[Marxism] Leningrad, Shostakovich and the Music of Transcendence

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

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http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/2015/12/leningrad-shostakovich-and-music-of.html

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Check out my newest book, Daydream Sunset:60s Counterculture in the 70s

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Re: [Marxism] Leningrad, Shostakovich and the Music of Transcendence

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Ron Jacobs wrote

http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/2015/12/leningrad-shostakovich-and-music-of.html

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To me, Shostakovich composed the music of a time of end-of-era cognitive 
dissonance and destruction. 

I grew up in a musical family in the midwest. My mother played and taught piano 
and played the organ in a local church, and my business-man father was a paid 
church baritone and civic light opera soloist (even a paid cantor for a time) 
with a fine voice, who would not allow me to have vocal training, because he 
said a second-rate businessman can make a living at it, but not a second rate 
musician. I listened with resignation to what he said, and to the vocal music 
of Handel, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Hugo Wolf, and got not much further. I 
learned at least to read music and listen fairly critically, but without formal 
training other than choral. Until the LP came along, and moving to the 
more-vibrant Bay Area of KPFA and Davies Symphony Hall (and the Jazz Workshop, 
Keystone Corner, Blind Lemon and the Blackhawk).

In the last few years I’ve been listening, for hours at a time, to 
Shostakovich, particularly his quartets.  At first what I heard was the 
dissonance and agony, and friends and family asked me what in the world I was 
doing immersing myself in that ugly, downer music. Because that’s what it seems 
to be to many. 

But then I recalled the history of the musical form as it came to me. The 
strange dissonances, for their time, of Hildegarde von Bingen and Gesualdo, the 
original organ compositions of Buxtehude, the cramped shapes of much of the 
sacred music of Heinrich Schutz, what seemed to me the almost mathematically 
precise, often angular forms of Bach in his astounding instrumental and vocal 
compositions, often clashing, I’m sure, to his contemporaries in the 
stultified, pious Lutheran church fold, the dissonances in some of the 
Beethoven late quartets and the strange rhythms and unfamiliar tone poems in 
his symphonies, sometimes clashing, and the effect they may have had on 
comfortable bourgeois listeners in the chambers and concert halls of 
19th-century Europe. The almost crazed use of the idiom by Berlioz, the unusual 
experiments in new forms of Debussy, Stravinsky, Berg, Carter, Veress, Reich, 
Reilly, Glass and Cage, and how most have been validated for their genius and 
have entered, some sooner some later, the mainstream of musical experience.   

And the more I listened the more I marveled at what Shostakovich was doing with 
the material world of experience of his place and time, and what genius it took 
to make such creative and profoundly expressive use of that material to explore 
and extend the accretion of musical invention and creation bequeathed to him. 
His piano compositions as well, his 24 Preludes and Fugues in honor of Bach. 
But especially his quartets, which were his secret, uninhibited, creative 
expression and testament hidden beyond the stultifying criticisms of Soviet 
officialdom. I now think of him as the premier genius by far among 20th century 
composers.

So I‘m requesting a copy of Symphony for the City of the Dead, and thanks for 
the referral and your thoughts, Ron. You’ve certainly added to my day, sent me 
back to Dmitri’s 3rd quartet, after weeks on streets filled with canned tired 
Christmas music.



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