Creative Union

The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953

Kiril Tomoff

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501732652
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Why did the Stalin era, a period characterized by bureaucratic control and the reign of Socialist Realism in the arts, witness such an extraordinary upsurge of musical creativity and the prominence of musicians in the cultural elite? This is one of the questions that Kiril Tomoff seeks to answer in Creative Union, the first book about any of the professional unions that dominated Soviet cultural life at the time. Drawing on hitherto untapped archives, he shows how the Union of Soviet Composers established control over the music profession and negotiated the relationship between composers and the Communist Party leadership. Central to Tomoff's argument is the institutional authority and prestige that the musical profession accrued and deployed within Soviet society, enabling musicians to withstand the postwar disciplinary campaigns that were so crippling in other artistic and literary spheres.

Most accounts of Soviet musical life focus on famous individuals or the campaign against Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth and Zhdanov's postwar attack on musical formalism. Tomoff's approach, while not downplaying these notorious events, shows that the Union was able to develop and direct a musical profession that enjoyed enormous social prestige. The Union's leadership was able to use its expertise to determine the criteria of musical value with a degree of independence. Tomoff's book reveals the complex and mutable interaction of creative intelligentsia and political elite in a period hitherto characterized as one of totalitarian control.

Part I

THE PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION OF SOVIET COMPOSERS

Whether they examine the “free professions” characteristic of Anglo-American capitalist parliamentary democratic societies or the more state-regulated professional groups of continental Europe, most scholars of professions agree that a profession is an elite occupational group defined by its state-protected monopoly on a specific type of socially valuable, expertise-based work. The All-USSR Union of Soviet Composers (SSK) was a professional organization analogous to more familiar professions of modern societies that emerged contemporaneously with the Soviet Union. After a nearly decade-long formation process, the Composers’ Union exhibited almost all of these defining characteristics. The rest were achieved in the cauldron of World War II, when the Composers’ Union consolidated its institutional structure and its members demonstrated the extreme importance—the social significance—of their creative work.

The Soviet Union shared with its contemporary modern societies the phenomenon of the profession. However, the Soviet Union was also a peculiar modern phenomenon, governed as it was by a state with ambitions of nearly complete control of its population. It would be extremely surprising to find that its professional groups were more or less exact replicas of professional groups elsewhere. They were not. Part I of this study begins to examine that Soviet exceptionalism. By introducing the relationship between the municipal and all-USSR composers’ unions and other Stalinist institutions—especially the government’s arts watchdog, the Committee on Artistic Affairs—it also sets the stage for one of the great conflicts that marked the professional organization’s most significant postwar successes. Just as professions elsewhere emerged through conflict with other groups that claimed solutions to similar socially relevant problems, so the Composers’ Union emerged in the midst of tension with the Committee on Artistic Affairs. Part I traces thattension from its early seeds in the mid-1930s through World War II. It describes the emerging membership contours of a professional organization that united otherwise potentially disparate groups of professionals, conservatory-trained composers, musicologists, and popular song writers, but not performers. And it analyzes the first phases of the centralization of authority that characterized the professional organization throughout the Stalin period.

Part I begins by examining the details of the Composers’ Union’s institutional growth from theoretically related but distinct municipal and republican composers’ unions in the early 1930s to a single all-USSR Composers’ Union with developed institutional forms, hierarchical decision-making structures, control over membership, and responsibility for professional behavior and work. This bureaucratic history helps us to understand the institutional constraints placed on composers and musicologists, the institutional context in which they lived and worked, and the formal development of an important Stalinist cultural profession. In a society so deeply embedded in bureaucracy, we must understand the bureaucracy to understand the society.

