Academic literature on the topic 'Music – Soviet Union – History and criticism'

Between 1962 and 1963 the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev launched several campaigns against abstractionists and formalists in Moscow, thus marking the end of the so-called Thaw throughout the Soviet Union. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Latvia also started a campaign against national abstractionists and formalists. On the 22nd and 28th of March 1963 the works of the new poets Vizma Belševica, Monta Kroma, Ojārs Vācietis as well as writer Ēvalds Vilks came under the criticism cross-fire at the Intelligentsia Meeting of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. After the criticism from the Communist Party the above mentioned authors also had to be discussed at the Board meetings of the Latvian Soviet Writers’ Union and the local organization meetings of the Party. The article examines the attitude of the Board of Soviet Writers’ Union towards the campaign initiated by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Latvia in March 1963 by looking at the documents of the Latvian Soviet Writers’ Union and the Union’s local organization of the Communist Party that are available at the State Archives of Latvia. Crucial and artistic aspects of the works of the above-mentioned authors have not been included in the analysis. Examining the debates that evolved in the Writers’ Union within the ideological campaign, it is possible to state that the Board, which was loyal to the Communist Party, kept its official stance in line with the Party principles, hereafter paying special attention to the ideologically artistic achievements of particular authors. Generally, the position of the Board of the Latvian Soviet Writers’ Union in respect to the criticized authors can be evaluated as passive, because no repressions were carried out against the new authors and no creative activities were completely suspended by the Board. The campaign of 1963 strongly demonstrates the differences between the generations and the views of the writers. It also reveals the older generation’s struggle for keeping their position and prestige in the field of literature while the younger generation took an increasing opposition.

