GALINA USTVOLSKAYA: ORTHODOXY AND TRANSGRESSION IN SOVIET MUSIC by Alexander Samuel Popowich A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Music and Culture Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario May 18, 2011 2011,A.S. Popowich Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de Pedition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-81603-5 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-81603-5 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1*1 Canada ABSTRACT Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) is an enigmatic figure in the history of Soviet music. Despite its undeniable quality and avant-garde nature, Ustvolskaya's music was neither celebrated nor officially suppressed during the Soviet period, and this ambiguous position continues to this day. It is as if Ustvolskaya was twice silenced, once in her own time, and once more in ours. Employing critical theory ranging from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, through the gesture theory of Robert Hatten and David Lidov, to concepts of the body in Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Susan Sontag, I investigate the structural and discursive reasons for the silence surrounding Ustvolskaya's work. n ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. James Deaville for his support and encouragement in the researching and writing of this thesis, as well as the faculty, students, and staff of the Department of Music at Carleton University. I would also like to thank Rosemary Swan, Joan Cavanagh, and Cameron Metcalfe of the University of Ottawa Library for their support. This thesis is dedicated to Marie-Claire Simard, without whom the researching and writing of this thesis would have proceeded much less smoothly. in Determining how all this stands in Russia would presuppose submitting the stratification over there to an analysis that would scarcely be tolerated. T.W. Adomo1 All who really love my music should refrain from theoretical analysis of it... G.I. Ustvolskaya2 1 T.W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1976), 57. 2 Quoted in Olga Gladkowa, Musik als Magische Kraft (Berlin: Ernst Kuhn, 2001), 1. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Musicology and the Sociology of Bourdieu 11 Musicology and Interdisciplinary Bourdieu's work and the "new musicology ' Practice and Subjectivity Practice Theory, Ideology, and Soviet Music Bourdieu and Marxist Musicology Interpretation and the Problem of Homology 2 Soviet Orthodoxies and Avant-Gardes 34 The Post-Revolutionary Moment in Soviet Music The Avant-Garde in Soviet Music History Cultural Capital and the History of Fields Soviet Orthodoxy and its Discontents Soviet Music History as the Cycle of Avant-Gardes The "Ustvolskaya Myth" and the Dominance of Shostakovich 3 Language, The Body, and the Grotesque 57 The Relation of Music to Language and the Body Habitus and Performativity The Theory of Embodiment The Body and the Semiotic Markedness Theory Bodily Gesture and Musical Gesture Gestures of the Grotesque Body Case Study Shostakovich 4 Transgression, The Abject, and the Erotic 84 Kristeva, Lacan, and the Abject The Soviet Symbolic Order Abjection in Ustvolskaya's Music Abjection and Transgression Transgression and Heresy Silence or the Inability to Speak Erotics The Silent Speech of the Body CONCLUSION 109 APPENDIX 1 Socialist Realism and Music 112 2 Musical Examples 111 3 List of Works 114 BIBLIOGRAPHY 129 INTRODUCTION In his introduction to the Everyman edition of Samuel Beckett's trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable), Gabriel Josipovici quotes Kierkegaard's "contrast between mere end and significant conclusion": the lives of... men go on in such a way that they have indeed premises for living but reach no conclusions - quite like this stirring age which has set in movement many premises but also has reached no conclusion. Such a man's life goes on till death comes and puts an end to life, but without bringing with it an end in the sense of a conclusion. For it is one thing that a life is over, and a different thing that a life is finished by reaching a conclusion.1 For Beckett, Josopivici maintains, writing itself was implicated in this particular variation of the "meaningless" philosophy of life. The literary use of words was empty, solipsistic since the act of writing was by nature a solitary one, while the very nature of words is social.2 This contradiction between the emptiness of written words and the very real need to write was a source of conflict until, in 1946, Beckett realized the kind of work he might do that could transcend it: the trilogy itself. Prior to this discovery, Beckett maintained an attitude of distance and irresponsibility towards his work and his readers, caused by a feeling of disgust in the self-centered, "masturbatory" limits he believed to be inherent in the act of writing. As Josipovici says, this - as well as Beckett's "tone of haughty disdain for the reader" - was "not likely to win him many fans in the decade of Auden, Malraux and Sartre."3 It is precisely this problem of "fans" - of recognition or consecration - that I would like to raise with respect to the music and career of Galina Ustvolskaya. Much of what Josipovici says about Beckett could be applied equally to Ustvolskaya. Many of her statements concerning public performances of her work and about the very public music 1 S0ren Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation (1848), cited in Gabriel Josipovici, introduction to Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, by Samuel Beckett, xxi-xxxiv (New York Everyman Library, 1997), xn 2 "This sense of horror and disgust at the uselessness of words in literature is not of course unique to Beckett Romantic and post-Romantic writers like Holderhn and Mallarme, Kafka and Hofmannsthal, had already been gripped by despair at the thought of writing anything in a world where the writer was no longer, as in Homer, the mouthpiece of the Muses, but merely someone indulging himself in solitude " Ibid., xi 3 Ibid., xiv 1 of Shostakovich4 suggest that publicity and public exposure are shameful and embarrasing 5 For Ustvolskaya as well as Beckett the social content of music has been lost and what remains is a dirty, abject, solitary working out of the "premises of living " Ustvolskaya's early public pieces were eventually suppressed as if shameful or filthy 7 Also like Beckett, Ustvolskaya had very few supporters or promoters throughout her working life, even though her music fit with the "underground," avant-garde music of the time (even anticipating it by several years) Her music is extremely difficult (one contemporary listener called it "very ugly") , and certainly would have met the (admittedly vague) criteria for "formalism" so anathema to Soviet cultural politics Yet she was not repressed, forced to publicly recant her formalism and to promise to follow a path more acceptable to the Soviet cultural authorities as Prokofiev and Shostakovich, among others, had been forced to do As Viktor Sushn, a fellow composer and Ustvolskaya's editor at Musikverlag Hans Sikorski in Hamburg, writes "The music of Ustvolskaya is not "avant-garde" in the usual sense of the word It is perhaps for just this reason that her work was never subjected to the same public condemnation as the music of several of her colleagues in the USSR " Unlike the underground composers who came after her, such as Andrey Volkonsky and Edison Denisov, Ustvolskaya's music was never "banned,"10 but neither was it publicly performed It seems that, except for Shostakovich, some of her composition students, and the occasional performer (such as Oleg Malov), her music had few admirers and no champions '' 4 For example, in Simon Bokman's memoir Variations on the Theme Galina Ustvolskaya (Berlin Ernst Kuhn, 2007) 5 Thea Derks,