CHAPTER 1

The Formation of the Composers’ Union, 1932–41

Organized music professionalism in Russia can be dated to the formation of the Imperial Russian Musical Society in 1859 and its music conservatories in St. Petersburg (1862) and Moscow (1866).1 Through these conservatories and its system of secondary music schools, the Imperial Russian Musical Society formed the main center of music professionalism that bequeathed a rich but incompletely solidified professional music heritage to the fledgling Soviet state after the Revolution. In the 1920s, that heritage became a flash point of contention between new associations that sought to organize and dominate the musical culture of the revolutionary society.2 The most famous of these feuding associations were the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) and the Association of Contemporary Music (ASM). Their often vitriolic disputes culminated in the temporary ascendance of RAPM in the late 1920s and early 1930s before the whole system of the 1920s was swept away in a landmark 1932 Central Committee resolution that called for the creation of new artistic organizations, the creative unions.

The Composers’ Union was the music field’s creative union. It emerged from humble origins in the 1930s to dominate the Soviet music world by the end of the 1940s.

Creative unions were designed to be different sorts of Stalinist institutions. The Composers’ Union formed gradually, from the advent of creative unions in 1932 to the foundation of the all-USSR Organizational Committee of the Union of Soviet Composers in 1939 and to the expanded reach of the all-USSR Composers’ Union beyond the cultural capitals just before the Second World War. Though it was always subject to outside ideological monitoring, the Composers’ Union became a bureaucratic institution juridically distinct from both government oversight committees and the Communist Party. Thus the bureaucracy that most closely touched the lives of composers and musicologists was formed primarily according to the demands of Composers’ Union leaders, all of whom were, by the beginning of the war, professional composers and musicologists.

Prehistory: Russian Music Professionalism and Revolutionary Cultural Politics

The vaunted Russian school of music was initially created by art critics whose nationalist ideology exhorted and exalted the diverse works of aristocratic dilettante composers, especially the famed Mighty Five: Milyi Balakirev, Aleksandr Borodin, Cesar Cui, Modest Musorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The most powerful voice at the creation of this Russian nationalist school was Vladimir Stasov, whose forceful writings and longevity shaped the history of Russian music for more than a century.3 From the 1860s on, the most powerful competitor to Stasov’s emerging nationalist conception—and the target of his critical reviews—was the Imperial Russian Music Society (IRMO) and its leaders, Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein. The brothers Rubinstein considered that Russian music would be best served through the professionalization provided by Western European–style conservatory education.

In the 1860s the IRMO opened conservatories in St. Petersburg and Moscow and began creating a large system of secondary music schools. It also pressured the Russian state to confer legal status and privileges on its conservatory graduates and provide pension rights to its conservatory professors. This long and difficult struggle was mostly accomplished before the 1905 revolution, and by the beginning of World War I the IRMO could legitimately claim to have created a class of professional musicians whose status was codified in Russian law.4 Prerevolutionary music professionalism thus hinged primarily on the legal provisions afforded those who successfully completed advanced conservatory education.

But the prominent role of aristocratic dilettantes in nineteenth-century musical culture and the practices of conservatory enrollment limited and conditioned this conservatory professionalism, preventing it from flowering into a profession according to the technical definition I use here.5 Important though a conservatory graduation credential had become, one could make a living as a musician without it, and many students only completed part of the program before embarking on music teaching careers. Some peculiarities of prerevolutionary conservatory education policies and practice left strong imprints on the development of the music profession after the Revolution. Class and gender biases in the selection of disciplines within the conservatory attached long-lasting associations to musicians trained there. These biases endowed composers and a few select instrumentalists (especially violinists and cellists) with the most prestige, while other orchestral musicians (usually recruited from lower estates) had far less. Women matriculated in especially high numbers in the piano department but completed their degrees far less frequently than men, as they left the conservatories for teaching careers or marriages.6 With certain exceptions, the biases created by these patterns would continue after the Revolution. Outside of opera and ballet, women would be strikingly underrepresented among Soviet musicians, and precious few would enter the Stalinist professional music organization, which was dominated by musicologists and especially composers.