Educational conditions reflect society’s cultural traditions and political system, in turn affecting society’s development. The development of the younger generation is guided by way of education, for which reason working out educational policy requires the participation of society’s various interest groups. This article analyses changes in the teaching of history in the transitional period from the Soviet era to restored independent statehood. The development of subject content, the complicated role of the history teacher, the training of history teachers, and the start of the renewal of textbooks and educational literature are examined. The aim is to ascertain in retrospect the developments that took place prior to the restoration of Estonia’s independence, in other words the first steps that laid the foundation for today’s educational system. Legislation, documents, publications, and media reports preserved in the archives of the Ministry of Education and Research and the Archival Museum of Estonian Pedagogics were drawn upon in writing this article, along with the recollections of teachers who worked in schools in that complicated period. These recollections were gathered by way of interviews (10) and questionnaires (127). Electronic correspondence has been conducted with key persons who participated in changes in education in order to clarify information, facts, conditions and circumstances. The discussion in education began with a congress of teachers in 1987, where the excessive regulation of education was criticised, along with school subjects with outdated content, and the curriculum that was in effect for the entire Soviet Union. The resolution of the congress presented the task of building a national and independent Estonian school system. The congress provided an impetus for increasing social activeness. An abundance of associations and unions of teachers and schools emerged in the course of the educational reform of the subsequent years. After the congress, the Minister of Education, Elsa Gretškina, initiated a series of expert consultations at the Republic-wide Institute for In-service Training of Teachers (VÕT) for reorganising general education. The pedagogical experience of Estonia and other countries was analysed, new curricula were drawn up and evaluated, and new programmes were designed for school subjects. The solution was seen in democratising education: in shaping the distinctive character of schools, taking into account specific local peculiarities, establishing alternative schools, differentiating study, increasing awareness and the relative proportion of humanities subjects and foreign language study, better integrating school subjects, and ethical upbringing. The problems of schools where Russian was the language of instruction were also discussed. The Ministry of Education announced a competition for school programmes in 1988 to find innovative ideas for carrying out educational reform. The winning programme prescribed compulsory basic education until the end of the 9th grade, and opportunities for specialisation starting in the second year of study in secondary school, that is starting in the 11th grade. Additionally, the programme prescribed a transition to a 12-grade system of study. Schools where Russian was the language of instruction were to operate separately, but were obliged to teach the Estonian language and Estonian literature, history, music and other subjects. Hitherto devised innovative ideas for developing Estonian education were summed up in the education platform, which is a consensual document that was approved at the end of 1988 at the conference of Estonian educators and in 1989 by the board of the ESSR State Education Committee. The constant reorganisation of institutions hindered development in educational conditions. The activity of the Education Committee, which had been formed in 1988 and brought together different spheres of educational policy, was terminated at the end of 1989, when the tasks of the committee were once again transferred to the Ministry of Education. The Republic-wide Institute for In-service Training of Teachers, the ESSR Scientific-Methodical Cabinet for Higher and Secondary Education, the ESSR Teaching Methodology Cabinet, the ESSR Preschool Upbringing Methodology Cabinet, and the ESSR Vocational Education Teaching and Methodology Cabinet were all closed down in 1989. The Estonian Centre for the Development of Education was formed in July of 1989 in place of the institutions that were closed down. The Institute for Pedagogical Research was founded on 1 April 1991 as a structural subunit of the Tallinn Pedagogical Institute, and was given the task of developing study programmes for general education schools. The Institute for the Scientific Research of Pedagogy (PTUI) was also closed down as part of the same reorganisation. The work of history and social studies teachers was considered particularly complicated and responsible in that period. The salary rate of history teachers working in secondary schools was raised in 1988 by 15% over that of teachers of other subjects, since their workload was greater than that of teachers of other subjects – the renewal of teaching materials did not catch up with the changes that were taking place in society and teachers themselves had to draw up pertinent teaching materials in place of Soviet era textbooks. Articles published in the press, newer viewpoints found in the media, published collections of documents, national radio broadcasts, historical literature and school textbooks from before the Second World War, and writings of notable historians, including those that were published in the press throughout the Soviet Union, were used for this purpose. Teachers had extensive freedom in deciding on the content of their subject matter, since initially there were no definite arrangements in that regard. A history programme group consisting of volunteer enthusiasts took shape at a brainstorming session held after the teachers’ congress. This group started renewing subject matter content and working out a new programme. The PTUI had already launched developmental work. There in the PTUI, Silvia Õispuu coordinated the development of history subject matter content (this work continued until 1993, when this activity became the task of the National Bureau of Schools). The curriculum for 1988 still remained based on history programmes that were in effect throughout the Soviet Union. The greatest change was the teaching of history as a unified course in world history together with themes from the history of the Estonian SSR. The first new curriculum was approved in the spring of 1989, according to which the academic year was divided up into three trimesters. The school week was already a five-day week by then, which ensured 175 days of study per year. The teaching of history began in the 5th grade and it was taught two hours per week until the end of basic school (grades 5 – 9). Compulsory teaching of history was specified for everyone in the 10th grade in secondary school, so-called basic education for two hours a week. The general and humanities educational branches had to study history three hours a week while the sciences branch only had to study history for two hours a week. Students were left to decide on optional subjects and elective subjects based on their own preferences and on what the school was able to offer. The new conception of teaching history envisaged that students learn to know the past through teaching both in the form of a general overview as well as on the basis of events and phenomena that most characterise the particular era under consideration. The teacher was responsible for choosing how in-depth the treatment of the subject matter would be. The new programmes were implemented in their entirety in the academic year of 1990/1991. At the same time, work continued on improving subject programmes. After ideological treatments were discarded, the aim became to make teaching practice learner-oriented. The new curriculum was optional for schools where the language of instruction was Russian. Recommendations for working with renewed subject content regarding Estonian themes in particular were conveyed by way of translated materials. These schools mostly continued to work on the basis of the structure and subject content that was in effect in the Soviet Union, teaching only the history of the Soviet Union and general history. Certain themes from Estonian history were considered in parallel with and on the basis of the course on the history of the Soviet Union. The number of lessons teaching the national official language (Estonian) was increased in the academic year of 1989/1990 and a year later, subjects from the Estonian curriculum started being taught, including Estonian history. The national curriculum for Estonian basic education and secondary education was finally unified once and for all in Estonia’s educational system in 1996. During the Soviet era, the authorities attempted to make the teaching profession attractive by offering long summer breaks, pension insurance, subsidised heating and electricity for teachers in the countryside, and apartments free of charge. This did not compensate the lack of professional freedom – teachers worked under the supervision of inspectors since the Soviet system required history teachers to justify Soviet ideology. The effectiveness of each teacher’s work was assessed on the basis of social activeness and the grades of their students. The content and form of Sovietera teacher training were the object of criticism. They were assessed as not meeting the requirements of the times and the needs of schools. Changes took place in the curricula of teacher training in 1990/1991. Teachers had to reassess and expand their knowledge of history during the transitional period. Participation in social movements such as the cultural heritage preservation movement also shaped their mentality. The key question was educational literature. The government launched competitions and scholarships in order to speed up the completion of educational literature. A teaching aid for secondary school Estonian history was published in 1989 with the participation of 18 authors. Its aim was set as the presentation of historical facts that are as truthful as possible from the standpoint of the Estonian people. Eesti ajalugu (The History of Estonia) is more of a teacher’s handbook filled with facts that lacks a methodical part, and does not include maps, explanations of terms or illustrations meant for students. The compendious treatment of Estonian history Kodulugu I and II (History of our Homeland) by Mart Laar, Lauri Vahtre and Heiki Valk that was published in the Loomingu Raamatukogu series was also used as a textbook in 1989. It was not possible to publish all planned textbooks during the transitional period. The first round of textbooks with renewed content reached schools by 1994. Since the authors had no prior experience and it was difficult to obtain original material, the authors of the first textbooks were primarily academic historians and the textbooks had a scholarly slant. They were voluminous and filled with facts, and their wording was complicated, which their weak methodical part did not compensate. Here and there the effect of the Soviet era could still be felt in both assessments and the use of terminology. There were also problems with textbook design and their printing quality. Changes in education did not take place overnight. Both Soviet era tradition that had become ingrained over decades as well as innovative ideas could be encountered simultaneously in the transitional period. The problem that the teaching of history faced in the period that has been analysed here was the wording of the focus and objectives of teaching the subject, and the balancing of knowledge of history, skills, values and attitudes in the subject syllabus. First of all, Soviet rhetoric and the viewpoint centring on the Soviet Union were abandoned. The so-called blank gaps in Estonian history were restored in the content of teaching history since it was not possible to study the history of the independent Republic of Estonia during the Soviet era or to gain an overview of deportations and the different regimes that occupied Estonia. Subject content initially occupied a central position, yet numerous principles that have remained topical to this day made their way into the subject syllabus, such as the development of critical thinking in students and other such principles. It is noteworthy that programmes for teaching history changed before the restoration of Estonia’s independence, when society, including education, still operated according to Soviet laws. A great deal of work was done over the course of a couple of years. The subsequent development of the teaching of history has been affected by social processes as well as by the didactic development of the teaching of the subject. The school reform that was implemented in 1987–1989 achieved relative independence from the Soviet Union’s educational institutions, and the opportunity emerged for self-determination on the basis of curricula and the organisation of education.

