The purpose of this study is to review some of the techniques developed by Russian composers in the early part of the twentieth century, down to the active assertion of state control of the arts in the Soviet Union, which began in 1929. The study centers principally on music for the piano, with an emphasis on harmony and both tonal and nontonal structures. The choice of the piano repertoire is partly to keep the project within manageable limits and partly because the composers tended to employ the piano as a medium for their more experimental efforts. However, since the main objective is to trace the growth of Modernism, at times it is desirable to refer to songs and chamber works as well.

The study involves a group of composers¹ of varied styles, working both at home and abroad, whose compositions may loosely be termed “Modernist” because they involve some measure of experimentation. It begins with the work of two major figures, Aleksandr Skriabin (1872-1915) and Sergei Prokofiev (1891— 1953), who were important either as influences or as leading exponents of techniques used and developed by some of these composers. We will also attempt to trace the origins of such techniques in the work of the Russian Nationalist school and in the styles of folk art.

It was in the year 1910 that Skriabin began work on a series of compositions for piano in which he developed his own harmonic language and original constructional methods. After the two pieces Op. 57 of 1907, he worked for approximately three years on his last orchestral piece, Prometheus, in which his later harmonic style began to take shape. During this period he published no new works. Then, beginning in 1910, there followed his piano compositions Op. 58 to Op. 73, in which the possibilities of that style were fully explored, and finally the set of Preludes Op. 74, in which new techniques were essayed, the full implications of which were not realized until the early works of Olivier Messiaen some ten years later.

The ending of the period in 1929 is by no means so clearly marked by events within music itself. By that time Modernism in Russia, as in the West, had largely expended its energies. Of all the composers who had been active before the Revolution, only Nikolai Roslavets (1881-1944) continued to develop radical techniques. In the middle of the decade he had been joined by the rising star of the young Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), whose discordant style, with its ironic comment on traditional practices, created much interest. It was the decision by the state authorities in 1929 to grant tacit recognition to the unofficial Proletarian groups, who had long opposed experiment in the arts, that effectively marked the end of the Modernist period. At the All Russian Musical Conference later that year there was an attempt to achieve what Lenin had always resisted, the suppression of the performance of all pre-Revolution music and the banning of further composition in both Modernist and Classical styles. The move did not succeed, but there followed a general recognition that the period of freedom which the arts had so far enjoyed was at an end. In 1929 two nonmusicians were appointed as heads of conservatories: Pshibyshevsky at Moscow and Mashirov at Leningrad. Maksimil’ian Shteinberg (1883-1946) wrote at this time that music in Russia was threatened with “annihilation of professional art and the reduction of everything to complete dilettantism.”² In 1932 the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians was itself banned, and the Union of Soviet Composers was formed. This stopped much of the fighting between rival groups, but brought musicians more under state control.

Music and the Arts In Russia

The period around 1910 was of great importance for the arts in general in Russia. That year probably marked the beginning of abstract painting, for it is believed to have been in 1910 that the Russian painter Vasili Kandinsky, who was then living in Germany, produced what he later called his “first abstract water colour.”³ In the same year he met and began a firm friendship with Schoenberg and started work on his book Über das Geistige in der Kunst.⁴ It was published in Munich in 1912 and was written originally in German, but the section “The Language of Form and Colour” was already available in Russian by the end of that year. Music was Kandinsky’s first interest among the arts, and his book makes many references to music, especially that of Debussy and Schoenberg.⁵ Significant for the Modernist movement was the fact that Kandinsky considered great works of art to be “symphonic,” in that the “poise and systematic arrangement of parts” was more important than the “melodic” or decorative element. Elegance and simplicity of form were also important to Kasimir Malevich, who, in 1913, founded Suprematism. His picture Black on White, exhibited that year, went straight to the radical position that the Dutch painter Mondrian reached only by stages of gradual simplification of nature. There was a veritable explosion of art movements at this time, under such neologisms as Acmeism, Sythism, Neoprimitivism, Allism, Rayonism, Cubofuturism, Constructivism, and Productionism.⁶