Because of the odd relationship between the conservatories, the IRMO, and the Imperial Russian state, the conservatories afforded one of the few paths of even limited upward mobility for the Russian empire’s large, oppressed Jewish population. Though rampant anti-Semitism posed serious problems for Jewish students and their conservatories before the Revolution,7 their access to advanced musical education and its legal status helped make Jews particularly prominent in the Soviet music profession.

The heritage of this conservatory professionalism was carried into the Soviet period by professors who reproduced the training they received from such figures as Rimsky-Korsakov, Anatol Liadov, Sergei Taneev, Anton Arenskii, and Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov. Among the most influential such professors were Reinhold Glier, Mikhail Gnesin, and especially Nikolai Miaskovskii. Glier, the eventual head of the Composers’ Union, was a professor at the Moscow Conservatory for twenty years. From 1925 to 1951 Gnesin held various professorial posts at the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories and at the top music education school in the Soviet Union, the Gnesin Institute for Musical Education, which was founded by his sisters Evgeniia, Mariia, and Elena Gnesina, the last of whom ably directed it throughout the Stalin period. His students included both of the Composers’ Union’s most powerful leaders, Aram Khachaturian and Tikhon Khrennikov. Miaskovskii’s nearly thirty-year tenure at the Moscow Conservatory from 1921 until his death in 1950 allowed him to instill rigorous ideals of technical mastery and intellectual musical construction in generations of composers, including Khachaturian. In addition to his conservatory post and his leadership positions in the Composers’ Union, Miaskovskii’s extensive work as a consultant on publishing and programming made him one of the most influential Soviet musicians, whose opinion helped determine what was published and performed. Contemporaries and students alike stressed Miaskovskii’s wide-ranging musical interests, his remarkable musical memory, and his openness to diverse musical styles, provided they were professionally executed.8 A solid, advanced education in musical theory and classical compositional techniques would prove to be important to Composers’ Union leaders throughout the Stalin period.

The first fifteen years after the Revolution were turbulent ones for Soviet musicians. Groups of composers, musicologists, and performers organized music associations to promote their conceptions about the place music should occupy in revolutionary society. Amy Nelson has identified three musical agendas that found organizational expression in the 1920s: Russian traditionalists, modernists, and advocates of “proletarian” culture. These three found rough representation respectively among the conservatory professorate, the ASM, and a series of groups who spoke for proletarian music, including RAPM.9 Representatives of the ASM and the proletarian music groups waged vitriolic press campaigns throughout the 1920s before their sparring came to a head during the Cultural Revolution that accompanied crash industrialization and agricultural collectivization from 1928 to 1932.

Attempting to capitalize on the class war spirit of the Cultural Revolution and follow the lead of its literary namesake, RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), RAPM sought to dominate musical production, browbeating its modernist and popular opponents, supporting preferential admissions for proletarian applicants to the conservatories, calling for a unified state music policy beneficial to RAPM, and trying to write proletarian music. Though all of these efforts were partly successful, by 1932 the energies of the Cultural Revolution were spent, and RAPM was dissolved in a call for more catholic creative unions.

Even after the wrangling between them in the 1920s came to an end, all three creative positions continued to exert an influence on the development of the Stalinist professional organization, the Composers’ Union. Though they remained largely outside the fray in the 1920s, the professorate emerged from the upheavals of the late 1920s and early 1930s relatively unscathed, and their work training new composers and musicologists meant that they had a profound influence shaping the artistic outlooks of the Stalinist music profession’s younger generation.

The ASM was a large and diverse group that most famously included such radical modernists as Nikolai Roslavets, who devised a twelve-tone compositional technique independently and contemporaneously with Arnold Schoenberg. Roslavets was a fiery polemicist in the 1920s who thought that the political and social revolution called for new, revolutionary innovations in composition. Roslavets and those who shared similar visions fancied themselves the musical avant-gard...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers
• Part II Profession and Power, 1946–53
• Part III Professionals and the Stalinist Cultural Elite
• Bibliography