The current standing of the Estonian-born composer Arvo Pärt (b.1935) rests almost exclusively on the works he has composed since 1976, the year the composer unveiled the first fruits of his newly-discovered modal formulae, or what has now become known as the ‘tintinnabuli’ style. There is, however, a large, important and up until now relatively unexplored series of experimental works that predate this seemingly radical change of style. For example, Pärt's first orchestral piece, Nekrolog (1960), was the very first piece of Estonian music to employ the 12-note technique, incurring the wrath of no less a person than Tikhon Khrennikov, the all-powerful general secretary of the Soviet Composers’ Union. Indeed at the Third All– Union Congress of Soviet Composers held in Moscow in March 1962 Khrennikov singled out Pärt for criticism.

The study of musical signification constitutes an important key for the comprehension of Shostakovich’s music. This becomes particularly evident when one observes that social and political background plays an important role in his compositional process through the configuration of specific musical topics on structural positions of his music. These specific topics have arisen after cultural and social events during the establishment of the Soviet Union and became typical elements of the Soviet Music. This paper aims to show the function of these elements as compositional roots in the creative concept of Shostakovich’s music. The rising of the concept of musical topic after Leonard Ratner (1980) has opened new paths for a consistent comprehension of the musical discourse, identifying social and cultural signs that may articulate ideas which go beyond the music itself: ideology, criticism and politics became elements of musical expression, composing a new soundscape of music in Revolutionary Russia.

Abstract This article examines the compositional history and early reception of Soviet composer Andrey Volkonsky's two earliest and most important serial compositions, Musica Stricta and Suite of Mirrors (Syuita zerkal). These two works spurred on the formation of an unofficial music culture in the Soviet Union during the Thaw of the late 1950s and 1960s. Volkonsky (b. 1933) was the first and initially the most visible of a group of young Soviets known by officialdom as the “young composers” (“molodïïye kompozitorïï”). These “young composers”—among them Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, and Edison Denisov—came of age in the years following Stalin's death in 1953. Their compositions reflected their attempts to “catch up” with the Western avant-garde following decades of musical development that had been denied them under Stalin. The first “new” technique these composers adopted was serialism, and Volkonsky's early compositions illustrate the specifically Soviet approach to the method and demonstrate the meanings it held for Soviet officials and Soviet audiences. Volkonsky's early works also force a broadening of current interpretations of postwar European and American serialism. Much of the information in the article stems from personal interviews with Volkonsky and the other leading composers and performers of the Thaw, as well as archival research conducted in Russia.

