FANFARES FOR THE COMMON MAN

THE ENGAGEMENT OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY composers with Marxism is less well known than that of their counterparts in other art forms, but it is equally fascinating and no less disconcerting. Music was not an initial priority for Russian Bolshevism. Indeed, Lenin’s tastes were quite traditional. But radical aesthetics arose with the creation of the Proletkult movement which sought a new “proletarian culture”, and the Futurist writings of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Trotsky. A few short-lived musical developments resulted, including composer Arseny Avramov devising a system of 17 tones to replace “bourgeois” chromaticism, and a work presented in the harbour in Baku in 1922, which combined sounds from boats, cars, buses and machine guns with renditions of the Internationale. More enduring was Nikolay Roslavets and the Assotsiatsiya Sovremennoy Muzyki’s (ASM) promotion of works…