Conference Agenda

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, escalating the conflict between the two countries that had been ongoing since 2014. The Russian invasion drew attention from around the globe, and the ongoing war in Ukraine has had implications not only on politics and economics, but also on musical activities. As early as March 2022, musicians in the United States and Canada began to organize benefit concerts expressing support for Ukraine and raising funds for humanitarian aid, resulting in a surge of such concerts in spring 2022 that has continued at an abated pace through subsequent years. While these concerts vary widely in their repertoire, venues, and organizational goals, they all speak to a belief in the power of music and grassroots leadership.

This paper examines three concerts mounted in the Northeastern United States: “An Evening of Ukrainian Music” in Colchester, Vermont (March 19, 2022), “Concert for Ukraine” in Concord Massachusetts (June 7, 2022), and “Concert for Ukraine: A Celebration of Ukrainian Music” in State College, Pennsylvania (November 19, 2022). Drawing on interviews with concert organizers and performers, I analyze how each concert balanced the priorities of community involvement, repertoire choices, and fundraising goals.

Scholars have explored the benefit concert model through analysis of large-scale international and televised events (Marcus 2007; Hossain/Aucoin 2017; Reed, 2019; McIntosh 2020; Schmidli 2021). However, grassroots musical protest has not been fully explored. Through my analysis of these three concerts, I argue that in benefit concerts for Ukraine, music serves as both an expression of local and global community and as a tool of grassroots leadership. The organizers of these concerts chose music to express their support for Ukraine, wanting to do “whatever small part [they] could do.” In their descriptions of these events, however, it becomes clear that the musical experience of each event generated feelings of connection within the local community and solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Ultimately, these benefit concerts created an experience that went beyond the funds that were raised.

Musicological and analytical approaches to Prokofiev’s music have blossomed in the past two decades; however, his sketches have yet to be examined in sufficient detail, despite the potential they offer to interpretation. This paper concentrates on the Seventh Piano Sonata, op. 83 (1939-43), considered by many (including the composer himself) to be his most radical work. One of a cycle of three so-called ‘war sonatas’, the Seventh is titled “The Stalingrad” due to its struggle-to-victory trajectory and its premiere soon after that turning point in the war. My overview of Prokofiev’s projects of 1938-39 draws on evidence from notebooks, sketches, and drafts to overturn existing accounts of the genesis of all three piano sonatas (as well as the Violin Sonata, op. 80).

From this historical foundation, my alternative interpretation of op. 83 offers new analytical and intertextual insights, looking to Aleksander Nevsky (1938) and Semyon Kotko (1939), to the Russian traditions that lay behind these two works, and to Beethoven (filtered through Romain Rolland’s Beethoven the Creator, which the composer read in 1938-39, focusing on Rolland’s description of the Appassionata). My analysis concentrates on the ‘atonal’ first movement, revealing a consistent octatonic and hexatonic basis within a classical framework, including an opposition between collections replacing contrasting key areas. I build on Inna Bazayev’s recent research to consider other associations with the octatonic beyond the conventional ‘fantastic’ mode, in particular the image of the ominous invader, through comparisons with the violent third act of Kotko and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Kitezh. The second movement’s minuet theme, originally intended for Eugene Onegin (1936), was developed into a tragic meditation, while the third movement draws from the epic heroism of Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, a point often made in reception but expanded here through specific links to Nevsky. My argument is that Prokofiev created a modern Appassionata-like narrative out of markedly Russian materials, and that his combination of these officially approved heroic models demonstrates an attempt to meet pre-war High Stalinist aesthetics in an original way, just as Nevsky, Kotko, and the other sonatas do, and exemplifies what his 1930s statements on innovation in Soviet music assert.