AFTER THE MUSIC
PURGE
Arrest that bird!" (It should be remarked parenthetically that
Kro–
kodil's
imaginary man talks in indirect quotations from the Soviet
press. )
Since the purge the Central Committee of the party, through
its mouthpieces in the Union of Soviet Composers, has devoted a great
deal of space to the condemnation of contemporary Western music.
In this health campaign, aimed at the protection of Soviet music
from Western contamination, practically all the well-known contem–
porary Western composers have been denounced as " decadent formal–
ists," "pseudo-modernists," or simple "cheats and scoundrels." The
leaders of the campaign have tried to be explicit; but, on account of
skimpy and outdated information about Western music, they have
sometimes obscured "the clear-cut wisdom" of the party line. Thus,
in a speech by Asafiev, late president of the Composers' Union, Paul
Hindemith is referred to, along with Schoenberg, Berg, Krenek and
Webern, as an "antiharmonic atonalist," which, of course, he has
never been. In the April issue of
So vietskaya Muzyka,
Mr. Koval
denounces the whole school "of graphic, linear pseudo-counterpoint"
initiated by Hindemith, "which is slavishly followed by so many
pseudo-modernists in Europe and America." In another issue of the
same magazine Walter Piston is singled out for grudging praise.
"Among the compositions performed at the Amsterdam Festival"
says
Sovietskaya Muzyka,
of July 1948, "one should mention a fairly
brilliant symphonic work by Walter Piston." In America, however,
we consider Walter Piston one of our most "linear" composers and
one closely allied to the school of Hindemith.
The Frenchmen Milhaud and Auric are usually found in a list
of "servile teasers of the snobbish bourgeois tastes of a capitalist city."
Poulenc's name is sometimes included and sometimes excluded from
this list. At times his work is singled out for considerable praise. His
"apt and artful settings" of the poems of such "truly democratic
poets" as Louis Aragon (long a party member) and Paul Eluard
(certainly a fellow traveler) are found to be both "highly successful"
and "forward-looking."
In the U.S.A., the main offenders, according to the Soviet
press, are Gian-Carlo Menotti and Henry Cowell. Reference to the
former has already been made.
As
for the latter, the July, 1948, issue
of
Sovietskaya Muzyka
carried a cartoon of Mr. Cowell, his feet