The article is devoted to the history of the creation and music score of the ballet Twelve based on the poem by A. Blok by the outstanding Russian composer of the second half of the twentieth century Boris Ivanovich Tishchenko. The ballet was staged by the famous Soviet choreographer Leonid Jacobson back in 1964 and became, in fact, the first avant-garde ballet in the Soviet Union. Critics noted Tishchenko’s bright modern symphonic music and Jacobson’s free plastics, which “became a breath of clean air in the rarefied atmosphere of classical epigonism”.

AbstractScholars have explored the use of Breen-Davis's Porgy and Bess and its stellar ensemble cast to counter Soviet criticism of US race relations during the Cold War—but an equally prominent theme in contemporary coverage of the production is spirituality. Onstage as well as off, the Soviet tour of Porgy and Bess reflected both American and Soviet ideas about religion's role in international diplomacy in the mid-1950s. This article explores religiosity in the Breen-Davis production as well as the reception of the 1955–56 Soviet tour both in the United States, where the production represented a hopeful vision of the nation's racial tolerance and religious pluralism, and in the USSR, where the tour's twin messages of American spiritual superiority and racial equality were challenged by Soviet authorities. Drawing on materials from the Robert Breen Archives housed in the Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, this article considers Breen-Davis's Porgy and Bess as a religious export to the USSR, enriching our understanding of US cultural diplomacy and Cold War–era musical exchange with broader implications for American–Soviet history, religious studies, and opera analysis.

A war of history and memory over the Great Patriotic War (WWII) between the Soviet Union and Germany has been raging in Vladimir Putin’s Russia for almost two decades. Putin’s Kremlin deploys all of the mythmaking machinery at its disposal to correct narratives that demonize the Soviet Union and reflect badly on post-Soviet Russia. Victory Day, celebrated annually on 9 May with parades, concerts, films, theatre, art, and music, plays a crucial role in disseminating the Kremlin’s counter narratives.

In 1980 Soviet Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov began a series of “postludes,” a genre representing, in his words, a “collecting of echoes, a form opening not to the end, as is more usual, but to the beginning.” This article examines Silvestrov’s Symphony no. 5 (1980–82), and the theory, practice, and reception of his evolving “post” style. The symphony represents a unique congruence of modernism and postmodernism, nostalgia and continuity, expressed at the end of the Soviet Union, the end of the twentieth century, and what many believed to be the end of history. Completed near the conclusion of the Brezhnev period of stagnation, the symphony was intended to assuage the public’s acute dissatisfaction with life in the USSR. Yet when it was first heard in the mid-1980s, it offered a comforting familiarity amid the bewildering acceleration of perestroika. Examining Silvestrov’s “post” style requires considering the sociocultural impact of his sense of ending by treating his eschatology as a useful fiction that illuminates the conflicting sensations of stasis and acceleration during the last decades of the USSR. This article draws on interviews with Silvestrov and his close associates, as well as the Silvestrov Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung.

This article examines the development of social control in the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, who was General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1964 to 1982. Historians have largely neglected this question, especially with regard to its evolution and efficiency. Research is based on sources in the Russian State Archive of Modern History (RGANI), the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) and the Moscow Central State Archive (TSGAM). During Brezhnevs rule, Soviet propaganda reached the peak of its development. However, despite the fact that authorities tried to improve it, the system was ritualistic, unconvincing, unwieldy, and favored quantity over quality. The same was true for political education, which did little more than inspire sullen passivity in its students. Although officials recognized these failings, their response was ineffective, and over time Soviet propaganda increasingly lost its potency. At the same time, there were new trends in the system of social control. Authorities tried to have a foot in both camps - to strengthen censorship, and at the same time to get feedback from the public. However, many were afraid to express any criticism openly. In turn, the government used data on peoples sentiments only to try to control their thoughts. As a result, it did not respond to matters that concerned the public. These problems only increased during the era of stagnation and contributed to the decline and subsequent collapse of the Soviet system.

