Conference Agenda

Calls to “decolonize” Soviet and post-Soviet histories and geographies have become ubiquitous following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Yet now over a year into the war, questions surrounding the mechanisms and implications of decolonization, and specifically decolonizing the study of Soviet and post-Soviet music, both theoretically and practically, have become even more urgent. Different approaches are necessary than those found in the existing post-colonial and decolonial literature as applied to, for example, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and the Americas in works by such formative thinkers as Spivak, Said, Bhabha, and Mignolo, among others. This panel builds on this literature and ongoing discussions about decolonizing Soviet and post-Soviet spaces by examining the music from two “peripheral” republics, Georgia and Ukraine, both of which have been attacked by Russia in the past 15 years and remain either at war or under occupation.

The three papers address key moments and key issues in musicking during the Stalin period and the Thaw. The first paper looks at the ramifications of Soviet colonization on the creation and policing of composition in Georgia under Stalinism by examining two representative compositions, Grigol Kiladze’s opera Bakhtrioni (1936) and Andria Balanchivadze’s First Symphony (1948). It shows how Soviet resolutions were translated both practically and conceptually between the Soviet center and its periphery. The second paper examines the tangled history of forming a national opera canon in Georgia after it became part of the USSR in 1921, considering the aesthetic and political negotiations necessary to create officially approved “national” works in this most-Soviet of genres. The third paper turns to Ukraine, showing the rejection of Socialist Realism in the 1960s in Kyiv by younger composers, chief among them Valentyn Sylvestrov, and the dialogue this rejection opened between older and newer notions of Ukrainian self-fashioning. Looking at Georgia in conjunction with Ukraine across the first fifty years of the USSR will allow for broader points to be made about control, order, interperipheral exchanges, and the concrete implications of decolonizing Soviet and post-Soviet music.

Georgian art music developed within a dichotomy of freedom and control following its incorporation into imperial Russia in the nineteenth century. From 1921 until 1991, control overtook freedom, as Communist Party authorities in the Georgian SSR created multiple dimensions of mental colonialism that constrained and disciplined composers, performers, and critics, preventing them from freely participating in vibrant musical processes. This mental colonialism was characterized by the suppression of ideas, the practice of dominance, and the creation of anti-pluralistic environments intolerant of any deviance from a standardized canon.

This paper considers anew the politics of controlling both creative conceptions and musical life in Georgia during the Soviet period, specifically between 1921 and 1953, when Teimuraz Badurashvili served as Minister of Culture for Soviet Georgia, and Iona Tuskia (1935-37) and Shalva Mshvelidze (1942-50) were the heads of the Georgian Composers’ Union. It focuses on two examples: Grigol Kiladze’s opera Bakhtrioni (1936) and Andria Balanchivadze’s “punishment” for his First Symphony (1948). These examples serve as test cases for a decolonial approach to the processes of mental colonialism within Georgian musical culture. For the first time, this paper examines the uniformization of Soviet music from the perspective of mental colonialism and the governmental organizations that provided legitimacy to the colonial relations between the central power structures of the USSR in Moscow and such “peripheral” republics as Georgia.

The anatomy of musical power in the USSR was built on censorship on the one hand and general party-administrative guidelines on the other. By examining both the official power structures and the official resolutions implementing and articulating the musical lingua franca of Socialist Realism, bolstered by evidence from archival sources and oral histories, we can arrive at a more refined understanding of the mechanisms of control at both national and local levels in the USSR. These mechanisms of power will be further illuminated by studying party-administrative guidelines for managing culture in addition to the specific roles adopted by the Ministry of Culture of the USSR and its subsidiary units in the Soviet republics, in this case the Georgian SSR.

Political regimes, and especially totalitarian regimes, have sought to influence and control opera throughout its history. This paper discusses just such a case in an under-studied region of the world: opera under Stalinism in Soviet Georgia. Georgian opera emerged during the national liberation movement against Russian imperialism in the 19^th-century and was symbolically born in the same year that the country gained independence, 1918. Its first creators, especially Zakharia Paliashvili with his opera Abesalom and Eteri (1919), sought to define Georgian art music as a distinctive and long-hidden part of European—but decidedly not Russian--musical culture.

Yet the development of Georgian opera took a radical turn after the Soviet occupation in 1921, when all art forms, including opera, were first gradually then suddenly obliged to be “national in form and socialist in content” and became instruments for asserting socialist realism. Against the backdrop of mounting repression in the 1930s, the strategies for creating opera that had once been used by the first “classics” of Georgian opera (combining Georgian national musical traditions with European operatic forms) were transformed into ready-made, officially approved yet clichéd recipes for the next generations of composers (e.g., Shalva Taktakishvili, Grigol Kiladze, etc.) in Soviet Georgia from the early 1930s until the death of Stalin. Compared to the very fruitful and encouraging start in 1919, the number of operas composed and staged declined steadily and significantly over the next 30 years. This paper examines noteworthy and distinctive features of the libretti and musical language of several representative examples of Georgian opera from the 1920s through the end of the Stalin period in 1953 as it traces the struggles, and ultimately the perceived “failure” of the genre, a “failure” so evident that even the official Soviet press could not deny it. The course of Georgian opera offers an instructive counterpoint to the production of opera under Stalin in other parts of the USSR, and especially its most visible examples, chief among Shostakovich and Prokofiev. This project is based on, among other sources, the archives of the Tbilisi Opera House and reviews published in the official press of the time.

Over the past decade the 1960s Kyiv musical avant-garde—including such notable composers as Valentyn Sylvestrov, Leonid Hrabovsky, Volodymyr Zahortsev, and Vitaly Godziatsky—has been fêted with anniversary airings of key concerts and key works, with deluxe, newly recorded box sets of their music, and with books of conversations, reminiscences, and scholarly essays. Building on this attention and the urgent post-February 2022 impulses to decolonize Ukrainian music history, this paper takes a new look at the musical shistdesiatnyky in Kyiv, reevaluating the ways in which this group was entangled with, yet stood apart from the Soviet center.

It focuses on the creative dialogue between Valentyn Sylvestrov and his teacher Borys Lyatoshynsky, reconsidering their divergent forms of musical “Ukrainianness” in the 1960s. By then Lyatoshynsky was as often opting for general expressions of pan-Slavism (e.g., his Slavonic Overture, 1961; Symphony no. 5, “Slavonic,” 1966; and Slavonic Suite, 1966) as for specifically Ukrainian references. By contrast, Sylvestrov, like many in his generation, avoided clear national markers in his blankly evocative, intuitive, and individualistic compositions, compositions prized at the time for their extreme “contemporaneity,” a frequent Socialist Realist buzzword.

Yet even as they engaged with both present—and (imagined) future—Sylvestrov’s “avant-garde” compositions often glanced backward. To Lyatoshynsky, for example. They thus demand a more refined critical and historiographical appraisal. By comparing Lyatoshynsky’s Symphony no. 4 and Sylvestrov’s Symphony no. 1, both composed in 1963, with Sylvestrov’s 1968 Poem in memory of Lyatoshynsky, this paper pinpoints the local manifestations and implications of the Thaw in Ukrainian music. As it demonstrates, the 1960s was a key moment not only within Lyatoshynsky’s and Sylvestrov’s output, but within Ukrainian music writ large, one with far-reaching effects on later interpretations of Ukrainian sonic identities. This paper is informed by recent interviews with Sylvestrov, among other primary sources.