The years immediately after 1910 are also seen as a watershed in Russian literature. The Symbolist movement, led by Aleksandr Blok, with its emphasis on mysticism and the use of symbolic language, came to an end about that year. In 1912 Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky founded a group called the Poets Guild, which came to be known as the Acmeists, of which Anna Akhmatova and Osip Emil’evich Mandelshtam were the most famous members. The Futurist movement also began in 1912 and flourished in the early years following the Revolution, its two best-known adherents being Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. The Acmeists sought perfection of form and wanted to restore precision in the use of words, while the Futurists emphasized the importance to art of the impact of modem technology. Both movements originated as a reaction against Symbolism.⁷

The period around 1910 proved to be of significance in the history of Russian music for many reasons and marked a division between the old Nationalist school and the rising avant-garde. Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 and Balakirev in 1910; Cui lived till 1918, but he wrote nothing after The Captain’s Daughter of 1911. In 1911 Skriabin returned to Russia and exercised a considerable influence on the rising generation of young composers until at least the mid-twenties.⁸ Also in 1911, Nikolai Miaskovsky (1881-1950) graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, began work as a professional musician, and completed his Symphony No. 2. In the twenties Miaskovsky was regarded in Russia as one of the most progressive composers. In 1910, Arthur Lourié (1892-1966) composed a string quartet using microtonal intervals, starting an interest which was taken up by other Russian composers, notably Ivan Vishnegradsky (1893-1979), and which led in 1923 to the founding of a Society for Quarter Tone Music in Leningrad by Georgi Rimsky-Korsakov. By 1910 Prokofiev, then nineteen years of age, had completed his Four Etudes for piano and was already demonstrating some of the characteristics of his future style.

Shortly before 1910 there began to develop a renewed interest among both Russian and Western musicians in hearing and performing each other’s latest works.⁹ The Russian seasons organized in Paris from 1907 by Diagilev had been devoted to historical surveys of Russian concert music and opera, but in 1910 he produced the contemporary ballet Firebird by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), followed by Petrushka and The Rite of Spring in 1911 and 1913. Earlier—during 1901 in St. Petersburg—the Evenings of Contemporary Music had been started, at which works by Western composers, including Debussy, Mahler, Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Schoenberg, and Strauss, were performed. Later, works by native contemporary composers such as Miaskovsky, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky were also heard. Similar concerts took place in Moscow from 1909 under the direction of Ivan Kryzhanovsky and Viacheslav Karatygin. The founding of the Koussevitsky concerts in Moscow in 1909, which ran till he left Russia in 1920, were also an important means of introducing to the Russians modem works by Western composers and providing a platform for rising native musicians.

Much of the experimental work of the Modernist movement in both Russia and the West had already been carried out before World War I. At first some Russian artists—no doubt naively—saw the ferment of artistic activity after 1910, and the 1917 Revolution itself, as related manifestations of a spiritual revival of mystical, almost religious significance. Some who were living abroad before the Revolution were inspired to return immediately to Russia, Anton Pevzner and his brother Naum Gabo and Kandinsky among them. Inevitably, disillusionment followed. This was not however the result of interference by the state at this early stage. The first problem that artists in Russia encountered was the extreme poverty and social privation engendered by the Civil War. The second was the growing opposition to artistic freedom from unofficial Proletarian groups, which came in the early twenties as a reaction to Modernism. It was possibly this latter element, even more than the hardships, which prompted so many artists to leave, including those holding influential positions, such as Lourié and Kandinsky.

After the Revolution the rivalry between supporters of native and Western influences in Russian music continued and became more complex.¹⁰ The conservatories, which previously had been seen as centers of Western academicism, now became identified more with the preservation of the Russian Nationalist tradition, under such men as Glazunov at Petrograd, Ippolitov-Ivanov at Moscow, and Glier at Kiev, all pupils of Rimsky-Korsakov. There arose Proletarian groups, whose main concern was the production of music accessible to the people, and Modernist groups, who shared a common interest in fostering the study of Western music, though not with the idea that it should be in any way detrimental to the native Russian idiom. The situation at times became very confused. With the reform of the conservatories in 1922 and the appointment of progressive musicians like Boris Asaf’yev (1884-1949) and Vladimir Shcherbachev (1889-1952), there were serious divisions between the Modernists and Traditionalists within the conservatories themselves.

