment as simple as possible (sine quarta conso- nante) ... we did not dare to insert any seventh chords ... this would entirely distort the character of Russian singing, both secular and sacred."28 Gajibekov's recourse to imitative textures as a palliative to four-part harmonic style was a strategy the Russian nationalists had frequently turned to

-imitation, no doubt by dint of its greater antiquity, was not so strongly associated with Western music. Each republic sought to draw the line be-

26. F. A. Abukova, Turkmenskaya opera: Putiformirovaniya, zhanrovaya tipologiya (Ashkh- abad: Ylym, 1987). Abukova seems unaware that the Gregorian and ancient Greek modes were very different systems.

27. Uzeir Gajibekov, Osnovi azerbaidzhanskoy narodnoy muziki (Baku, 1945), 32. 28. Odoyevsky, "Starinnaya pesnya," in Muzikal'no-literaturnoye naslediye, 252-54, at

253.


Example 2 Uzeir Gajibekov, two harmonizations of an Azerbaijani melody "Strict" style

Folk style

Folk style

'... ! !

ld ! T t

---,,-----

... . ,J -J J J .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 separate the harmonized collections of Nikolai Lvov and Ivan Pratsch from those of Balakirev; in Armenia, it likewise separated the work of the collectors/composers Khristofor Kara-Murza and Sogomon Komi- tas. The Russian dream of new, authentically derived harmony and methods 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 parallels were at first encouraged, if not created, by the Moscow and Leningrad composers offering "brotherly help" to their colleagues in the republics. Take, for example, the group of composers generally known 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 similar 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 monodies 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 instead 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's Tale

Mosso

-----

cresc. .' r4,=q -i , 11F 4

G G

fourth separated successive strings of the traditional accompanying instrument, and likewise doubled the composed bass line at the fifth, simply as a means of eschewing the characteristic sounds of Western harmonization. The result of this approach can be seen in Example 3.

Although this negative procedure was thus passed on from the Russian nationalists to the national composers of the republics, the latter did not treat the peculiarities of the Russian nationalist style on a par with other nonindigenous compositional features; indeed they apparently regarded the style as neutral. Glinka was depicted as the father of all musical nationalism, to the extent that musical procedures stemming from him, or by extension from The Five, were above suspicion. The Russian nationalist devices of flat VI within the major, chromatic counterpoint for diatonic melodies, and, above all, the changing-background variation technique all found a home in the national operas of the republics. In the Caucasus, they figured in Paliashvili's Abesalom i Eteri and Daisi (Georgia), Spendiarov's Almast (Armenia), and Gliere's Shahsenem (Azerbaijan); in Central Asia they could be heard in Brusilovsky's Zhalbir (Kazakhstan) and Gyul'sara (Uzbekistan), and Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev's Ai-churek (Kirghizstan) ... and the list goes on. Another characteristic touch is the use of augmented triads to evoke the mysterious or the fantastic in operatic scenarios: in Ai- churek, for example, the appearance of the dervishes is so marked, just as Rimsky-Korsakov might have done (Ex. 4).

Example 5, from Ai-churek, is reminiscent of the clumsiness of Bala- kirev's pupil Olenin, whose use of conventional four-part harmony to un- derscore moments of dramatic tension was grotesquely at odds with his otherwise austere observance of the negation principle. Here the harmonic


Example 4 Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev, Ai-churek, act 2, Kalhyman and other girls drive away the witch and dervishes

f PI udim."

Sf dim.

b i N

. .. 1 1"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 formulated Soviet-style nationalism within the ecology of equally artificial nation- 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 orientalism to overcome. The very concepts of nationalism and orientalism, as formulated by Edward Said, are of course closely related: the former invents 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 rejected 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. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).


Example 5 Vlasov-Fere-Maldibayev, Ai-churek, act 2, Ai-churek joyfully embraces Kaliy- man and the girls

3 m.d. 3

3-3

433 3

3 3

I-: .# 1 ~ 1~ r 4- I IL II1

-]: ; L F f" r I

10 rit.

a I L--3.

3 3

.

? "

3

8 ? 5

fairy-tale East, but Russian composers were also happy to cultivate the exotic, 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.


