Shostakovich and His World

Shostakovich and His World
Title Shostakovich and His World PDF eBook
Author Laurel E. Fay
Publisher Princeton University Press
Pages 428
Release 2021-06-08
Genre Music
ISBN 0691232199

Download Shostakovich and His World Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has a reputation as one of the leading composers of the twentieth century. But the story of his controversial role in history is still being told, and his full measure as a musician still being taken. This collection of essays goes far in expanding the traditional purview of Shostakovich's world, exploring the composer's creativity and art in terms of the expectations--historical, cultural, and political--that forged them. The collection contains documents that appear for the first time in English. Letters that young "Miti" wrote to his mother offer a glimpse into his dreams and ambitions at the outset of his career. Shostakovich's answers to a 1927 questionnaire reveal much about his formative tastes in the arts and the way he experienced the creative process. His previously unknown letters to Stalin shed new light on Shostakovich's position within the Soviet artistic elite. The essays delve into neglected aspects of Shostakovich's formidable legacy. Simon Morrison provides an in-depth examination of the choreography, costumes, décor, and music of his ballet The Bolt and Gerard McBurney of the musical references, parodies, and quotations in his operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki. David Fanning looks at Shostakovich's activities as a pedagogue and the mark they left on his students' and his own music. Peter J. Schmelz explores the composer's late-period adoption of twelve-tone writing in the context of the distinctively "Soviet" practice of serialism. Other contributors include Caryl Emerson, Christopher H. Gibbs, Levon Hakobian, Leonid Maximenkov, and Rosa Sadykhova. In a provocative concluding essay, Leon Botstein reflects on the different ways listeners approach the music of Shostakovich.

Shostakovich and Stalin

Shostakovich and Stalin
Title Shostakovich and Stalin PDF eBook
Author Solomon Volkov
Publisher Knopf
Pages 307
Release 2007-12-18
Genre Biography & Autobiography
ISBN 0307427722

Download Shostakovich and Stalin Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

“Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.” So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later under the totalitarian rule of Stalin, with his unpredictable grounds for the persecution of artists. Solomon Volkov—who cowrote Shostakovich’s controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony—describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composer’s life and work. Volkov, an authority on Soviet Russian culture, shows us the “holy fool” in Shostakovich: the truth speaker who dared to challenge the supreme powers. We see how Shostakovich struggled to remain faithful to himself in his music and how Stalin fueled that struggle: one minute banning his work, the next encouraging it. We see how some of Shostakovich’s contemporaries—Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among them—fell victim to Stalin’s manipulations and how Shostakovich barely avoided the same fate. And we see the psychological price he paid for what some perceived as self-serving aloofness and others saw as rightfully defended individuality. This is a revelatory account of the relationship between one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.

Symphony for the City of the Dead

Symphony for the City of the Dead
Title Symphony for the City of the Dead PDF eBook
Author M.T. Anderson
Publisher Candlewick Press
Pages 465
Release 2017-02-07
Genre History
ISBN 0763691003

Download Symphony for the City of the Dead Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Originally published: Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2015.

The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Symphonies

The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Symphonies
Title The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Symphonies PDF eBook
Author Roy Blokker
Publisher
Pages 210
Release 1979
Genre Music
ISBN

Download The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Symphonies Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Bespreking van de verschillende symphonieën van de Russische componist (1906-1975).

How Shostakovich Changed My Mind

How Shostakovich Changed My Mind
Title How Shostakovich Changed My Mind PDF eBook
Author Stephen Johnson
Publisher New York Review of Books
Pages 160
Release 2019-05-14
Genre Biography & Autobiography
ISBN 191074946X

Download How Shostakovich Changed My Mind Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson's struggle with bipolar disorder. BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness. Johnson looks at neurological, psychotherapeutic and philosophical findings, and reflects on his own experience, where he believes Shostakovich’s music helped him survive the trials and assaults of bipolar disorder. There is no escapism, no false consolation in Shostakovich’s greatest music: this is some of the darkest, saddest, at times bitterest music ever composed. So why do so many feel grateful to Shostakovich for having created it—not just Russians, but westerners like Stephen Johnson, brought up in a very different, far safer kind of society? The book includes interviews with the members of the orchestra who performed Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony during the siege of that city.

Shostakovich

Shostakovich
Title Shostakovich PDF eBook
Author Laurel E. Fay
Publisher Oxford University Press, USA
Pages 494
Release 2000
Genre Biography & Autobiography
ISBN 9780195182514

Download Shostakovich Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

"Shostakovich's life is a fascinating example of the paradoxes of living as an artist under totalitarian rule. Alone among his artistic peers, he survived successive Stalinist cultural purges and won the Stalin Prize five times, yet in 1948 he was dismissed from his conservatory teaching positions, and many of his works were banned from performance. He prudently censored himself, in one case putting aside a work based on Jewish folk poems. Under later regimes he balanced a career as a model Soviet - holding government positions and acting as an international ambassador - with his unflagging artistic ambitions."--Jacket.

The Noise of Time

The Noise of Time
Title The Noise of Time PDF eBook
Author Julian Barnes
Publisher Vintage
Pages 170
Release 2016-05-10
Genre Fiction
ISBN 110194725X

Download The Noise of Time Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes an extraordinary fictional portrait of the relentlessly fascinating Russian musician and composer Dmitri Shostakovich and a stunning meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society. • “Brilliant…. As elegantly constructed as a concerto.” —NPR 1936: Dmitri Shostakovich, just thirty years old, reckons with the first of three conversations with power that will irrevocably shape his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has suddenly denounced the young composer’s latest opera. Certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, his daughter—all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, he will twice more be swept up by the forces of despotism: coerced into praising the Soviet state at a cultural conference in New York in 1948, and finally bullied into joining the Party in 1960. All the while, he is compelled to constantly weigh the specter of power against the integrity of his music.