Conference Agenda

“There are thirty million women working in the Soviet Union, but no one studies the geometry of the lines on their faces,” wrote Soviet Georgian avant-garde poet Karlo Kacharava. It is from this line of poetry that contemporary Georgian performer, activist, and composer Nino Davadze takes her inspiration and title for her electroacoustic composition, The Geometry of Soviet Women. The piece combines field recordings from various locations in Tbilisi, lush collages of distorted electronic beats and sweeping, expansive chords, and recordings of Davadze’s own voice. Released in late 2022, the piece is a powerful statement in the context of the war of Russian aggression about solidarity among women in former Soviet republics while also reflecting the immense weight that accompanies the legacy of the role of women in the Soviet Union.

In this paper, I provide a close reading of Davadze’s composition while placing it in the broader context of Soviet feminism and music. Through a series of interviews with Davadze about the composition, her artistic and activist philosophy, and the political valences she anticipated for this particular piece, I understand Geometry as Davadze’s commentary on the competing expectations for Soviet women’s attention and labor and the resulting challenges they faced. Davadze employs diverse compositional methods to sonically articulate spaces central to women’s quotidian experiences, like the market and the apartment. Within this sonic framework, the piece explores the uniformity of experiences among women across ethnic groups, geography, and culture in different member states, highlighting the tensions that flared between these groups.

While other scholars have analyzed post-Soviet compositions in the context of the Soviet past, I differ by offering a distinctly feminist musicological analysis of Davadze’s composition and how she engages with the legacy of the Soviet Union. By situating her composition within a broader narrative of Soviet feminist thought, rooted in work by early Soviet feminist theorist Alexandra Kollontai, I demonstrate how Davadze is able to use sound to comment on the lived reality of women in the Soviet Union and begin to grasp the burden they carry as citizens in the former Soviet Union today.

On November 25, 1969, the Armenian Union of Composers hosted a premiere of Avet Terterian’s Symphony No.1. This four-movement work for organ, brass section, piano, percussion, and bass guitar included a combination of styles ranging from meditative sections for solo organ to imitations of jazz and rock, and a quotation of the 4^th century Armenian psalm “Երգ օրհնության” (“A Song of a Blessing”). The polystylistic nature of the piece and the sacred origin of its Medieval source material was highly unusual for its time, coming before Alfred Schnittke’s First Symphony (1974) and the majority of sacred works by Arvo Pärt and Sofia Gubaidulina, discussed by major scholars of late Soviet music (Schmelz 2009 and 2021, Karnes 2017 and 2021). Even though its world premiere received mixed reviews, Terterian’s Symphony No.1 was repeated in Yerevan in a concert dedicated to Lenin’s centennial in April 1970, when it was praised by official delegates from Moscow. It was then performed twice in Moscow and eight times across the USSR.

In this paper, I position Terterian’s Symphony No.1 and his subsequent symphonies that featured unconventional instrumentation and spiritual themes in the context of 1960s spiritual renaissance in Soviet Armenia, which had its distinct national character. While Gubaidulina, Schnittke and Pärt, who composed sacred music despite the official atheism, drew inspiration from the tradition of Western classical sacred music, Armenian composers were inspired by Armenian music and texts by Armenian saints. The fact that their works were performed and the nature of their stylistic experiments provides a new look at censorial politics in the late Soviet Union and positions Armenian composers at the forefront of musical avant-garde.

Drawing from archival documents, eyewitness accounts and period periodicals, this paper highlights the importance of studying music outside the metropoles of Moscow and Leningrad in advancing the knowledge of the imperial power dynamics between the Soviet centers and “peripheral” zones. By discussing composers who use quotations of sacred chants from their local traditions, this presentation contributes to scholarship on contemporary sacred music which has focused mainly on works that follow the genres of Western classical sacred music.

From the start of the Soviet Union, the idea of US Blackness was associated with musical production. The Soviet Union paralleled Western Europe in this way—often jazz, ragtime, or other US musical styles were regarded as typically Black American traditions. Some US jazz styles persisted in musicmaking and cinema from the 1920s into the mid-1930s with great acclaim and popularity. By late Stalinism, however, any music resembling Soviet perceptions of jazz became restricted. In this context, the first representation of “jazz” onscreen—intended as a multivalent critique of US culture—was written by Dmitry Shostakovich for the first Soviet cold war film Meeting on the Elbe (1949). After Stalin’s death, Shostakovich wrote an essay in 1954 advocating for more jazz in film music, citing this film’s specific jazz scene. That same year, Paul Robeson participated in a Soviet bloc/East German documentary film project, Song of the Rivers (dir. Joris Ivens, 1954). Robeson narrated the film and sang the theme song, written by Shostakovich, which called for the unity of the world’s workers under the banner of communism. In both of these examples, US Blackness was foregrounded through sound for specifically Soviet, cold war, and socialist purposes.

In this paper, I pivot between these two cinematic examples to examine the complexity of the idea of Blackness and film sound in early post-war Soviet Union. Building on recent discussions of race and sound by scholars such as Nina Eidsheim and Matthew Morrison, and an examination of German and Russian archival materials and audiovisual narratives, I argue that musical-cinematic representations of US Blackness were a significant part of cold war Soviet imperialism and diplomacy. The representations in these two films—in spoken and sung voice, timbre, and instrumental sound—were aligned with the promotion of Soviet ideologies, some of which echoed US liberal movements. These audiovisual representations created a new liminal space—the post-war Soviet perception of US Blackness had shifted since the 1920s to serve particular imperial uses, illuminating another example of how Black American musicmaking was translated to Soviet transnationality.