Daniel Elphick, Music and Letters, vol 99, nº 2, May 2018, p. 304-307.

an eminently discussable sign-off, issues of composers’ citizenship are irrelevant. The final Part rounds up various issues pertaining to the post-Soviet period. Laurel Fay gives an eye-witness account of the Eighth AllUnion Congress of Soviet Composers in Moscow in March 1991, which saw the last gasp of Tikhon Khrennikov’s forty-three-year stewardship. William Quillen revisits the ‘Idea of the 1920s in Russian Music Today’, which several of his fellow contributors also touch on. Along with some descriptions of unfamiliar works, all the more valuable for the rarity of this sort of thing elsewhere in the book, he manages to maintain an almost heroically nonjudgemental tone in the face of the rather obvious fact that most of the music he is describing is embarrassingly weak. In her ‘Paradigms of Contemporary Music in Twenty-First-Century Russia’ Lidia Ader accepts the notion of a 1920s Avant-garde in Russian music, even though the term and the quality of the musical product, and even the conventionally assumed distinctness of the decade, have been critiqued elsewhere (Rakhmanova notes the lack of artistic distinctionç p. 39; Hakobian reinforces the 20s/30s borderlineçp. 77, whereas Amy Nelson, quoted by Zuk on p. 65, has suggested it should be deemphasized). Once again the lack of a virtual round table is conspicuous. Which only means that it should not be long before the topics raised in this book are revisited, preferably with a strong element of musical discussion added to the mix, so that the music itselfç pardon the shorthandçcan be illuminated as brightly from the inside as it is here from the outside. Meanwhile what we have here is a richly thought-provoking volume that should go straight onto every reading list in its field. DAVID FANNING University of Manchester doi:10.1093/ml/gcy050 ß The Author(s) (2018). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships. Ed. by Esteban Buch, Igor Contreras Zubillaga, and Manuel Deniz Silva. Pp. x þ 224. Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century. (New York and Abingdon: Ashgate, 2017). »70. ISBS 978-1-4724-3749-5) The intrigue of music composed under dictatorships has proven undeniably attractive to scholars, with a sizeable body of literature following the collapse of the USSR and Fuku- 304 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article-abstract/99/2/304/5126979 by guest on 12 October 2018 Part II moves to ‘Reappraising the Soviet Past’: from considerations of Soviet culture ‘translating’ French revolutionary and other traditions into appropriate and approvable terms (Marina Raku), and forming an accommodation with Western and pre-Soviet Russian repertories (Pauline Fairclough), through the vagaries of the ‘Stalinist Opera Project’ (Yekaterina Vlasova) to a harrowing account of composers and musiciansçincluding many associated with the aforementioned opera project at the Bolshoi Theatreçconsigned to the Gulag (Inna Klause). In case any of this leaves Western scholars with any sense of misplaced superiority, in Part III (on ‘Soviet and Post-Soviet Musicology’) Olga Manulkina offers a pointed reminder that not a single Russian musicologist appears in the general section of the New Grove article on ‘Musicology’. And in case anyone should think that the late- and post-Soviet reconstruction of musicology was a straightforward process, she recalls the case of Yury Kholopovça prolific analyst generally considered untouchable by his many disciplesçadopting a reactionary stance to the incursion of the humanities into musicology (pp. 236^7). Daniil Zavlunov then attempts a ‘reimaging’ of Glinka that boldly swims against a continuing tide by fully accepting Western deconstructions of Russianness, daring, in passing, to go even further than Frolova-Walker (p. 263). The confinement of Part IV (‘The Newest Shostakovich’) to two articles may not satisfy all expectations, but in and of themselves those contributions are gold dust. Lyudmila Kovnatskaya delineates the young composer’s relationship with the marginally senior Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, in the process introducing us to an intermittently foul-mouthed correspondence (on Shostakovich’s side) that evidently had no fear of the censor. Then comes Digonskaya’s above-mentioned article on the ‘pre-Twelfth’ Symphony. One only wishes that Kovnatsaya had been encouraged to expand on her thoughts (hers is the shortest article in the book) and that Digonskaya had gone on to discuss the Op. 136 choral songcycle Loyalty as a round-off to hers on Shostakovich’s ‘Lenin project’. For Part V, ‘Russian Music Abroad’, Taruskin muses on the figure of Arthur Lourie¤, eventually answering his own question ‘Is there a ‘‘Russia abroad’’ in Music?’ in the negative. In her disquisition on Russian e¤migre¤ composers, Elena Dubinets notes that while the two streams of e¤migre¤ and stay-at-home Russian writers have effectively reunited, the same cannot be said of composersçat least not from their point of view. For listeners, she claims in three somewhat blurred headings (‘Music for the people’, ‘Composing for the dictator’, and ‘State commemorations’), I survey them here geographically: Central/Western Europe, South America, and Eastern communist states. There are five chapters that cover Central and Western Europe. Yannick Simon begins with a survey of the figure of Joan of Arc in musical works commissioned by the Vichy Regime. Covering a large amount of material, Simon outlines a puzzling phenomenon: how the traditionally nationalist figure of Joan of Arc became utilized for distinctly non-national ends in support of Nazi occupying forces under the Vichy regime. On fascist Italy, Justine Comtois presents a case study on Alfred Casello’s Il deserto tantanto, an opera explicitly dedicated to Mussolini himself (and, so, nicely fitting the ‘music for dictators’ category). Comtois reveals a motivation for collaboration that surfaces in several case studies: a composer’s desire to shape national perceptions of musical education and its social role, as well as to establish a new nationalism in their respective genres. For Comtois, ‘Fascism is the keystone in the analysis of Casella’s work . . . Il deserto tantanto must be considered as Fascist propaganda’ (pp. 94^5). Manuel Deniz Silva presents a chapter on Salazar’s Portugal, a subject sorely underrepresented in English-language scholarship. Interestingly, Silva focuses on Freitas Branco’s symphonic poem Solemn Overture 1640, a work that was received as a complete failure at its initial performance. Silva touches on intriguing modern-day efforts at a revival, including a 2006 performance of the work; it is interesting to note that this piece has not received a backlash of criticism similar to Zdravitsa!. Igor Contreras Zubillaga writes on Francoist Spain, a regime that sought to engage with the avantgarde and abandon ideas of nationalism or folklorism in its commissions. Such works were generally received poorly, but the regime promoted them as massive national successes (despite ‘small’ details like the lack of television signal interrupting broadcasts!). The final chapter concerning Central Europe is Katherine L. FitzGibbon on Gottfried Mu«ller’s pro-Hitler Deutsches Heldenrequiem (with titular references to both Brahms and Strauss). Fitzgibbon details how Mu«ller saw the career potential for creating a pro-Nazi work in the early days of the Nazi regime, and he was praised as an early talent. Fitzgibbon details the particularly interesting story of Mu«ller’s futile attempts to distance himself from the regime after the war, which seems a topic 305 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article-abstract/99/2/304/5126979 by guest on 12 October 2018 yama’s ‘End of History’ theory. The same thinking that has sought to paint Shostakovich as a secret protestor against the Soviet regime has been turned to pardon the likes of Richard Strauss and Carl Orff for their various levels of collaboration with the Nazi regime. While critics have agonized over the ethics of performing works like Orff ’s Carmina Burana or Prokofiev’s Zdravitsa!, questions of aesthetic value have largely been disregarded. The editors of the new volume raise a perplexing question: whether or not ‘a composition made for a dictatorial regime can only be aesthetically flawed; in other words, bad music’ (p. 5). The potential answers are multifaceted, but all react against a reductionist perception; Adorno once stated that anything that could be categorized as ‘state art’ could not be anything but a failure. Composing for the State features ten chapters covering various regimes where the dictatorial state had some role in the commission, production, or dissemination of musical works. As well as the usual suspects of the USSR and Nazi Germany, there are also chapters focusing on China, Italy, Portugal, Argentina, Spain, and more. Contributors include Professors, Research Fellows, and Ph.D. candidates from an international array of institutions, including Canada, Portugal, and Hong Kong, edited by a trio of scholars well versed in this field: Esteban Buch (E¤cole des Hautes E¤tudes en Sciences Sociales), Igor Contreras Zubillaga (EHESS), and Manuel Deniz Silva (Universidade Nova de Lisboa). In attempting to suggest that music for the state could actually be quite interesting, the editors themselves acknowledge that there is a sizeable literature for themselves to push back against. Marina Frolova-Walker’s chapter on Shostakovich’s Song of the Forests can serve as a useful summary for many of the arguments that recur throughout the volume’s chapters. She tackles head-on one of the largest questions to face scholars of twentieth-century music: how could any composer choose to write works in support of a murderous regime? Shostakovich’s defenders have previously rushed to claim that Song of the Forests was his attempt to win rehabilitation after the 1948 resolutions that saw his works banned from performance. Instead, Frolova-Walker establishes that Shostakovich had already been fully rehabilitated before he commissioned the text for the work. Pushing against accepted wisdom, Frolova-Walker calls for a ‘re-stalinisation of the work’, insisting that ‘a Stalin-free Forests fails to make sense’ (p. 104). Many of the other chapters here are essentially calling for the same thing in their respective areas. While the chapters are laid out under Tuchowski makes the