4.2.3 The five commandments

years this association organised concerts including new music from the West, such as that from the Second Viennese School and Hindemith. The ACM’s idea was to make the best music by Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Mahler and the modern composers accessible to the common people of this classless society. However, the ACM’s principles soon came under attack by composers who felt very differently. They believed composers should not attempt to uplift the taste of the people, but, on the contrary, find out what the taste of the people was and translate that to the concert halls. Not music for the people but music of the people. These latter composers united themselves in the RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians). Well, they weren’t really ‘united’ as it did not take long before there was a factional struggle between moderates and radicals. The radicals cherished the most grotesque forms of amateurism: some of these composers refused to write anything that was not in 2/4 meter because this supposedly was the meter of the marching people, while others had hardly even mastered musical notation. In 1932 both associations were combined in a single state organisation, which put an end to any further factional struggles because the Party dictated artistic guidelines from then on. These guidelines coincided to a large degree with those of the ‘moderate’ faction in the RAPM.

It is worth mentioning that this music for the people versus music of the people debate is also relevant in the West. For the people, meaning to give them the music of the highest quality, or of the people, which means granting the status of art exclusively on the basis of popularity or sales figures of a particular type of music (or basically anything).90

4.2.3 THE FIVE COMMANDMENTS Soviet realism had five ‘commandments’, which today, summarised, seem quite clear but at the time of the attacks on artists in the Soviet Union, these commandments came about in a haphazard way and artists often had to rely on their intuition in deciding what they could and could not do. I mention them here as I feel knowledge of this is also relevant to the ongoing debate about art in the West. - Formalism The main principle in Formalism in art is that an artwork’s meaning can be found completely within the work itself. No historical knowledge is required to appreciate an artwork: it is judged on the basis of inherent qualities, its technical and structural aspects. To quote the French painter and writer on art, Maurice Denis (1870 - 1943): “Consider that a

90 Like the title of a record with music of Elvis Presley: 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t

Be Wrong (Yes they can).

painting, before it becomes a warhorse, a female nude, or a genre piece, is in the first place a flat surface with colours in a certain arrangement.”91

In Young Music (Chapter V), being the official Avant-Garde of the West, this formalism had become the main principle. But in the Soviet Union, where practically everything was political, art existed only as part of the cultural policy of the Communist Party. Composing ‘just for form’ and not in service of the communist ideal was therefore regarded as a form of dissidence, punishable even by death or exile. But regardless of political intentions, all good musicians know that without ‘the right tones in the right places’ music cannot reach any form of quality, which is essential to art. It is only logical that especially the best Soviet composers suffered under this ban on formalism, as they were the ones who best realised that it took ‘the right tones in the right places’ to create a work of art. - Cosmopolitanism Citizens of the communist world were obliged to radically choose to support the system. Cosmopolitanism, a sense of being connected way beyond the boundaries of the communist motherland, went against the absolutism of the communist system, as it implied that one could feel sympathy for countries with a different state and societal structure. In general, communist party officials were very suspicious of the outside world, of which they knew little more than what they had learned through their own propaganda. Among other things, the ban of cosmopolitanism gave way to antisemitism, because they felt Jews did not have a fatherland of their own and were therefore even more untrustworthy. Within the arts, the ban on cosmopolitanism translated into a profound distrust of all influence from outside the Soviet state and especially that of Western modernism. Composers were encouraged to focus on the folk music of the various populations within the Soviet Union. - Pessimism When art serves a political policy, it can only spread positive messages. After all, communism had won the day and was claiming one success after the other (as Stalin wrote in an article entitled Dizzy with Success in the Pravda of 2 March 1930). Propaganda reality has no place for a sombre ending of a symphony. Therefore, the otherwise tragic music of Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony concludes with a very noisy, but politically correct final part. This part was written in the style of Monumentalism to avoid political problems.

91 Maurice Denis,'Definition of Neo-Traditionism' (1890), an essay in the journal

Art et Critique.