ABSTRACT
A passionate admirer of music, especially of Beethoven and Skryabin, he believed revolution and music to be ‘sisters’ and, consequently, was inclined to support first of all those artistic movements whose ideology was based on the utopian belief in the transfiguring power of art. The musical creation, especially the so-called samodeyatel’nost’ played a privileged role in Proletkul’t programmes. In the musical life of the 1920s, the most conspicuous manifestation of pluralism was the coexistence of two independent and practically irreconcilable unions of musicians, both formally established in the autumn of 1923: the Association of Contemporary Music and the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. For understandable reasons, the scope of styles and forms cultivated among serious composers during the early post-revolutionary years was considerably limited. In terms of musical language, the urbanist fashion of the 1920s was a development of the line initiated by some works of early Sergey Prokofiev, as well as of some of his lesser-known contemporaries.