In 1923 the Association for Contemporary Music (ASM) was formed to promote concerts of modem works in both Petrograd and Moscow.¹¹ Compositions by Anatoly Aleksandrov (1888-1982), Lev Knipper (1898-1974), Vladimir Kriukov (1902-1960), Miaskovsky, Prokofiev, Roslavets, and Sergei Vasilenko (1872-1956) were among those presented; and the foreign composers included were Bartók, Honegger, and Schreker. Asaf’yev, in Leningrad, produced some scholarly articles on the new music, including a book on Stravinsky, published in 1929, and papers on Berg, Krenek, and Hindemith, whose works were also performed. The ASM is thought at one time to have enjoyed the support of ninety percent of composers and performing musicians in Russia.¹²

The archrivals of the ASM were the various Proletarian groups loosely associated under the name Proletarian Culture (Proletcult), an unofficial organization concerned with providing facilities for choral singing and instrumental folk music in rural towns.¹³ After the Revolution, Aleksandr Kastalsky (1883-1946), who had assisted Taneev in forming the People’s Conservatory in Moscow in 1906, together with many other serious musicians, including Vladimir Deshevov (1889-1955), became involved with Proletcult. Lenin appears to have been suspicious of Proletcult and to have seen it as a possible rival to the official People’s Commissariat of Public Education (Narkompros).¹⁴ Proletcult was officially banned in 1923 but seems to have been immediately replaced by other Proletarian groups, notably the Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM).¹⁵ Again Kastalsky and other professional musicians were involved. After the crisis of 1929, RAPM appears to have received a measure of Communist party support, and large numbers of musicians for tactical reasons left ASM and joined its ranks. The influence of RAPM grew enormously, until it was abolished by the Party’s Central Committee in 1932. The involvement of musicians such as Vasilenko, Kastalsky, and Deshevov with the Proletarian movement should warn against making simplistic generalizations about the quality of the work achieved by these organizations. Nevertheless it does seem that much of the music composed by workers in these groups was on an amateur level.

No doubt the argument between rival groups in Russia was partly the result of the feeling of insecurity among musicians in the new and uncertain political situation. Each group felt the need to demonstrate that it consisted of the true revolutionaries. Members of ASM argued that they were creating new and revolutionary works; and RAPM countered by saying that the Revolution was for the benefit of the workers, and only music easily accessible to them was valid. Outside of the conservatories there were extremists among both Modernist and Proletarian groups who would have liked to see the conservatories swept away altogether, and who, for their various reasons, would have preferred that all pre-Revolution music from any source be repressed. Even serious musicians at times expressed outlandish views. Roslavets, who was a journalist as well as a composer, wrote in 1924 that pre-Revolution Russian music was a “product of feudal culture . . . completely routed by October” and deserved to be destroyed—a remarkable statement for one whose own works were so obviously rooted in those of Skriabin.¹⁶ For its part, RAPM, in its journal, Music and October, published an article condemning Miaskovsky, Vissarion Shebalin (1902-1963), and Anatoly Aleksandrov for “bourgeois decadence.”¹⁷ At first most of the official posts were held by Modernists, who had the better of the argument, but after 1922 the pendulum began to swing inexorably in favor of the Proletarians.

The Political Background

In view of all the infighting between rival factions, it is important to note the official policy on music, the arts, and the nation’s cultural heritage. Lenin is reported to have said, “We must take all culture that Capitalism has left us . . . all knowledge of art. Without this we cannot build the life of the Communist society.”¹⁸ In conversation with Klara Zetkin, he remarked,

We must preserve the beautiful, take it as a model, use it as a starting point, even if it is “old.” Why must we turn away from the truly beautiful, just because it is old? Why must we bow low in front of the new, only because it is new? . . . I am unable to count the works of Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, and similar “isms” among the highest manifestations of creative genius. I do not understand them. I do not derive any pleasure from them.¹⁹

Lenin was evidently in favor of preserving the national heritage but was no particular friend of the avant-garde. No doubt the early influence of Modernism, as reflected in the first May Day celebrations of 1918, was due largely to the influence of Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Education (see note 14).

