How the Pandemic Taught Me to Love the Soviet Composers
When I played the violin in college, I thought I hit my breaking point with a sonata by Sergei Prokofiev.
At the end of a semester, I played one of the Soviet composer’s pieces for a jury of music professors. It received a solid B-minus. I was surprised I did that well; the dissonant, atonal 20th-century music didn’t make any sense to me.
“I’m not gonna play Prokofiev” became a common refrain for me, and it supplied one more reason to not pursue a career in music.
Then, 35 years later, when the pandemic hit, I rediscovered the Soviet composers. I listened to them for months.
Here we were: Swimming around in a tide of uncertainty, with the American government dismissing medical science; signs of social collapse everywhere. I was drawn to a brooding portrait of Dmitri Shostakovich on YouTube, and I heard the chaos and uncertainty in his Jazz Waltz №2: A cheerful oom-pah band giving cover to a melody fraught with fear.
Along with Shostakovich, I fell headlong into the Violin Concerto by Aram Khachaturian. The concerto hits me like strong coffee; if I touch it after noon, it’ll keep me up all night.
My God, I thought. How could I have missed this?
Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian: All composers whose work had been denounced under Stalin, and who lived in fear.
In the rough edges and dissonance of the Soviet composers, I heard the same qualities that had spoken to me in Tchaikovsky’s music: A cheerful face for the public, played against a backdrop of fractured dances and frantic chromatic runs. I heard sheer terror, running like some pernicious app in the background.
It was the perfect soundtrack for a threatening world.
In retrospect, it’s not surprising that the chaotic chords of the Soviets failed to resonate when I was 20. After all, I thought I lived in an orderly society. It was the time of postwar prosperity in the United States — a place where if I worked hard, I could succeed.
In reality, the last waves of the Great Society were receding from the beach, but we didn’t know it yet. We had no idea how quickly our country’s commitment to equity would crumble.
For more on Shostakovich, here’s a piece from the Reckless Violinist YouTube channel:
It was the first installment of my summer of Russian waltzes, with my take on his famous Jazz Waltz № 2:
Let’s keep in touch! I write a monthly column, and you can follow it here: Rebecca Raney — The Reckless Violinist.
