Shostakovich in Context (review)

Shostakovich in Context. Edited by Rosamund Bartlett. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xviii, 224 p. ISBN 0-19-816666-4. $65.]

This is an anthology of papers that were presented at the conference "Shostakovich: The Man and His Age," which took place in 1994 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It reflects the state of scholarship at that time, although several contributions bear the mark of later modification. The opening sentence of the introduction, which claims that the volume presents "recent research into Shostakovich" (p. [xiii]), should thus be read with the appropriate caveat: many of the opinions presented have since been challenged and discussed in other conferences and symposia dedicated to the composer. Some of these later articles were published in a Russian anthology in 1996 (L. Kovnatskaya, ed., D. D. Shostakovich: Sbornik statey k 90-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya [St. Petersburg: Izd-vo "Kompozitor," 1996]). Even with its updating comments, Shostakovich in Context can hardly be regarded as groundbreaking for the specialist. In the past decade, research on Dmitri Shostakovich has become one of the most lively and controversial fields of musicology, and articles that were innovative and opened new areas for research six years ago may now seem almost out of date. Some of the facts that were discovered at that time are by now familiar even to the English reader, mainly because they have been referred to by scholars who have had access to the 1996 Russian collection. Some of the material published in the present anthology has already been discussed in more recent papers that nonetheless have earlier publication dates; for example, Lyudmila Kovnatskaya's article "Shostakovich and the LASM [Leningrad Association of Contemporary Music]" (Tempo: A Quarterly Review of Modern Music 206 [1998]: 2-6) refers to Laurel Fay's findings published here as "Shostakovich, LASM, and Asafiev." Yet every cloud has a silver lining. This collection does contain some references later than 1994, and with the cross-references between the articles, what could have been just a presentation of conference proceedings has been upgraded to the level of a scholarly discussion with a coherent, specific, and definable statement.

The material in the various articles is, in most cases, excellent. Despite the lapse of six years, the interdisciplinary approach is still fresh and stimulating. As the title promises, the collection presents the composer "in context," not only within his political environment, but within the wider (and deeper) cultural, historical, and social environments, going far beyond the outworn repetition of his alleged political stance. Indeed, the reader looks forward with excitement to further research stimulated by these papers: new projects on Shostakovich are probably taking place as this review is being written. Furthermore, the articles by David Fanning, David Haas, Caryl Emerson, and Rosamund Bartlett, which inspect Shostakovich's output from a broad cultural perspective while offering scrupulous examinations of his music, provide ample justification in themselves for purchasing the volume, for they raise important issues and present interesting and perceptive ways of dealing with them. Fanning addresses the problem of musical expression in a new way that demands higher scrutiny and far more self-awareness from the music analyst than is usually found in the literature. Not giving in to "pure absolutist" approaches that avoid the difficult questions of musical meaning, nor to political or expressionistic slogans that avoid a real, close, conscientious analysis of the music, Fanning offers an unusual method of harmonic analysis that is eventually correlated with semantics. Haas points at cultural perceptions of musical traditions that may have affected Shostakovich's compositions. Suggesting a thorough inspection of developmental techniques and thematic transformations and going beyond the obvious musical quotations and allusions, he takes a step forward in the contextual analysis of the composer's music. Emerson, pointing at cultural perceptions of existential ideas in light of which Shostakovich lived and wrote, makes fascinating comparisons between Modest Mussorgsky's attitude toward Aleksandr Pushkin's texts and that of Shostakovich toward Marina Tsvetaeva's. Her quotation from Mikhail Bakhtin at the opening of her...