On October 26 (Julian) 1917 Lenin had set up the People’s Commissariat of Public Education with Lunacharsky as its head and Mikhail Pokrovsky as Deputy Commissar responsible for education.²⁰ Arthur Lourié, an aggressively Modernist composer, was Lunacharsky’s right-hand man responsible for music. Other official appointments within Narkompros included the Modernist painters Mark Chagall and Kandinsky, the experimental theatrical producer Vsevolod Meiergol’d, and the poet Aleksandr Blok. Both Lenin and Lunacharsky were determined that the nation’s cultural heritage should be preserved against extremists from whatever source; and Lunacharsky, a great visionary of the arts, right down to his deposition in 1929, continued to hold a nice balance between extremist groups and between the demands of the state and the needs of individual artists. Following the provocative article in Music and October of 1926, Lunacharsky stepped in, pointing out that it was not appropriate to call Russian Classical music “formalist” or the new Proletarian music “realist”: “such terms do not apply to music.”²¹ A 1925 resolution of the Party’s Central Committee, referring to the arts, declared “The party cannot grant a monopoly to any of these groups.”²²

That there was no lack of support for forward-looking research and experiment is shown by the work carried out by Lourié’s division of Narkompros, known as Narkompros-Muzo.²³ In 1919 a subdivision, Ak-Muzo, was established; under its auspices the State Institute for the History of the Arts (GIII) was set up in Leningrad to study the contemporary scene and the sociological and revolutionary aspects of music.²⁴ The next year Ak-Muzo formed a similar research unit in Moscow called the State Institute for Research in Music (GIMN), with instructions to investigate music theory and engage in experimental research.²⁵ Special attention was given to acoustics and to the possibility of developing new tonal systems, instruments, and scales. During the next two years, among the papers read was one on the application of golden section in music, another on ultrachromaticism, and one by Konus on the metrical structure of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Rozanov, who had been a founding member of the Musical Scientific Society in 1901, proposed a new scale (C, D-flat, D, E, F, G, A, B-flat, B, C). Attention was also given to new forms of notation and to the music of Skriabin. Boleslav Iavorsky’s theory of modes was studied and researched in relation to Russian folk music, and a rival theory, based on acoustics, was proposed by Garbuzov.²⁶ In 1921 the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN) was formed to undertake research into all the arts, and in 1922 it opened a music section under Leonid Sabaneev (1881-1968) to study theory, history, and psychology.²⁷

Musorgsky, writing in 1873, said “It is the people I want to depict.”²⁸ Lenin seems to have reflected these traditional ideas on Realism when he stated, “Art belongs to the people. It must be understood . . . by them. It must be rooted in their feelings, thoughts and desires.”²⁹ Throughout the nineteenth century musicians of the Nationalist school were concerned that their music should maintain contact with “reality,” by which it was meant that music should express something outside of itself and should serve a useful purpose; it should not become an exercise in pure musical techniques. Music, it was thought, should express some human emotion or depict a historical event and should maintain contact with the ordinary people, perhaps through the idiom of folk music, and so be accessible to all.

After 1930 “realism” was interpreted by the authorities more specifically as that which serves the current objectives of the state. Much of the music of the twenties was denigrated in Russian criticism. The Proletcult were condemned for their simplistic view of music, as much as the ASM for their Modernism; both were blamed for the late development of what is called Socialist Realism. Western Modernism was suspect, because it was seen as an exercise in new abstract techniques which did not necessarily have any extramusical import and were inaccessible to any but trained musicians. Such music was criticized as “formalist.” This is reflected in the words of Nadezhda Brusova at a Composers’ Meeting in Moscow in 1948: “Socialist Realism . . . does not require from the artist any sort of abstract objectivism, but an understanding of the true road of life . . . the great road of the Soviet people towards Communism, the highest stage of life.”³⁰ Much of the music considered in this study would later have been called “formalist” because it was concerned with experimental techniques yet, although in some respects it was “difficult,” it always maintained contact with the Classical Russian tradition and contained many intonations³¹ characteristic of Russian folk music.³²

Modernism In Music

In discussing Modernism we are dealing with a group of composers who do not fit cozily into any partisan section but range over the whole musical scene. Asaf’yev, while belonging to ASM and supporting the Modernists, was conservative in his own compositions. Though much of the music of the Proletarians was simplistic and amateurish, some professional composers who chose to ally themselves with the group produced some decidedly Modernist works. Certain pieces by Deshevov must have presented as great a problem of comprehension to the workers as the shorter compositions of Roslavets, and his early Scherzo suggests the possible influence of Prokofiev.³³

