Event overview
Music of the Soviet Age: Myths and Reality
The Western view of music of the Soviet Age, reflected in a great deal of scholarly and popular literature, seems to be influenced considerably by three inaccurate notions (hereafter referred to as ‘myths’):
Myth 1: arts and letters (including music) were divided into two distinctly separated realms – ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ or ‘dissident’ – and those who professed unorthodox views had almost no chance of publishing or promoting their works.
Myth 2: the output of Soviet ‘non-conformist’ (‘avant-garde’) composers of the 1960s and later was essentially an imitative and stylistically backward or ‘half-way’ sprout of the great international avant-garde.
Myth 3: so-called Socialist Realism was a phenomenon of the same nature as the art of the Third Reich (both fall under the definition of ‘totalitarian art’).
In this lecture, Hakobian will confront these myths with historical realities.
Levon Hakobian, b. 1953 in Yerevan, Armenia, graduated from the Yerevan State University and Yerevan State Conservatoire, and has been based in Moscow since 1993. He is a Doctor of Science, head of the department of music theory at the Russian State Institute of Art Studies, editor of the e-journal Art of Music: Theory and History, and a member of the editorial staff of the New Collected Works of Shostakovich (Moscow, DSCH Publishers). Hakobian's publications include a concise encyclopaedia of 20th-century music (in Russian, 2010), Music of the Soviet Era, 1917–1991 (Routledge, 2018), and a number of texts (in Russian, Armenian, English, Polish, German, French and Italian) dedicated to medieval Armenian sacred chant, to topical problems of music scholarship, to the history of Soviet music (particularly to Shostakovich), and to lesser known 20th-century composers.
This event is free and open to all, no need to book.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Mar 2020 | 5:00pm - 6:30pm |
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