This thesis is a study of Prokofiev's musical ideas as they emerge in his early writing for piano. It is concerned with elucidating the connections between Prokofiev's pianistic technique and his compositional technique. In doing so, the study explores the genealogy of composer's musical gestures and thematic ideas. Both his playing and his compositional styles have been labelled as distinctive: the thesis attempts to deconstruct that distinctiveness by pinpointing the origins of the composer's playing and compositional styles, tracing their gradual evolution into a mature idiom. The first chapter is concerned with Prokofiev's juvenilia (1898 to c. 1906). Drawing upon a large amount of previously unpublished archival resources, this chapter uncovers the original gestures and thematic ideas which characterize Prokofiev's early style. The next chapter focuses on Prokofiev's period at the St Petersburg Conservatory, tracing his development into a virtuoso pianist, examining the nature of that virtuosity and chronicling the creation of Prokofiev's performing persona. The gestures and idea- types identified in the first chapter are then examined within the context of Prokofiev's works for solo piano, his early works with orchestra and his first two major operas. Conclusions are then drawn about the nature of Prokofiev's distinctiveness, his compositional legacy and about his current position as a major twentieth-century composer.

The tenorhorn and baryton (euphonium), as members of the valved conical brass family, were highly regarded by Oskar Böhme (1870-1938) and Victor Ewald (1860-1935). This study examines the role the tenorhorn and baryton played in selected works by these two composers of the Russian Chamber Brass School. A chronology of the research leading to the discovery and naming of the Russian Chamber Brass School is included as well as a discussion on brass chamber music performance practice both then and now.

Das Wort was a literary journal published by German Communist writers and fellow-travelers exiled in Moscow from 1936 to 1939. It was to be a mouthpiece for German literature in exile and to promote the Popular Front policy, which sought to unite disparate elements in non-Fascist Europe in opposition to the Nazis. Das Wort, under the editorship of German Communist writers whose close association with the Soviet Union had been well established in the previous decade, tried to provide a forum for exiled writers of various political persuasions, but was unwavering in its positive portrayal of Stalin's Soviet Union and the policies of that country. As the level of hysteria grew with the successive purges and public show trials in the Soviet Union, the journal adopted an even more eulogistic and militant attitude: any criticism or expression of doubt about Soviet policy was equated with support for Fascism. Thus the ability of the journal to contribute to the formation of a true common front in Europe to oppose Fascism was compromised from the outset by its total support for the Soviet Union. The Popular Front policy foundered on this issue, and that portion of German literature in exile which was to form the first generation of East German literature was inextricably bound to the Soviet Union well before the German Democratic Republic came in to existence.

The Communist Party's control of Soviet literature gradually evolved from the 1920s and reached its height in the 1940s. The amount of control exerted over Soviet literature reflected the strengthening power of the Communist Party. Sources used in this thesis include speeches, articles, and resolutions of leaders in the Communist Party, novels produced by Soviet authors from the 1920s through the 1940s, and analyses of leading critics of Soviet literature and Soviet history. The thesis is structured around the political and literary developments during the periods of 1917-1924, 1924-1932, 1932-1941, and 1946-1949. The conclusion is that the Communist Party seized control of Soviet literature to disseminate Party policy, minimize dissent, and produce propaganda, not to provide an outlet for creative talent.

The present work deals with the literary-theoretical work of the Petrograd Formalists - those who participated in the OPOiaZ in the 1910s and early 1920s - with a focus on that oflurii Tynianov. It attempts to unpack the representation of their literary-theoretical work as 'science' [nauka] by exploring how that category was constructed in dialogue with their evolving conception of literature. It is argued in the first chapter that, for the duration of their project, they conceptualized the 'language of nauka' - and their own prose by association - in accordance with the laws of their theory of language. It is argued in the second chapter that, as the Formalists developed a theory of literary history as an endless succession of 'revolutions' in the period 1919- 24, they tried to make their theorization of that process take a correspondingly revolutionary form, one in which the sciences of nature and those of history would become one. It is argued in the third chapter that, as the Formalists came to theorize the connection between literature and life in the period 1924-30, they practised a new 'type' of nauka in the form of the authorial collection of articles, one in which their own work was historicized in a 'literary' manner. It is concluded that, for the OPOiaZ, nauka came into being as a function of its object: as the Formalists transformed their conception of literature, their realization of nauka was correspondingly transformed. The conclusion then problematizes the categorization of Formalism as a purely 'scientific', extra-'literary' movement, since emphasis is placed on their authorship of that categorization, and raises broader questions about the origin of modem 'literary theory'.

