Music vis-à-vis Other Arts in Eastern and Central Europe: Performance, Literature, Theatre, Art/Architecture and Visuality

Dear Colleagues,

Over sixty years after the appearance of Joyce Michel’s essay on “Music and its relation to other arts” in 1959 (Criticism, Vol. 1), our Special Issue is set to explore the uneasy relationship between the realms of musical performativity and other arts such as literature, theater, visual arts, as well as critical theory. Music has a deep and intricate relationship with other arts, particularly with visual arts, literature, and dance. A telling episode here is Schopenhauer’s playful polemics with Goethe, who was famously comparing musical sounds and the plastic arts, particularly architecture. Notably, for Hermann Hesse music represented a certain metaphorical quintessence of cultural history as such. One of the most significant connections lies here naturally with visual arts. Music has often been employed as a theme in paintings, sculptures, and other visual art forms, and many artists have sought to represent music in their work. The names of Mussorgsky, Debussy, Rimsky Korsakov, Skriabin versus Čiurlionis and Kandinsky here come most readily as those important artists who transcended ‘symbolic territories’ quite easily. It is especially important to mention here the later (mid-20th century) movement of abstract expressionism which sought to capture the essence of music through visual art, with artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning drawing inspiration from the rhythms, harmonies, tonal as well as atonal melodies and compositions in their paintings. Similarly, literature has also been heavily influenced by music, with many authors drawing on musical themes and structures in their writing. For instance, Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot used musical elements like rhythm, meter, and repetition in their verse, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf used musical structures to shape their novels at the same time as F. Scott Fitzgerald characterized his writing in Great Gatsby as “jazz prose…”.

Cinema and dance represent a more natural artistic form that is closely historically associated with music—these have often been created in a sort of tandem, with cineastes and choreographers working closely with composers to create performances that showcase the interplay between performance, movement and sound. Slavic and Eastern European music has often been a source of inspiration for so many writers and poets with (among a plethora of others) Adam Mickiewicz, who naturally incorporated traditional Polish folk melodies into his poetry, and Ivan Turgenev, who included descriptions of folk songs in his novels. Visual arts of the region have been powerfully influenced by various sonoric cultures, with artists often drawing on musical themes and motifs in their work. One example is given by the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, with his series of Art Nouveau posters inspired by Slavic folk music, while Wassily Kandinsky and Alexander Skriabin firmly believed that painting could be used to creatively express musical ideas. Overall, Slavic and Eastern European musical realms offer a rich cultural legacy and have been inherently connected to the domains of literature, visual arts, and performance.

Stretching up until the first years after the demise of the Soviet Union, our volume will also concentrate on the less-researched issues of Soviet “unofficial’ music” (understood as a broad concept) that flourished during that chronotope. Music that existed in defiance of the “approved canon” of what was permissible a propos the Soviet mainstream. We would like to strongly focus on those trends and currents in Soviet musical space which did not enjoy full endorsement from the communist authorities. This naturally relates to all the magnitude and varieties of Russian rock that in itself represents a unique combination and correspondence between poetry and music, performance and film. We are especially interested in the so-called “political rock” (GrOborona, DDT, Televizor, etc.) as well as in the “avant-garde/experimental rock” (Strannye Igry, AVIA, Auktsion, Vezhlivyi otkaz, Pop-Mekhanika, Zvuki Mu), including experiments with rock-influenced themes created by the members of the Union of Soviet Composers and other “official” musicians. We also extend a particular welcome to submissions focused on the less commonly studied philharmonic music. In particular, we consider the oeuvre of such iconic contemporary composers as Sergei Slonimsky, Boris Tishchenko, Valentin Silvestrov, Nikolai Karetnikov, Alemdar Karamanov, Viacheslav Artiomov, Faraj Karaiev, Alexander Knaifel, Alexander Vustin, Vladimir Tarnopolsky, Vladimir Martynov, Anton Batagov, Yuri Khanin, and Yuri Kasparov, by no means restricting our interest with the more universally acclaimed canonic names of Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, and Sofia Gubaidulina. We are also keen to consider proposals dealing with the “radical” Soviet (Free) Jazz (the Ganelin Trio, Arkhangel’sk, TRI-O, etc.), also developing research in the field of “conceptualist” music). Along with music per se there also existed a burgeoning culture of rock/underground culture journalism which flourished within the realm of underground “zines”, occasionally spilling into the “official” publications. This milieu produced its own tradition of rock journalism with prolific and original practitioners whose work we would also be glad to envisage. We welcome all contributions working in all disciplines involved in the academic study of music during the relevant period of time—particularly those coming from performance studies, general history, popular music studies, cinema studies, ethnomusicology, literature/culture studies, sociology, folklore, etc.

Prof. Dr. Dennis Ioffe
Guest Editor

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• music
• visual art
• Slavic music
• east-European music
• soviet music
• Russian art
• Slavic literature
• classical music
• jazz music
• rock
• conceptualism
• avant-garde
• Soviet culture