Ildar Khannanov (Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University)
Music Theory in the USSR in 1948: The Problem of Formalism
The tragedy and farce of the January 1948 Postanovlenie of the TsK and the following disputes among composers and musical critics has received enough coverage in the 1990s. Overshadowed by the battle of composers, the discussion among music theorists presents a different angle and may shed light on the opposition “social realism vs. formalism.” In fact, the conflict of theoretical concept of musical work and that of musical form is more essential than the pair of stylistic descriptions above. If the standoff between Zhdanov and the Composer’s Union creates nothing but a juicy topic for the mass media, the question of choice of analytical method in music remains of value for a scholarly discussion. The true opposition in 1948 has been between Victor Zuckerman on the side of the indigenous Russian method of integrated analysis and Semyon Ogolevets on the side of western tradition of teaching of form (Formenlehre). The climax in the debates of 1948 has been reached when Ogolevets announced that the best way for Soviet music theory would be to return to good old pre-Revolutionary teaching of form. This was an ultimate act of defiance in the midst of complete subservience of the Faculty Meeting of the Moscow Conservatory. This act has been praised by the generation of the Thaw as the most outstanding example of heroism the musical academia has seen in decades.
The irony of this event has been revealed in the recent years by the fact of reorientation of western music scholarship from the 19th-century theory toward new models, such as Schenkerian doctrine, neo-Riemannian transformational approach and New Musicology. In all three of these most common trends, as well as in recent overhaul of theory of form introduced by Willian Caplin, Warren Darcy and James Hepokoski the main object of critique is exactly the 19th-century teachings of harmony and form. Nobody in the West nowadays would want to return to A. B. Marx or L. Bussler. If anything, the western minds are ruled by the idea of musical work as an entity integrated by force of voice-leading (in Schenkerian view) or intertextuality (in New Musicological interpretation and Dahlhaus project participants). And although everybody in the West still opposes Andrey Zhdanov’s methods of persuasion, nobody seems to disagree in principle with the idea that musical work is a complex phenomenon which exceeds the limits of “form.” Old Hanslikian formalism and its newer positivistic reflection of the 1960s are either dead or slowly dying in the western academia. Richard Taruskin has inherited more from Zuckerman, than from any Russian theorist of formalist tradition. Even Zuckerman’s title Kamarinskaya and the Russian Traditions has travelled into Taruskin’s Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. There are many interesting directions in Russian indigenous musical thought which indicate integrated (tselostnyi) character of music, ranging from Asafiev’s intonatsia to the neumes of the Znamenyi chant.
