Daniel Elphick

Mieczysław Weinberg left his family behind and fled his native Poland in September 1939. He reached the Soviet Union, where he become one of the most celebrated composers. He counted Shostakovich among his close friends and produced a prolific output of works. Yet he remained mindful of the nation that he had left. This book examines how Weinberg's works written in Soviet Russia compare with those of his Polish contemporaries; how one composer split from his national tradition and how he created a style that embraced the music of a new homeland, while those composers in his native land surged ahead in a more experimental vein. The points of contact between them are enlightening for both sides. This study provides an overview of Weinberg's music through his string quartets, analysing them alongside Polish composers. Composers featured include Bacewicz, Meyer, Lutosławski, Panufnik, Penderecki, Górecki, and a younger generation, including Szymański and Knapik.

Music behind the Iron Curtain: Weinberg and his Polish Contemporaries, available from Cambridge University Press, October 2019.

https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/music/twentieth-century-and-contemporary-music/music-behind-iron-curtain-weinberg-and-his-polish-contemporaries?format=HB

Amidst all the art, literature, music, and theatre of the ‘Zhdanovshchina’ (the post-war Soviet intervention in arts policy), one play stands out: Sergei Mikhalkov’s Ilya Golovin. In this play, a leading Soviet composer is chastised for his formalism but sees the error of his ways and again writes music of sufficiently socialist character. Ilya Golovin is noteworthy not just because it presents a crude parody of Shostakovich and his music, but because it reveals the wider context of the ideological campaign against artists and shows us something of how different artists responded. In this article, I argue that Ilya Golovin is not simply a bizarre example of multiple artists toeing the ideological line: instead it reveals the uglier side of late Stalinism in the form of vehement anti-Semitism, as well as demonstrating the xenophobic Cold War patriotism that served as the ultimate motivation behind the Zhdanovshchina itself.

The theories of Boris Asafiev, including musical process, symphonism, and intonatsiya, proved to be hugely influential in the Soviet Union and beyond. While Asafiev’s ideas were widely adopted by theorists and audiences alike, they were also appropriated by a generation of music critics. As composers struggled to come to terms with what might constitute socialist-realist music, critics built a discourse of projecting meaning onto works via Asafiev’s theories. At the same time, multiple theorists developed and expanded his ideas. The picture that emerges is of a multitude of applications and responses to a multivalent body of work that became a vital part of musical discourse in the latter half of the Soviet Union. In this article, I survey the main theories from Boris Asafiev’s writings on music, and their significance after his death. I begin by defining key terms such as symphonism, musical process, and especially intonatsiya. I then discuss the 1948 Zhdanovshchina and Asafiev’s involvement, and the less well-known 1949 discussions on Musicology. For the remainder of the article, I provide examples of key studies from Soviet music theorists using Asafiev’s terms to illustrate how their usage expanded and, in some cases, moved away from Asafiev’s myriad intentions.

Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships.  Ed. by Esteban Buch, Igor Contreras Zubillaga, and Manuel Deniz Silva. Pp. x +  224. Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century. (New York and Abingdon:  Ashgate,  2017). Review for Music & Letters, May 2018.

Sonata No. 1 for Violin Solo, Opus 82; and: Sonata No. 2 for Violin Solo, Opus 95; and: 24 Preludes for Violoncello Solo; and: Three Palms, Opus 120; and: String Quartet No. 14, Opus 122; and: String Quartet No. 15, Opus 124 by Mieczysław Weinberg. Notes
Volume 72, Number 3, March 2016
pp. 619-623.

An introduction to current research on the life and work of Mieczysław Weinberg, with biographical overview, bibliography, recommended listening, and further figures of interest, including Margarita Kuss, Yuri Levitin, and Boris Chaykovsky.

Published in the DSCH journal, No. 44, January 2016.

This article explores instances of mutual influence in the string quartets of Weinberg and of Shostakovich. While Shostakovich's influence on Weinberg is apparent on first listen, the reverse process is more subtle - and is particularly apparent in some of Shostakovich's earlier quartets. After several examples, the case of Weinberg and Shostakovich is explored in the context of theories of influence itself - especially Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. I conclude that Weinberg and Shostakovich's relationship of mutual influence is a rather unique one in the history of music.

"Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-96) is a unique figure in Soviet music. A Jewish-Polish composer, he was born and raised in Warsaw, but fled to the Soviet Union following the outbreak of WWII. He left his family behind, never to see them again; they perished in the Holocaust. He found acceptance in the USSR and quickly made a name for himself as a composer, establishing a close friendship with none other than Dmitri Shostakovich. From 1942, Weinberg’s father-in-law was Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater and chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Mikhoels’ state-sanctioned assassination in 1948 signalled another dark time for Weinberg, as a period of official anti-semitism began in the USSR. Weinberg’s family links to the 1952-3 ‘Doctor’s Plot’ lead to him being arrested and imprisoned for several months in 1953. As a result of such hardships, much of Weinberg’s music was commemorative in nature, culminating in his 1967-8 opera The Passenger. The opera is unique for directly dealing with the Holocaust, having much of its on-stage action set in Auschwitz itself.
In this paper, I explore how Weinberg sought to come to terms with such hardships through his music; how he dealt with his own exile, imprisonment and with the effects of the Holocaust in general, and how he maintained a touching and humanistic idiom throughout all of his works. In particular, I will be examining The Passenger, and the obstacles it presents for modern-day audiences."

SMA Study Day, 'Teaching Music Theory in the Digital Age'

Music Departments across the UK are dealing with a similar issue: decreasing numbers of A-Level music graduates. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the music theory knowledge (or lack thereof) of new undergraduates. Many departments (my own included) have lifted the requirement for A-level music and have instead ran theory ‘catch-up’ courses. In September 2020, I was responsible for design and delivery of such a course – in the middle of the pandemic. The result was an intersection of accessibility, both technological and social.
The Autumn 2020 term brought the curse of ‘blended learning’: teaching in-person and online simultaneously. It was, in effect, the worst of both worlds. Group work was out of the question, as in-person students could not be within 2 metres of each other, while those online might be alienated from the group. I deployed a series of online solutions, most visibly in a video series which has now moved to YouTube. At the same time, I was trying to gauge levels of theoretical understanding and to judge what was ‘essential’ theory knowledge for new music undergraduates. Understanding student backgrounds and the limitations of blended learning threw the looming crisis of music theory teaching into relief. In this paper, I discuss the tools and strategies that HE teachers can explore to make theory more 'accessible’ in an equalities and class-based sense, and also in the learning technologies sense.

Watch the 'Fundamentals of Music Theory' series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpxsj3Ntr3mEU5-k5_ewXtGy8qy79W6WO

(paper given at the Russian and East-European Music Conference, Durham, October 2019)

The theories of Boris Asafiev, including musical Process, Symphonism, and intonatsia, proved to be hugely influential within the Soviet Union and beyond, earning Asafiev the first ever Stalin Prize awarded for musicology. His ideas built upon pre-existing treatises of musical form and structure and combined them with an appropriately Marxist-Leninist viewpoint to provide a body of analytical theories to analyse music from a socialist point of view. His ideas were crucial to the development of socialist-realism in music, and also to the reception of a generation of composers. While Asafiev’s ideas were widely adopted by composers and audiences alike, they were also abused by a generation of music critics. This paper explores the trend of use (and abuse) of Asafiev’s theories in Soviet music criticism, focusing on the use of intonatsia.
In Asafiev’s original usage, intonatsia provided an intricate web of social meanings to construct a piece’s contemporary significance, with considerable recourse to concepts from Marxist class struggle. In Soviet music criticism, however, the idea could be adopted to explain the socialist credentials of any piece of music (or lack thereof). While composers struggled to come to terms with what socialist-realist music might sound like, critics were busy constructing an industry based around projecting meaning onto works via Asafiev’s theories. Examples included in this talk include critics who dismissed otherwise successful works via reference to ‘negative’ intonatsia, as well as composers and critics who sought to defend music via ‘positive’ intonatsia. The trend that emerges is of a musical theory that took on a life of its own and became a vital part of the stagnation of ‘official’ cultural life in the latter half of the Soviet Union.

The format of socialist realism in music is familiar from the grand works of bombastic symphonies, through to overly-optimistic (and over-the-top) cantatas. It is an aesthetic strongly associated with the era of Stalin, and many of the most famous works directly contributed to the cult of personality that was built around the dictator. After Stalin’s sudden death in 1953, socialist realism did not disappear, however. It is largely unacknowledged that socialist realism persisted later into the Soviet Union, even as far as the 1980s and the era of Gorbachev. Critics at the time reflected the large-scale cultural stagnation of the Soviet Union, and continued to praise and celebrate the continuing production of socialist-realist works. Soviet-era analytical approaches to socialist realism prove illuminative for explaining the persistence of the aesthetic, even long after the deaths of its initial architects. This paper takes two oratorios as case studies: Alfred Schnittke’s Nagasaki (1958), and Rodion Shchedrin’s Lenin is among us (1970). Along with overviews of these works, the cultural and political horizons of the thaw and the stagnation eras in Soviet history are considered to discuss how and why socialist realism continued to thrive for so long after the death of the despot who had been its driving architect. The picture that emerges is of a ‘zombie-aesthetic’, continuing more out of habit than political imperative, with a huge repertoire of works that have now been forgotten.

