THE END OF SOVIET MUSIC

Chapter:

CHAPTER 9 After Everything

Source:

MUSIC IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

What, then, about cold-war purity, “Eastern”-style? The complementary orthodoxy, adhered to (and sometimes enforced) within what during the cold war was called the Soviet bloc, demanded above all the “accessibility” and “transparency” of style that (when embraced by Rochberg or Lerdahl) the Western critical establishment deemed heretical, and frowned upon the idea of stylistic progress that had led the music of “bourgeois decadence” into social isolation. One might expect that as the frigidity of the cold war eased, so might doctrinal rigidity on both sides. And indeed, as social criteria crept back into (and undermined) Western modernist commitments, formalist ideas played a similar role among composers in Eastern Europe—at first among a subversive minority, later more openly and commonly. The principal effect in the East, as in the West, was a growing and finally dominant eclecticism.

Citation (MLA):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 9 After Everything." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2025. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-009012.xml>.

Citation (APA):

Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 9 After Everything. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 27 Apr. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-009012.xml

Citation (Chicago):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 9 After Everything." In Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 27 Apr. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-009012.xml