“A Discourse of Myth”
Yesterday in class, my professor quoted Leo Treitler, who wrote in Musicology and Difference that “music history is, among other things, a discourse of myth.” Now of course this statement can be applied to more than just music history. Any type of history, and even news of current events, can fall prey to myth, as we have all witnessed firsthand with the“fake news” epidemic of the past few years.
There are a multitude of historical events and even entire time periods that are shrouded in mystery, creating the perfect breeding ground for myths. One example that stands out to me in music history from the past one-hundred years is the life of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
Dmitri Shostakovich was a famous composer of the Soviet Union during a time when the arts were heavily censored. Artists of the Soviet Union were not allowed the luxury of abstaining from giving their opinions on the political climate in which they were living. The arts fell directly under the control of the state, and Shostakovich often found himself at odds with them because of the music he chose to write. His versatility as a composer as well as his skill at appeasing the government while still remaining true to his musical standards secured him as one of the great composers of the twentieth century.
In 1979, just four years after the composer’s death, a memoir entitled Testimony was published in the United States. The book was instantly controversial. The author, Solomon Volkov, depicted Shostakovich as “an embittered ironist, who had never been complicit, to the slightest degree, with the Soviet regime; who had, on the contrary, seen through it, mocked it, protested it all along; whose “Aesopian” manner of expression and outward submission put him in the hallowed tradition of the 19th-century radical writers who knew how to outsmart the tsarist censorship” (Taruskin).This intensely anti-Soviet Shostakovich was a departure from the commonly accepted narrative surrounding him. Although Shostakovich had come under fire from the Soviet government multiple times, he spent much of his career trying to please Stalin and play by the rules of the state, even becoming a member of the Communist Party in 1960.
One of the many controversial claims made by Volkov is that Shostakovich’s music…
