848
PARTISAN REVIEW
5. Writing more songs on Soviet subjects.
6. Strictly abstaining from jazz rhythms, paroxystic syncopation,
"fake" (meaning dissonant) polyphony and atonality.
7. Writing operas about Soviet life.
8. Turning his attention in general to the song of the great Soviet
people and forgetting about the West.
This regimen has now been scrupulously followed for a year by
Shostakovitch and of course by all other Soviet composers.
The results do not seem to be satisfactory judging from state–
ments made by Messieurs Khrennikov and Koval and only recently
reiterated by
Pravda
and
Izvestia.
Last April ( 1948) an issue of
K rokodil, Pravda's
weekly humor–
ous supplement, carried on its back page the following cartoon: A man
and a woman seated on a bench under a tree: in the tree a bird is
singing: the woman says, "How do you like the bird's song?" "I can't
say anything," says the man, "until I know who wrote the song."
Several weeks later, perhaps by pure coincidence, the editorial board
of
Krokodil
was purged for "general laxity" and for "not keeping
abreast of the great epoch of Socialist construction."
Had the bird announced its song and said, for example, "Com–
rades, I
will
sing you an excerpt from Gian-Carlo Menotti's opera,
The Medium,"
the man on the bench could have replied, even before
he had heard the bird sing, "This is not for me. This is neuropatho–
logical music fit only for the bourgeois audiences of America. The
heroine of this opera is not an honest, optimistic and cleancut Soviet
citizen; she is a professional crook, a spiritualist, an alcoholic and,
besides all that, a murderess."
Had the bird been singing a piece by Stravinsky, the man might
as surely have replied, "This is the height of bourgeois decadence,
the music of a circus magician and an American busiriessman."
For music by Schoenberg the comment would have been, "This
is anti-aesthetic, anti-harmonic, chaotic and inane.
It
epitomizes the
decay of bourgeois culture."
If
the bird had suddenly swung into behop, or rebop, as it is
customarily referred to in
So vietskaya MUzYka,
the man would prob–
ably have called a militiaman and said, "Comrade, this kind of stuff
is an insult to our great Soviet culture. I publicly denounce this
animal as a bourgeois paranoiac and an enemy of the Soviet state.