The censorship of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is a familiar story to musicologists, but reception of the opera is not frequently mentioned. Examining the reception of a work can bring a work's relative importance into focus. In this thesis, German literary and reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss's model of the horizon of expectations is applied to reviews of American productions of Lady Macbeth. Curiosity about communism following the Great Depression in 1930s, America and American music critics' knowledge that Soviet composers worked for the Soviet regime led to the belief that Lady Macbeth was officially approved export from the Soviet Union. When the article condemning the opera as a Western formalism appeared in the Soviet magazine, Pravda, Americans needed to adjust their understanding of Lady Macbeth as a socialist expression. Following the work's revival in San Francisco in 1981, the influence of Solomon Volkov's Testimony is prevalent in many reviews. Many reviewers use Volkov's narrative of Shostakovich as covert dissident of the Soviet Union to assert that the censorship of the opera was about the content of the plot and not the music. Following the Soviet rejection of the work, American critics tried to claim Shostakovich for the West based on the values of individual freedom and feminism set forth in Lady Macbeth.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-06, Section: A, page: 2239. Adviser: Donna Buchanan. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-231) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

This chapter deals with the history of Soviet music’s relations with the outside world from the mid-1920s until the end of the millennium. During all these decades the Soviet musical production of any coloration was perceived by the free Western world as something largely strange or alien, often exotic, almost ‘barbarian’. The inevitable spiritual distance between the Soviet world and the ‘non-Soviet’ one resulted in some significant misunderstandings. Though some important recent publications by Western musicologists display a well qualified view on the music and musical life in the Soviet Union, the traces of past naiveties and/or prejudices are still felt quite often even in the writings of major specialists.

The core of this chapter is documentation of the proceedings of the Eighth All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers in 1991, drawn from the eyewitness account and tape-recorded transcripts made by the author, the only Western musicologist who was accredited to attend. It provides a vivid snapshot of a critical moment in Soviet musical and cultural history, a time of political upheaval, regional and ethnic strife, and economic collapse. The Congress began hopefully, but quickly disintegrated into a debacle of monumental proportions. From the vantage point of twenty years later, the Eighth—and what proved to be the final—Congress of the USSR Union of Composers stands out as a turning point in a radical and unprecedented cultural transformation.

The opera The Sugar Reapers (1962–5), by Alan Bush (1900–95), is doubly outside the communist bloc: the work of an English communist, set in the remote South American colony of British Guiana. Yet far from being an isolated curiosity, it addresses crucial aesthetic issues in post-war communism. As an enthusiast for the call for nationalist socialist realism that emanated from the Soviet Union in 1948, Bush faced particular difficulties in composing a work for British Guiana. What did national music mean in the context of an ethnically and culturally diverse population? And how was the danger of exoticism to be avoided? Tracing Bush's use of Guianese music, this chapter reveals a work indicative of the paradoxes of socialist realism, and creative in navigating these paradoxes. The work's political context and performance history are addressed as starting points for further investigation of communist cultural engagement with the Third World.

Chapter five surveys the poems and musical experiments that both distracted Bradbury from story writing and renewed his creativity in the early 1970s. Television and film composer Lalo Schifrin put Bradbury’s Madrigals for the Space Age to music just as Bradbury’s accelerating output of poems led to the first of three volumes of verse with his trade publisher Alfred A. Knopf. His defiant articles on the termination of the Apollo lunar missions culminated in his December 1972 Playboy article, “From Stonehenge to Tranquility Base,” a title image meant to convey the all-too-brief period of human history devoted to reaching the heavens. Chapter five concludes with unsuccessful attempts by the United States government to negotiate a cultural exchange for Bradbury with the Soviet Union.

Thirty years after the so-called ‚Wende‘, a fundamental and comprehensive study of the musical history of the GDR - encompassing both the music itself and the political and cultural contexts (i.e. the musical relations) - still represents a desideratum. The same is true for a long-term comparative music history of the divided Germany, for which the our project develops some essential prerequisites. The research project presented here is an informed cultural-historical analysis of the musical discourse of the GDR under the auspices of the Cold War. It is not about a revised version of national history only, because despite a relatively strong national and regional self-centredness of the musical life of the GDR, it can hardly be understood without the political and cultural references to the Soviet Union, the Federal Republic of Germany and the neighbouring European states.