point that socialist realism was problematic to enforce in Poland since composers were generally of the pre-war bourgeoisie, and so rejected communist ideals outright, while the general populace was heavily Catholic, and so rejected the Stalinist cult of personality. Gradstein’s work is presented in a quick summary. One of the most revealing sections of the whole book is Gradstein’s discussion of the Polish State Prizes, which itself could serve as a useful comparison to FrolovaWalker’s words on the USSR’s Stalin Prize in her chapter (discussed above) and in her much longer study, Stalin’s Music Prize (Yale, 2016 ). Overall, Composing for the State moves beyond the existing literature on this subject in several ways. For instance, Twentieth-Century Music and Politics: Essays in Memory of Neil Edmunds (Ashgate, 2013) edited by Pauline Fairclough, focuses almost entirely on music from Europe and Russia (apart from one chapter on music in Shanghai); as such, the present study seeks to expand the dialogue towards a global perspective. A closer complement is Music and Dictatorship in Europe and Latin America (Brepols, 2009), edited by Roberto Illiano and Massimiliano Sala, a huge volume with some twenty-four chapters; the present volume has a more critical eye, however, summed up by the editors’ description of its contents as ‘exercises in micro-historical analysis’ (p. 2). One side of musical life that is noticeably absent from Composing for the State is any aspect of popular or folk music. A suitable remedy can be found in Music, Power, and Politics (Routledge, 2004) edited by Annie J. Randall, a volume that includes more of the social-cultural aspects that could have rounded out Composing for the State to be an even fuller study. While many readers will wish to consult this book for its rather specialist case studies (aided by the detailed index), the most pertinent of the chapters here raise questions that can be traced across decades of scholarship. Buch’s and Frolova-Walker’s chapters stand out as particularly urgent contributions, raising questions that help to show the potential scope of this area of enquiry. There is, however, one lingering, fundamental question that can be detected throughout all of the chapters: when considering social significance, art music has been proven to have had relatively little impact on the general population (with a handful of exceptions, such as the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony); why, then, has music under dictatorships received so much scholarly attention? The editors’ response: because the ruling classes invested so much in it as a marker of cultural 306 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article-abstract/99/2/304/5126979 by guest on 12 October 2018 worthy of further discussion. The editors themselves highlighted the Nazi regime as the epitome of a dictatorship in the twentieth century; indeed, they even critique the popular culture trope that ‘Nazi’ has become a byword for evil encapsulated (or as I would point out, according to Godwin’s Law, how quickly an online disagreement breaks down into Nazi name-calling). Despite this, Fitzgibbon provides a nuanced account of Mu«ller’s work and the problems inherent in trying to discuss it in the present day. Two chapters present perspectives from South America. Analia Chernavsky writes on the Vargas regime in Brazil, and in particular how Villa-Lobos sought to support the regime in its efforts to further music education programmes. Chernavsky chooses to frame her chapter through the problematic prism of ‘dissidence’, but highlights Villa-Lobos’s Danc a da Terra (1943) as a useful case study. Her concluding thoughts warrant further exploration, including the irony of Brazil’s support for the Allied forces in their war against military dictatorships in Europe, while itself being a dictatorship. Esteban Buch brings us closer to the present day, with his chapter on Ginastera and Argentina. Buch details a commission from 1979^80, which Ginastera reluctantly accepted. The resulting work, Lubilium, is presented as being something between a military and national work, and Buch claims that the piece can be thought of as a ‘battle symphony’ in the same vein as Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory. Whether or not this is the case, it presents an interesting study where the composer was reluctant to cooperate with the regime in question. The remaining chapters present surveys relating to the USSR and its communist neighbours. Hon-Lun Yang’s chapter presents a case study from Maoist China, where the giant cantata The East is Red was on such a grand scale that it could only be orchestrated by a socialist state (partly relying on citizens’ goodwill and loyalty to said state, with some still passionate even when interviewed by Yang fifty years after the events). An interesting comparison that might have been made here is between the three ‘principles’ that underpinned much of Maoist composition and the three tenets of socialist realism in the USSR (p. 61). Yang concludes that the huge collaborative productions in 1960s China could be compared to presentday popular music, with maximum efficiency for maximum ‘profit’. Andrzej Tuchowski provides an intriguing chapter