Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CMC Senior Theses CMC Student Scholarship 2018 Looking Beyond Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony Juana Granados Claremont McKenna College Recommended Citation Granados, Juana, "Looking Beyond Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony" (2018). CMC Senior Theses. 1729. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1729 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you by Scholarship@Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in this collection by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Claremont McKenna College Looking Beyond Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony Submitted to Professor Gary Hamburg and Professor Anne Dwyer Written by Juana Granados For Senior Thesis Fall 2017 December 4, 2017 1 This page is intentionally blank 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my high school teacher, Mr. Das, for introducing me to Shostakovich. We played the Fifth Symphony for one of our concerts, and I have not forgotten that performance. The symphony was stuck in my head while I was abroad last year. It was not until I visited a cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia that I realized Shostakovich had composed more than one masterpiece. His music played all through the cemetery, and people were crying as they listened to it. There is a strong admiration for Shostakovich throughout Russia, so I wanted to learn more about his music. I know that it reflected gruesome events, but I wondered how music so pointedly critical of life in the Soviet Union could gain such popularity. On returning to Claremont, I decided to study an entirely new symphony and to see what aspects of it were controversial.