Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939-1953

Kiril Tomoff

Cornell University Press, 2006 - History - 321 pages

Why did the Stalin era, a period characterized by bureaucratic control and the reign of Socialist Realism in the arts, witness such an extraordinary upsurge of musical creativity and the prominence of musicians in the cultural elite? This is one of the questions that Kiril Tomoff seeks to answer in Creative Union, the first book about any of the professional unions that dominated Soviet cultural life at the time. Drawing on hitherto untapped archives, he shows how the Union of Soviet Composers established control over the music profession and negotiated the relationship between composers and the Communist Party leadership. Central to Tomoff's argument is the institutional authority and prestige that the musical profession accrued and deployed within Soviet society, enabling musicians to withstand the postwar disciplinary campaigns that were so crippling in other artistic and literary spheres.

Most accounts of Soviet musical life focus on famous individuals or the campaign against Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth and Zhdanov's postwar attack on musical formalism. Tomoff's approach, while not downplaying these notorious events, shows that the Union was able to develop and direct a musical profession that enjoyed enormous social prestige. The Union's leadership was able to use its expertise to determine the criteria of musical value with a degree of independence. Tomoff's book reveals the complex and mutable interaction of creative intelligentsia and political elite in a period hitherto characterized as one of totalitarian control.

Contents

• The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers: 7
• The Formation of the Composers Union 193241: 9
• Administering the Creative Process: 33
• Composers on the March 194145: 59
• Profession and Power 194653: 91
• Zhdanovshchina and the Ogolevets Affair: 93
• Brouhaha Party Intervention and Professional Consolidation 1948: 118
• Anticosmopolitanism and the Music Profession 194953: 148
• The Results of Party Intervention: 185
• Professionals and the Stalinist Cultural Elite: 211
• Muzfond Royalties and Popularity: 213
• Elite Hierarchies: 231
• Most Respected Comrade Informal Networks in the Stalinist Music World: 264
• Conclusion: 296
• Bibliography: 301
• Index: 309

Popular passages

Page 4 - The Politics of Knowledge: Party Ideology and Soviet Science, 1945-1953‎

Page xiv - Leonid Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki: Stalinskaia kul'turnaia revoliutsiia, 1936-1938 (Moscow: luridicheskaia kniga, 1997).‎

Page v - Preface This book has been a long time in the making. My interest in the connections between mathematics and music started in earnest in the early nineties, when I bought a second-hand synthesizer.‎

About the author

Kiril Tomoff is Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945-1958 and Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939-1953, both from Cornell.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939-1953
• Author: Kiril Tomoff
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2006
• ISBN: 080144411X, 9780801444111
• Length: 321 pages
• Subjects: History / Europe / General; History / Russia / General; Music / Ethnic; Music / General; Music / History & Criticism; Music / Philosophy & Social Aspects; Political Science / Labor & Industrial Relations