Music of the Soviet Peripheries

3 Credits.

This class explores the music, culture, and history of the Soviet and post-Soviet peripheries, meaning the non-Russian republics of the USSR, including, among others, the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), and the diverse countries of Central Asia (including Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan). We will focus on notable musical examples (including classical, traditional, and popular musics) as we investigate questions about identity, power, cultural politics, and coloniality and decoloniality from the early twentieth century up to the present. Representative composers include Lysenko, Glière, Liatoshynsky, Khachaturyan, Garayev (Karayev), Taktakishvili, and Tubin, as well as the prominent figures from the late-Soviet period: including Gubaidulina, Pärt, Silvestrov, Mansuryan, and Kancheli, among others. We will consider how different Soviet and post-Soviet thinkers from representative traditions wrestled with local definitions of “Sovietness” as well as with varied interpretations of the “post-Soviet.” The discourse of socialist realism and its bureaucratic and aesthetic negotiations will be a central topic, but so too will divergences from Moscow-centered artistic and philosophical demands.