on Poland, socialist realism, and Alfred Gradstein’s cantata A Word about Stalin. doi:10.1093/ml/gcy053 ß Crown copyright 2018. This article contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (http://www.nationalarchives.gov. uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/) Musical Migrations: Crossroads of European Musical Diversity. Ed. Jernej Weiss. pp. 489. Studia musicologica labacensia, 1. (University of Primorska Press, Ljubl jana, 2017. ISBN 9789616984-96-6.) In the autumn of 2015 more than 10,000 migrants a day crossed the border of Slovenia (population: under two million). The questions and political turmoil that this caused served to inspire the topic of a conference held in Ljubl jana 2017, now published as a conference report in the first of a new scholarly series, Studia musicologica labacensia (the last word derives from the old Latin word for Ljubl jana). Slovenia itself is a country that has in the past experienced and generally benefitted from musical migration. The Prague Conservatory, one of the leading musical conservatories of the nineteenth century, attracted young Slovenian composers up until the Second World War while Slovenia, until its incorporation in the new ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’ (i.e. Yugoslavia), was a favourite destination for well-trained musicians from the Czech lands who failed to find suitable employment at home. A good example was Jana¤c› ek’s pupil and colleague Beran, the subject of a monograph (Emerik Beran (1868^1940) Samotni Svetovljan, reviewed in Music & Letters, 90 (2009), 709^11) by Jernej Weiss, the editor of this report. Though not mutually intelligible, Czech and Slovene are both Slavonic languages and it is easy enough for a speaker of one of them to acquire the other if needed. Movement between the two regions was unproblematic until 1918 since both were then part of the Habsburg lands and, after the 1867 ‘compromise’, both part of Cisleithania, i.e. the Austrian half of the dual monarchy. Unsurprisingly, inward migration to Slovenia is a favoured topic of the conference such as Katarina Trc› ek Marus› ic› ’s history of musical migration to Slovenia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (pp. 99^114), Darja Koter’s account of foreign musicians employed by Friderik Rukavina at the Ljubl jana opera during the years 1918^25 (pp. 343^57), Natas› a Cigoj Krustulovic¤’s study of Schikaneder’s company in Ljubl jana (1779^80, 1781^2) and its adaptation of international repertory for local needs (pp. 115^31), or Jernej Weiss’s appealingly entitled article ‘Bankers, medical doctors, teachers, priests, musicians, all Czechs, kind gentlefolk who show us brotherly love’ (pp. 285^95). The timing of the conference was fortuitous in allowing it to capitalize on recent international research projects such as ‘Music Migrations in the Early Modern Age: the Meeting of the European East, West and South’ and provided a platform for some of the new findings. Katarina Trc› ek Marus› ic› ’s paper above is one of these, but the project also included examination of migration to all areas of the former Yugoslavia such as Vjera Katalinic¤’s account of musical mobility between central Europe and the Mediterranean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (pp. 85^ 98). Other considerations of movement to and from the former Yugoslavia include Katarina Tomas› evic¤’s case study of Davorin Jenko (1835^ 1914), a Slovenian who after studies in Vienna spent his professional life in Belgrade, where he promoted a wide range of Slavonic music (pp. 223^41); Melita Melin’s consideration of musical identity based on the life of Alexandre Damnianovitch, a Serbian composer who settled in Paris at the age of 20 (pp. 401^16 ); and Luisa Antoni’s catalogue of musicians in the Adriatic region, i.e. places such as Trieste, Split, and Pirano (the birthplace of Tartini) with a range of composers from Lukac› ic¤, Tartini, von Suppe¤, Smareglia, to Dallapiccola (pp. 337^42). There are two reports on the musical culture of Sarajevo: Fatima Hadz›ic¤’s on the contribution of Czech musicians there such as military bandmasters, conductors, teachers, and composers (pp. 257^75) and Lana Pac› uka’s broader chronicle of the town as Austro-Hungarian and the way ‘European’ values were imposed upon a previously ‘oriental province’ (pp. 243^56 ). There is also a broad overview of Czech musical history between 1870 and 1945 seen through the prism of musical migration in and out of the Czech lands by Lubomı́r Spurny¤ (pp. 277^83). But this international conference opened out to embrace all of Europe, for instance, addressing the way that the various places of work 307 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article-abstract/99/2/304/5126979 by guest on 12 October 2018 capital. My own suspicion: that such state attention renders this music sufficiently ‘other’ from our contemporary experience that it becomes irresistibly tempting to the music historian, raising ethical questions about intention and meaning, as well as providing an opportunity for examination through in-depth context. Composing for the State adds a vital update as these questions continue to be explored. DANIEL ELPHICK Royal Holloway, University of London