Any attempt to find a clear internal sequence of events in the Modernist movement is bound to meet with difficulties. The picture is one of a complex series of cross-currents. The early works of Shostakovich (which appeared in the middle and late twenties), in spite of their sometimes discordant and apparently radical style, reveal their nineteenth-century roots more readily than does Lourié’s Forms in the Air, composed in 1915. Lourié, who was quite aggressively avantgarde while in Russia, adopted a much more accessible style immediately after settling in France in 1922, a style of which his Proletarian opponents in Russia might well have approved. Nikolai Obukhov (1892-1954), who moved to Paris in 1918, adopted some of the superficial characteristics of the French school while applying them along with modal schemes and scale patterns which are distinctly Russian. Leo Omstein (b. 1892) had moved to the United States with his parents in 1907, yet his works display many Russian characteristics and are important to an understanding of the Russian Modernist school, in that he took certain techniques to an extreme stage of development (see chapters 5 and 13). Harmonically he was the most iconoclastic of the Russians, yet at the same time he composed works in a simple salon style and abandoned the Modernist movement altogether in 1922.

Despite the generally complex picture three primary threads can be traced. The first and most easily detected is the influence of Skriabin. The second is the linear style often associated with Prokofiev, although it is difficult to assess to what extent it was due to other composers copying him or to the fact that he represented a prevailing current in Russian music. The third strand is folk music, which seems to hover constantly in the background, either as a direct influence or via the nineteenth-century Nationalist school.

By 1910 Skriabin was a mature and sophisticated composer whose late works, coming right at the beginning of the Modernist movement, were absolutely crucial (see chapter 3). Among those influenced by him were Iury Shaporin (1889-1966), Aleksandr Krein (1883-1951), Roslavets, Joseph Shillinger (1895-1943), Shebalin, and Samuel Feinberg (1890-1962). Shebalin combined Skriabin’s complex harmonies with a modal coloring reminiscent of folk song. Krein used the slow harmonic rhythms of Skriabin with the scales of Russian Hebrew music to produce a style which is often distinctly octatonic. He and Stravinsky made extensive use of the element of symmetry evident in Skriabin, which can be derived from the late works of Rimsky-Korsakov and may be traced back to Dargomyzhsky and his use of the whole-tone scale. Roslavets, who was one of the most original and progressive of the Russian Modernists, began by writing almost exactly in the style that Skriabin adopted around 1910-1913 and gradually formed this into a fully developed twelve-tone system of his own. Feinberg composed almost exclusively for the piano. He developed the more frenetic piano writing of Skriabin to the furthest degree possible, sometimes in textures of considerable harmonic complexity. His works also owe much to the more linear style of Russian music deriving from the nineteenth-century Classical school. The other two most important composers of the Russian avant-garde, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, were both influenced by Skriabin—despite vigorous denials by Stravinsky.³⁴

The position of Prokofiev is more difficult to assess. In 1917 he was still working on such early compositions as Visions fugitives Op. 22, and in 1918 he settled in New York and later in Paris. One might suppose that some of the early works of Ornstein, with their ostinatos and driving motoric rhythms, reflected the influence of Prokofiev. However, a look at their dates of publication reveals that in these respects they go far beyond anything that Prokofiev had written until that time. These characteristics probably reflect the common influence of the more vigorous repetitive style of instrumental folk music. The ascendancy of Prokofiev in Russia came later, but he is important as a leading exponent of the more linear style of writing which developed in the nineteenth century and remained prominent in Russia throughout the time of the Modernist movement.

The background of folk music is all-pervasive but often rather intangible. Composers were particularly interested in aspects of style where they could find something in common between their native folk music and the Western tonal tradition. Its effect is particularly noticeable in their pitch schemes and scale patterns, their use of dominant-type chords in nonfunctional and even final positions, and the occasional cadence which, to Western ears, seems to hover between dominant and tonic but is really a modal phenomenon. (See the discussions in chapters 7, 8, and 10.) In nineteenth-century Russian music theory there was a peculiar conflict of opinion over dominant and tonic functions and over dominant and augmented 6th functions, which reflected the subtle aural differences between the Russian modal and Western tonal traditions.³⁵ Also important is the use of the variable 3rd and 7th of the scale (see chapter 9) and the plagal element in cadences and tonal schemes.

No discussion of Modernism in Russian music can proceed without taking into account the work of Skriabin, who, at the beginning of the period, dominated the avant-garde scene in Russia and whose compositions were known in the West as well as in his home country. Chapter 2 deals with some aspects of his work from 1910 on, which were of particular importance in relation to later developments.