Music under Stalin Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Music beneath Stalin - Essay ExampleThe RAPM which dominated the 1920s and thirty-something also advocated for anti-Western aesthetics that could be seen in kit and boodle much(prenominal) as Lady Macbeth and led to the identification of the commencement of the Soviet medicational history. Members of this group such(prenominal) as Marian Koval became one of the greatest critics of the works of Shostakovich (Edmund 2000, p. 88). There were other groups that were not as influential as RAPM such as Muzyka-massam which translates to harmony to the the vulgar founded in 1929 to produce music to the citizens. Much, later, there has been political meaning given to the music written by Russian composers such as Shostakovich in which the works were overtly propagandist in nature such as the Eleventh Symphony that were a protest against the Soviet Union under Stalin. Shostakovich also unruffled music that could be said to be formalist when the RAPM was influential such as the opera Th e Nose and the ballets drive away and The Golden Age that showed disdain for the music performed by RAPM. Despite the good works by artists such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev amongst other composers, they underwent a lot of repression in the year 1948 when the regime through its secretary command issued a decree denouncing them for their formalism and thus their music was suppressed with no publications or performances. Music under StalinThe Soviet regimes under Stalin and those who adopted Stalinism had a stranglehold on the music that was supposed to be produced and composed that make creativity a difficult affair. However, some artists such as Shostakovich, Prokofiev and others managed to create musical masterpieces with distinct messages mainly to counter propaganda and inspire revolutionary purposes amongst the masses (Fairclough 2012, p. 68). There is dormant very limited understanding of the Soviet reality as concerns the music that was played and performed under Stalin. T his incomprehension oft leads to the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the motivations and activities of those who composed and performed music including their meaning in the Soviet Union under Stalin. For type Shostakovich rarely explained his musical pieces with a program emphasizing no reference or illusions to his attitude towards the Soviet regime. Instead, he preferred confiding in a circle of friends whom he could trust as discussing his music elsewhere would have killed his musical career. The revered Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin states that during the 1950s, nobody wanted to go to the gulag as at that time there was no independent judiciary in Russia as the Communist party was the scarcely jury with Stalin as the assumed judge. There is clear evidence that music was mostly composed for the powerful regime which sought to control the citizens both physically and spiritually as shown by the music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. These ii geniuses of Russian mu sic were later accused amongst other Soviet musicians of not composing music that was social to the masses with their music christened antinarodnaya which implied that their music was against the people. In The War Symphonies Shostakovich against Stalin by Larry Weinstein, the author states that the film is clearly made to counter the propaganda of the