(Music since 1900 Conference, Huddersfield, 2019)

(Paper given at the symposium '"Individualismus in zeiten der avantgarde" mit Krzysztof Penderecki', MUK, Vienna, March 2019)

Penderecki has written for the string quartet ensemble throughout his career, though with a sizeable gap between composition of his two ‘pairs’ of works. The numbered quartets span the major changes of his compositional output: the First and Second, firmly within Penderecki’s earlier progressive style, and the Third and Fourth falling within his later neo-romantic style. Despite the striking differences between the two pairs, there are subtler similarities that unite them together, and that show the consistency of Penderecki’s writing for string quartet. In this paper, I will provide an overview of Penderecki’s works for String Quartet, and also suggest ways that they can be conceived of as a united group, rather than the accepted division into pairs.

Polish music in the Cold War was torn between two identities: the imposing force of the Soviet Union, and the cultural hegemony of the USA. Events such as the Warsaw Autumn Festival may have proven excellent training grounds for the next generation of Polish composers, but they also operated as arenas for cultural grandstanding, a kind of ‘soft politics’ within the Eastern Bloc itself. While tensions between East and West in the 1960s have been widely explored, cultural incongruities were felt strongly behind the iron curtain.
This paper focuses on cultural exchange in the 1960s between Poland and the Soviet Union. In particular, I examine how various delegations to the Warsaw Autumn Festival returned feeling increasingly frustrated year after year, as Polish audiences were increasingly interested in a Soviet avant-garde that Moscow authorities sought to quash. The parallel movement, of Polish delegations to Moscow, drew equally frustrating results for both sides, as the Polish visitors were highly dismissive of many of the products of 1960s Soviet composition. The role of musicians reveals a troubled alliance, reflecting the uneasy truce that existed under Soviet domination of Poland in the middle of the Cold War.

(Paper given at Royal Musical Association Annual Conference, Bristol, September 2018).

Paper given at REEM annual conference, 'Music and Revolution', Goldsmiths University, 2017.

Shostakovich dedicated two of his symphonies to the events of 1917, the Second and the Twelfth. Many authors have observed how these two works have little in common, despite being reactions to the same events. The Second was written in 1927, when the spirit of ‘October’ was still a driving force in public discourse, especially around the tenth anniversary of the revolution. By the time of the Twelfth Symphony in 1961, such glorification of the revolution itself was rare, and Shostakovich focused on the role of Lenin in the events of 1917.
The Second and Twelfth are often understood to be the most under-appreciated of Shostakovich’s symphonies, though they have more to offer us than first appearances might suggest. While the Second’s use of choir and mass song baffled Western audiences, it was the Twelfth’s ‘tableux-like’ style of dramaturgy that distanced critics (in contrast to the montage-like pace of its predecessor, the Eleventh Symphony). Most striking of all, there is a notable regression of style between the Second and the Twelfth, since the Twelfth takes an almost academic-style format. In this paper, I tie this apparent ‘regression’ with the shift in depictions of the October revolution in the years between the Second and Twelfth Symphonies. I argue that Shostakovich’s apparent stylistic ‘regression’ complements perfectly the regression in fervour that surrounded the events of October 1917. This leaves the work as being far from a critical failure, but rather an appropriate illustration of the shift in public discourse around 1917 that had occurred during Shostakovich’s career.

Paper given at ICMSN/Surrey MAC 2017.

The body of work known as ‘Socialist-Realist’ music was initially promoted by Soviet musicologists through a combination of topoi-based semiotics, and ideological renderings of a piece’s ‘content’. It was this obsession with socio-cultural contexts that came under fire at a time when Anglo-American analysis was accused of being similarly obsessed with ‘form-based’ analysis. As the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was pre-empted by the rise (and fall) of ‘New Musicology’ in the 1980s and 1990s, so the collapse of the Soviet regime was complemented by a rise in ‘form-based’ analysis in more recent Russian-speaking musicology. In a sense, both extremes on the sides of the former Cold War have been relaxing into a common analytical ground.
One marked difference, however, is in the relative reluctance on the part of former-Soviet scholars to engage with Socialist-Realist-era works, arguably because they are so tainted with the worst excesses of the Soviet ‘ideological’ method of analysis. In this paper, I call for an approach that provides form-based analysis wed with an appropriate ideological ‘context’ for a work, combined with psychoanalytical approaches. I take as my case study Vissarion Shebalin’s Fifth String Quartet (1942), subtitled the ‘Slavonic’, owing to its prolific use of folksongs from several Soviet nationalities (and, so, representing the ‘united’ Soviet war effort). I demonstrate through this work a pragmatic and score-based approach that utilises both extremes of analytical approaches in order to prove that Socialist-Realist works can still raise questions beyond their socio-cultural contexts.

