Quite correct, Mr Grew; the penalties are not mentioned in the document, which concentrates purely on the expected standards, and singles out those who are considered to have deviated.

 That particular committee would surely have been unlikely to have been dealing with the actual consequences of such behaviour, or at least to have been seen to be so doing. Surely there's no doubt about the vast oppression that this regime exercised upon the people, and that the fear that such punishments could be meted out at any moment to anyone, for any reason (or none) when it was happening to others all round them must have been ever-present, to say the least.

There is a wonderful document produced in 1945 by the Workers' Music Association, with really forward-looking suggestions for new music, education, and so on. When I'm back home again, I will post some longer bits; they called for a high standard of musical education and provision for all, asserting confidently that 'Musicians are educators, and the quality of what they give undoubtedly affects the musical level of the community and helps to determine whether it is a high level or a low one’ , as well as sounding a note of scepticism about the personality cults around performers that were engendered by commercialisation.

One certainly should not assume that workers or democratic workers' associations would necessarily wish composers only to write light music.

I think it is worth pointing-out that the "proletariat" in the USSR never "decided" anything.  The decisions were made on their behalf and in their name by professional revolutionaries.

The idea that "workers" chose what kind of music ought to be played is already nonsense - there was no structure by which they would have had any means of voicing such opinions (or indeed, opinions on any other matter).

As I've said elsewhere, the bizarre anomaly that western classical music was promoted and encouraged in the USSR arose merely because Lenin and his wife Krupskaya liked it, and believed - with no foundation for such belief - it was "morally beneficial".  It also formed part of the official USSR doctrine of replacing religion with culture.  For those who are saying, "well, no actual harm done", it's worth pointing out that the native non-Russian musical traditions in the USSR (which covered lots of non-Russian areas like Central Asia, Persia, Georgia etc) were ruthlessly stamped-out.  It's worth reading Anna Reid's "The Shaman's Coat", as one of the few English-language sources on how the USSR actually treated the "people's" languages, music and culture.  The colossal inequality of all non-Russians within the Russian Empire had been one of the biggest rallying-calls the Bolshevik side could muster - with promises that were to prove traitorously false in the deliverance.

Indeed that is a sentiment with which all persons of sound mind may at last agree without reservation. How those constant rat-a-tats plague the sensitive listener!

With the present discouragement of political comment the labour involved in our forthcoming review of the Eighth Symphony is at a stroke considerably reduced. We had always intended to criticise it as absolute music in any case, rather than as some sort of rival to Beethoven's Wellington's Victory. The research we have been undertaking is to clarify the composer's character and motives, rather than his political position (if any). That does not however mean that we are not still on the look-out for the truth about the fate of the aforementioned Mikhail Kvadri in particular, which truth might well assist our insight into said character and motives. If necessary the information if any one finds it out could be conveyed to us as the moderator suggests by way of private message.

I understand exactly what you mean, here, t-p... it's my fault for not explaining more clearly what I meant.  The music which I said was suppressed and stifled was the "folk" music of various different peoples.  Of course, with 15 USSR Republics, each had to have something to be proud of.  Although I have talked to Armenian musicians like the pianist Mikhail Egizaryan and conductor/impresario Mark Aghbalyants, and they don't even consider Khachaturian's music to be Armenian...  "it's in the Leningrad soviet style, without Armenian feeling or content".  I was a little surprised by this, because I felt works like the Second Piano Concerto (especially the second movt - do you play that one, t-p?) are full of what I imagined was Armenian melodic material. 

But regarding the "folk" material, this was suppressed in areas like Khakhassia, Tuva, and amongst many of the "People Of The North", mainly because the lyrics, and social context of the music, was inextricable from animist and shamanist beliefs.  Shamanism wasn't even considered a religion by the soviets, but a social ill like alcoholism or illiteracy, and its adherents were dealt with severely.  A rather distant acquaintance of mine is Dr Mongush Kenin-Lopsan, a Tuvan ethnographer who chronicled the history of these matters.  His sister was out walking one day when she was arrested by police for wearing Tuvan National Costume... they alleged she was a shaman.  She was summarily shot,  and Kenin-Lopsan lost his position in the Academy of Sciences of Siberia, merely on the basis of being her brother.   There were lots more folk-songs of the Russian East, which were all banned because they hymned the annual round of sowing and harvest, and thus could barely avoid mentioning either God, or the Lord of the Manor, or both.  I have an ethnographer friend in Irkutsk who's trying to collect and collate whatever is left... but it was an oral tradition, and almost nothing remains.  The instruments, too, were abandoned... neither concertina nor accordion is native to Russia, they were introduced by the Communists in the name of "progress".

This is an interesting topic which does indeed have a bearing on Shostakovich's music in the larger picture.

One constant aim of the USSR was to create "one great Soviet people", and quietly expunge the national characteristics of different parts of the country... or rather, to absorb them into one homogenous whole.   I quite agree with you that there's a strong influence of Tchaikovsky upon Shostakovich's writing...  but perhaps that wasn't wanted?    To what extent was there a feeling amongst ALL of those composers in the 1920s and 1930s that they were creating a new genre - soviet music - which had not only musical, but also extra-musical responsibilities?

I suggest this because such feeling definitely existed in the other arts...  Mayakovsky's poetry and plays, Meyerhold's revolutionary new approachs to staging drama,  plays that didn't have an "author" at all but arose out of intense group improvisation work using Stanislavsky techniques, the new art of Lisitsky, Malevich, Klutsis etc.

Shostakovich was - until he was banned from doing so - a composer fascinated with the theatre, and he couldn't have avoided the cross-pollination that occured from these other creators of "new soviet arts"...   to what extent was in harmony with these ideas, to what extent would the new arts draw on the old,  and how far should they distance themselves from previous work?

Rei...

Two Katchaturian piano concerti? Are you sure? As far as I ever known there was just one (with the folksy slow movement with optional flexatone part). Two by Shostakovich, yes, but surely only one from the Armenian?

t-p,

I'd also query Mahelerian infuence in Shostakovich only starting with the fourth symphony: surely the choral finale of his second really couldn't have been inspired by anyone else?