Soviet Musical Imaginaries
SLAVIC 187
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
This course surveys the relationship between musical culture and the state in the Soviet Union, focusing on musical politics in Ukraine alongside comparative case studies in Uzbekistan and Russia. We explore how the lives, listening practices, and creative activities of musicians and audiences were negotiated through the interplay of top-down cultural policies and the bottom-up initiatives of culture workers and ordinary people. Topics include Soviet revolutionary-era debates in Ukraine over popular, folk and elite music in the 1920s and 1930s; the invention of Soviet Uzbek opera; the so-called Shostakovich Wars; the Kyiv Avant-Garde of the 1960s; Soviet “Flower Children” in 1970s Western Ukraine; the effect of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster on Ukrainian protest genres; the politics of 1980s punk in Ukraine and Siberia; the role of various media technologies in facilitating or constraining forms of musical activity; and the Marxist-Leninist engineering of folk music in diverse venues. Students will gain a critical understanding of how Soviet cultural policy conceived of musical practices as both a political resource and a potential threat in everyday and symbolic life, and what happened when ideological imperatives shifted, eroded, or were replaced after 1991. Readings draw from Slavic studies, music studies, anthropology, and history.
Course Notes
No knowledge of musical notation is required. All readings will be available in English.
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