Socialist Realism was an aesthetic doctrine enforced throughout the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s onwards. It was broadly defined as art that ‘depicts reality in its revolutionary development’. Socialist-realist art reflected the long-term goals of Soviet communism - not necessarily the everyday reality of life for Soviet citizens. In music this translated into works appealing to as broad an audience as possible, with emphasis on tunefulness, accessibility, and folk traditions. The complex layers of meaning in socialist realist music have often been noted. It can, however, be all too easy to dismiss socialist-realist music, opting instead for works that pushed against the trend. This is where my link between socialist-realist music and psychoanalysis emerges.
    Utilising the writings and theories of Lacan, Žižek, and other post-Freudians, psychoanalysis has been gaining attention and significance as a fruitful and useful method for cultural-analysis, including music. Psychoanalysis questions constructions of concepts such as self, dialogue, society, and meaning, all through the gaze of a multitude of thinkers. It has proved particularly suited to music observed to be rich in  psychological meaning – including composers such as Schoenberg and Scriabin. Its methods are ideally suited to application for the joint world of politics-meets-kitsch that is socialist realism.
    In this paper, I will be outlining some basic definitions of socialist realism, and of psychoanalysis. With these in place, I formulate an outline approach for analysis of socialist-realist works through the guise of various post-Freudian methodologies.

Weinberg’s background is unique among Soviet composers; he fled eastwards from Poland in 1939 and was
accepted into the USSR. He established a successful career, working with the most prominent Jewish musicians
of his day and praised as ‘the leading Soviet-Jewish composer’. Having narrowly escaped Nazi Germany,
Weinberg fell victim to Stalinist anti-semitism and was imprisoned for several months in 1953. Upon his release,
he made it his life’s mission to commemorate those who had fallen victim to atrocities.
Jewish themes in Weinberg’s music serve a dual purpose; to commemorate victims of the Holocaust, including
his parents and sister, and to reassert his Jewish heritage, despite his diaspora to a less-than-hospitable climate.
An internal struggle can be traced across his music, to reconcile between the need to celebrate his heritage as
well as to celebrate the USSR as his ‘saviours’ from the Nazis. In this paper, I explore the experience of Jewish
composers in the Soviet Union through Weinberg’s case study. I also outline Weinberg’s commemorative works
including, most controversial of all, his opera The Passenger. The opera is provocative, not least because the onstage
action is set in Auschwitz itself. This provides fresh challenges for modern-day audiences and critics alike.
The Passenger also calls into question the appropriateness of commemoration through depiction, alongside
Weinberg’s struggle to represent his displacement through music.

"Harold Bloom’s theories of influence in poetry are well known and many scholars have sought to apply them to wider fields of art. His aggressive vision of artistic influence has new authors ‘appropriate’ their predecessors’ works leading to an Oedipal elimination of the father-figure of influence. Bloom’s theories have proved highly significant in musicology, but also problematic.
This paper seeks to give a brief overview of Bloom’s writings and move to a review of Musicologists’ attempts to utilise his theories as set out in the book The Anxiety of Influence. It becomes apparent these cannot be easily adapted to music since they perpetuate the contested concept of ‘originality as progress’. I seek to demonstrate this with short case studies of friendships between composers that cannot be easily moulded to fit alongside Bloom’s aggressive writings. With these, I suggest a new template of musical influence, utilising thoughts from T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Britten and several others authors simultaneously calling for a reassessment of this complex issue from the perspective of musicology."

The many instances of composers revising their previous works later on in life raise questions of authenticity, intervention and intention, as well as sheer craft. Such delicate topics may be difficult to approach, especially when there is little or no documentation of motivation, as in the case of Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-96), a Polish-Jewish composer who lived and worked for most of his life in Moscow and whose posthumous reputation has dramatically advanced. Towards the end of his life, Weinberg revised many of his early works, especially his string quartets, in some cases making corrections and minor amendments, in others making substantial revisions, adding movements, and even rescoring for different forces. The significance of such revisions is vital to an understanding of Weinberg’s development as a composer, not least because many of his earliest works are now known to us only in their later manifestations. In this paper, I shall give examples of Weinberg’s revisions and explore the wide-reaching questions they raise.