Shadows of Orientalism

When Glinka set out to represent Russia musically, he had only a few Russified Italians and Germans of local significance to compete with, and Beethoven's Razumovsky Quartets seemed to flatter nationalists rather than invite reproach for misrepresentation. But for the burgeoning nationalism in the republics there was a whole tradition of orientalism to take into account; 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 rather than 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's music shows little or no evidence of what he had seen and heard. As we can see in Example 6, his key to the treasures of 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 harmony 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 attention 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 poetry, 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."30 In time, even the Russian critics writing for Sovetskaya muzika 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 prerevolutionary 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, perhaps even the majority, of Soviet composers worked with this material:

30. Uzeir Gajibekov, quoted in Safarova, Muzfkal'no-esteticheskiye vzglyady Uzeira Gajibe- kova, 45.


Example 6 Reinhold Gliere, Shahsenem, act 1, Kerib's aria

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-

.. . . . . r- r . =",.

-del ya p0- stig sok- ro- yen- miy, V e-torn

slav- myj moy ye- nets.

1Y 4.0

0.,- il

0 Fo

..+ - - -. - : II IF -z

.,J.!+ ,-.. . , ,r -d l a' -stg so - o- ve - nf, e tr ?:0"

WNW F I.

1 21'" IV- ?


"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."31 And 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, composers living thousands of miles from his Moscow office were still greatly vexed by the task of producing music that represented the East. They could not simply repeat the familiar formulas 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 issues, 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 Azerbaijan was 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 carry out at the behest of the Soviet authorities. In the end he was apparently unable 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 regard to 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 modern 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," Sovetskaya muzika (March 1939): 47-52.

32. See Gajibekov, Osnovi azerbaidzhanskoy narodnoy muziki.


would have to be assimilated to one of its neighbors).33 By 1939, however, he had enacted a rather bizarre volte-face, saying that Azerbaijani music possessed no intervals smaller than the semitone and even adding, with peculiar satisfaction, that "our semitone, in fact, is wider." 34By this stage of his career, Gajibekov was no longer a mere nationalist of local standing, but a celebrated composer of the Soviet Union. His change in status appears to have colored his judgment considerably: "I myself ignore the groundless claims of some musicologists that the international musical alphabet is not sufficient for the representation of the characteristics of Azerbaijani music. This opinion is wrong, since the chromatic scale satisfies us completely."'5 Gajibekov had never actually opposed the adoption of the imported tuning, but rather had simply pointed out problems that might arise in implementing it. His change of opinion therefore cannot be regarded as a pragmatic political concession. It would seem, instead, that he had sincerely convinced himself of this orthodoxy of Soviet music. He was now quite reconciled to equal-temperament representations of Azer- baijani music "if the style is right" (i.e., when not orientalist in his view), and he reported approvingly that tar players had begun to adjust their mov- able frets to conform more or less to equal temperament.36

The adoption of polyphony also posed obvious problems to Gajibekov. Since it was a defining feature of the music required by Soviet cultural policies, there was no point in mounting a challenge; problems had to be overcome, not used as an excuse for rejecting polyphony. The most Gajibekov could do was to advise against the wholesale adoption of a four-part harmonic style, and to recommend sparser contrapuntal textures instead. As even his own practices attest, however, it is hard, after the introduction of polyphony, to avoid drawing from the harmonic resources of Western music, or at least from those that had been mastered by these composers. Even octave doubling, Gajibekov knew, would often violate Azerbaijani musical practice, since its non-octave-based modes assigned different functions to degrees an octave apart.

While full surrender to the European inheritance of tuning and polyphony was virtually unavoidable, at first there seemed to be greater possibilities for compromise in the tonal and modal organization of music. Gajibekov believed that it was possible to combine tonal harmony with the melodic modes he extracted from Azerbaijani traditional music, and that

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 vzglyady Uzeira Gafibekova, 145.

34. Uzeir Gajibekov, "O narodnosti v muz'ike," Revolyutsiya i kultura 5 (1939): 110 (in Azerbaijani); quoted in Safarova, Muzikal'no-esteticheskiye vzglyady Uzeira Gajibekova, 146.

35. Gajibekov, "O narodnosti v muzifke," reprinted in his O muzi'kal'nom iskusstve Azer- baydzhana (Baku, 1968), 85.

36. V. Vinogradov, Uzeir Gajibekov i 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 suggested that ifAzerbaijani music, which is monodic by nature, were to be supplied with harmony, then all its modal characteristics would be reduced to naught. .... Unskillful attachment of harmony to an Azerbaijani melody can change its character, and neutralize its vivid modal traits, even vulgarize it. But this does not mean that Azerbaijani music must forever remain monodic.37

Elsewhere he wrote: While working on the opera Keroglu, I allowed myself to deviate occasionally from the strict framework of the folk style; that is, I composed it in a freer manner. As the outcome showed, the opera succeeded, on the whole, to gain access to a wide stratum of listeners, because the modal system was the starting point of its musical text and of my creative fantasy.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 Azerbaijani might detect in Keroglu some faint traces of national characteristics, just as Russian audiences perceive Glinka's A Life for the Tsar to 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 modality of a melody. Gajibekov made no substantial advances in assimilating harmony to the modal character of the melodies he used.

