ABSTRACT
In the early years of Soviet music there was a great interest among composers and performers for the new music of the West; after all, the Soviet Union was the greatest revolutionary nation, and it was therefore expected to foster the most revolutionary systems of musical composition. The syllogism did not work, however, and very soon the timid growth of Soviet musical modernity was brutally squelched in the name of the people, who preferred nice tuneful music to the strange atonal sounds of the West. Yet, a modest little monograph on Schoenberg by Ivan Sollertinsky was published in Leningrad in 1934, and there were some performances of Schoenberg’s music; Alban Berg also received a Soviet accolade in those early times; there were concerts of contemporary music given in Leningrad, a city much more musically progressive than staid Moscow. But Nikita Khrushchev finished off Schoenberg and Schoenbergianism with peasant bluntness, but not without rough humor: “They call it dodecafonia, but to us its plain cacofonia” (the words rhyme in Russian).