As attention on the music of Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) has increased in the years after his death, so has the need for an analytical study of his musical style and language. This thesis surveys Weinberg’s changing style through a genre that spans almost his entire output: the string quartet. His close friendship and artistic affinity with Shostakovich helps make his music accessible to a wider audience, though closer examination reveals Weinberg’s individuality and a quite distinct language from that of his mentor. In support of this contention, a wide range of analytical approaches is deployed in this dissertation, along with a pragmatic methodology for presenting a holistic overview of Weinberg’s quartets.
Weinberg’s quartet cycle occupies an important place in twentieth-century music, with parallels to Shostakovich, Bartók, and other Soviet composers, including Myaskovsky, Shebalin, Levitin, and Boris Chaykovsky; correspondences and distinctiveness are explored in the second chapter. The third chapter surveys Weinberg’s musical narratives, with recourse to theories from Kofi Agawu, Boris Asafiev, and Jacques Derrida. Form is the focus of the fourth chapter, where ideas from Mark Aranovsky, and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy are deployed to highlight Weinberg’s problematising of traditional forms in his music. Chapter five explores Weinberg’s multi-faceted approach to harmony, with concepts expanded from Lev Mazel, Yury Kholopov, and the neo-Riemannian school of analysis.
The picture that emerges is of Weinberg’s individuality and distinctive voice, manifested in a controlled experimentalism and a tendency towards extended lyricism. His affinity with better-known composers may prove an approachable entry-point for wider audiences, but many of the most striking elements in his quartet cycle are of his own invention. His quartets stand as an important contextual dimension for understanding Shostakovich’s cycle, and also for appreciating the broader repertoire of Soviet chamber music. As his centenary approaches, engagement with Weinberg’s music continues to increase: this thesis provides contexts and analysis-based conclusions to complement this ongoing revival.

‘Awful’… ‘supporting tyranny’… ‘mammoths and mastodons’: socialist-realist music provokes strong rejections. Original attempts to define it lurched into prescriptive platitudes, or projections of intention on the part of music critics; Levon Hakobian has recently side-stepped the term altogether and refers to the ‘Big Soviet Style’ instead. This paper details the afterlife of socialist realism in the latter half of the twentieth century, with globe-spanning examples. I argue that socialist realism is an aesthetic in need of reappraisal, as a trend just as important as modernism to our understanding of art music composition since 1900. Our music histories have become stuck in the narrative rut somewhere between Fukuyaman ‘End of History’ and Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism’, and we need socialist realism to get out.

Unpublished talk (ahead of a draft work in progress), at Cambridge Faculty of Music Colloquium, March 2021.

The theories of Boris Asafiev, including musical process, symphonism, and intonatsiya, proved to be hugely influential in the Soviet Union and beyond. While Asafiev?s ideas were widely adopted by theorists and audiences alike, they were also appropriated by a generation of music critics. As composers struggled to come to terms with what might constitute socialist-realist music, critics built a discourse of projecting meaning onto works via Asafiev?s theories. At the same time, multiple theorists developed and expanded his ideas. The picture that emerges is of a multitude of applications and responses to a multivalent body of work that became a vital part of musical discourse in the latter half of the Soviet Union. In this article, I survey the main theories from Boris Asafiev?s writings on music, and their significance after his death. I begin by defining key terms such as symphonism, musical process, and especially intonatsiya. I then discuss the 1948 Zhdanovshchina and Asafiev?s i...

As attention on the music of Mieczys?aw Weinberg (1919-1996) has increased in the years after his death, so has the need for an analytical study of his musical style and language. This thesis surveys Weinberg?s changing style through a genre that spans almost his entire output: the string quartet. His close friendship and artistic affinity with Shostakovich helps make his music accessible to a wider audience, though closer examination reveals Weinberg?s individuality and a quite distinct language from that of his mentor. In support of this contention, a wide range of analytical approaches is deployed in this dissertation, along with a pragmatic methodology for presenting a holistic overview of Weinberg?s quartets. Weinberg?s quartet cycle occupies an important place in twentieth-century music, with parallels to Shostakovich, Bart�k, and other Soviet composers, including Myaskovsky, Shebalin, Levitin, and Boris Chaykovsky; correspondences and distinctiveness are explored in the secon...

This article explores instances of mutual influence in the string quartets of Weinberg and of Shostakovich. While Shostakovich's influence on Weinberg is apparent on first listen, the reverse process is more subtle - and is particularly apparent in some of Shostakovich's earlier quartets. After several examples, the case of Weinberg and Shostakovich is explored in the context of theories of influence itself - especially Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. I conclude that Weinberg and Shostakovich's relationship of mutual influence is a rather unique one in the history of music.