One perennial controversy arising from modality involved the notorious augmented second. Though the use of this interval was 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 represented by an abundant chromaticism, by the augmented second, and by certain melodic idiosyncrasies. Azerbaijani music 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 narodnoy muziki, 32. 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- ni ya- hm,


Example 7 continued (a) 17

21

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

25

-dn, ai ,

P o i-.-

...

" o "r# ''

, I

, ,.. -


Example 7 continued (b)

dfish dfim Ni- gar!

A 1$ 4.,raoiI i

fI - - diish dim Ni- gar!

i TL f' "JI d l dbl ?

... . ..+ t ' " . . . IL.

a "g

," I I I

UA ----

indeed contain tetrachords with augmented seconds, and, moreover, that these two modes were associated with texts expressing passionate yearnings and the pains of love. The undeniable musical evidence around Gajibekov thus forced him to admit that his earlier views were incorrect, and by the time he composed Keroglu, he had accepted that the use of melodic augmented seconds was legitimate. Not surprisingly, the result sounds to our ears very much like a return to orientalism (note, in Example 7b, the emphasis on the augmented second in the conventional final cadence of Keroglu's aria).


With regard to vocal style, Gajibekov once again was of two minds: on the one hand, he was uncomfortable with the idea of introducing a bel canto standard into Azerbaijani national opera: "European singing is, to our ears, still something strange and unpleasant; sometimes it is found to be such an irritant that people would rather leave the opera house."40 On the other hand, he later denied in print the very existence of any characteristic of folk music that would conflict with bel canto.41

In 1937, Keroglu was performed in Moscow, at the Festival of Azerbai- jani Art, together with Gliere's Shahsenem. Not only did critics fail to detect any opposition between Gajibekov and Gliere; they chose to praise Keroglu by comparing it to Borodin's Prince Igor, a touchstone of Russian orientalism. In the following decades, Keroglu was often singled out as a proof of Soviet opera's high achievements; it was judged a resounding success by the criterion "national in form, socialist in substance." As an anti-orientalist gesture, however, Keroglu was a failure. The blend of East and West in the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, for example, at least benefits from a sophisti- cated technique, which Gajibekov signally lacks. Keroglu does not substan- tially depart from orientalist conventions, yet at the same time it is in a sense occidentalist, for it contains a collection of dead conventions, such as da capo form, middle-section sequences, and final ritardandi. Ultimately, it is as much a partial truth to treat the idioms of Western music in this way as it is to use augmented seconds to represent the East.

One myth, then, succeeded another: the authenticity that critics found lacking in Russian orientalism proved no easier for the nationalists of the republics to attain. Indeed, even the most obvious of orientalist conventions often turn out, upon closer examination, to be the best possible ap- proximations of genuine Eastern features by means of available Western idioms. For instance, the alternation between major and minor third, found in the orchestral prelude to act 3 of Aida, is derived from the "neutral" third. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Armenian composer and folk-song collector Nicogaios Tigranian arrived at precisely the same device to represent a feature of Armenian music. He also used ornamental semitone figures to render the peculiarities of Armenian singing, 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 vzglyady Uzeira Gajibekova, 161-62.

41. Gajibekov, quoted in Safarova, Muzikal'no-esteticheskiye vzglyady Uzeira Gajibekova, 161. There was, in fact, an attempt to combine the characteristics of bel canto and the Azer- baijani folk 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- baydzhanskaya shkola peniya," Sovetskaya muzika (March 1940): 81-82.


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 Khachaturian attained world renown. It is ironic that his music in no way challenges the Russian orientalist style. Never dissociating himself 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 remark is more than a mere demonstration of loyalty to humor the authorities:

[Russian oriental music] showed me not only the possibility, but also the necessity, of a rapprochement between, and mutual enrichment of, Eastern and Western cultures, of Transcaucasian music and Russian music..... the oriental elements in Glinka's Ruslan, and in Balakirev's Tamara and Islamey, were striking models for me, and provided a strong impulse for a new creative quest in this direction.42

It is hardly surprising that Khachaturian's most popular piece, the Sabre Dance, was parodied mercilessly by Nino Rota in the satirical orientalist episode in Fellini's Amarcord. 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 remain nameless) recently sought to convince me that an Armenian national twelve-tone music could and did exist. But what would an Armenian audience recognize with delight in a twelve-tone series? Would they be filled with that immediate, irrational pride 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 characteristics in the process of notation, and the composers' native experience of Eastern musical 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 before it. The underlying problem besetting national composers of the Soviet

42. Aram Khachaturian, quoted in D. A. Arutyunov, A. Khachaturian i muzika Sovetskogo Vostoka: Yazik, stil, traditsii (Moscow, 1983), 15.


Asian republics was that they chose to represent their native musical cultures within an imported Western tradition, and thus inevitably entangled themselves in the orientalism they hoped to repudiate.

The investigation of musical nationalism in the Soviet republics would be incomplete if we were not to place it within the context of socialist realism. After all, in the Stalin slogan used as the title of the present article, the diversifying tendency of "national in form" was counterbalanced by the unifying tendency of "socialist in 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 music? There were other slogans, too, which artists could ill afford to ignore: they were told, for example, to "master Bolshevism." Such pronouncements, 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's leading music critics, Georgiy Khubov, reiterated Stalin's formula, adding to it a fourth point that was more specifically musical: "Our new operas must above all include these four elements: Soviet subject matter, narodnost' ["nationality," or "people-ness"], realism, and the mastery of symphonic development."43 But 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 element could be criticized as bourgeois nationalism, too much realism was bourgeois naturalism, and too much symphonic development was bourgeois 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 formalism), which brought composers to heel.44 While on the face of it this work

43. Khubov, "Sovetskaya opera," 15. 44. The 10 February 1948 Resolution of the Communist Party Central Committee, en-

titled "On V. Muradeli's opera The Great Friendship," extended its criticism beyond Muradeli and branded another six composers formalist: Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram


had appeared to enjoy a safe plot concerning socialist revolution in the Caucasus, Stalin's most loyal officials found intolerable its inevitable por- trayal of many of Stalin's Georgian compatriots as opponents of the Soviet revolutionary struggle.

For our purposes, it is important to note that in Stalin's and Khubov's formulas, the national and socialist are not two separate entities to be combined and reconciled; rather, the national is a necessary component of socialism. One of the first accusations leveled against Shostakovich was pre- cipitated by his failure to quote Ukrainian melodies in his ballet about a Ukranian collective farm. Muradeli, twelve years later in 1948, was similarly reproached, though this time Stalin was more personally concerned, since an absence of Georgian folk music was at issue. In the following pas- sage from a speech by A. A. Zhdanov, we can detect Stalin's disappoint- ment at the lack of any familiar lezghinka melody:

If, in the course of the action, the lezghinka is performed, then its melody is certainly not reminiscent of any popular lezhginka melodies. In his pursuit of originality, the composer offered his own music for the lezghinka, music barely comprehensible, tedious, and far less meaningful or beautiful than normal lezghinka folk music.45

Although such criticism spurred many composers to quote copiously from folk sources, even this technique provided no safeguard. Among the Party's music critics were arbiters of professionalism who condemned "lazy" or "naive" dependence on folk quotations. Vlasov and Fere, for example, were criticized for their "incorrect approach" to harmonization, which arose from their "fear of distorting folk melodies."46 In fact, no path guaranteed a composer's safety, for the strictures of the critics were ever mutable, ar- bitrary, and contradictory.

The specter of "bourgeois nationalism" could be invoked at any time, and the critics who set themselves the task of rooting it out displayed great ingenuity. "The Chuvash choir," noted one, "performs in national costumes; it is of great importance to the choristers, which in itself counts

Khachaturian, Vissarion Shebalin, Gavriil Popov, and Nikolai Myaskovsky (published in Sovetskaya muzika [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 Uproar in 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, Sovetskaya muzika (January-February 1948), 10. The lezghinka is a type of fast Georgian dance.

46. A. Lepin, "'Altin-Kiz': Kirgizskaya opera V. Vlasova i V. Fere," Sovetskaya muzi'ka (December 1937): 48-55.


against them. A desire to perform as an 'ethnographic' choir smacks of nationalism" (i.e., of the wrong, bourgeois variety)."4 Another critic detect

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