Socialist Noise
Sound and Soviet Identity after Stalin
Abstract
My first monograph explores the way music and sound helped to shape the lived experience of late socialism. Although scholars of sound studies have looked at the way the sonic and the social intersected in the twentieth century, their work has largely focused on capitalist countries in Western Europe and North America. In contrast, musicological scholarship on Eastern Europe has largely emphasized the political and aesthetic networks around composers and performance practices. As a result, the ways in which “normal people”—those who experienced the Soviet project outside of state apparatuses—lived and interacted with their sonic environments have been largely overlooked. Music and sound, however, tell a very different story of everyday life during late socialism than those narratives which privilege the material and visual.
In Socialist Noise, I intervene in these discussions to argue that the Soviet government strategically deployed sound and music within a broader politics of “socialist modernity”—that is, a socialist alternative to capitalist models of cultural and technological development. Officials believed sound was a foundational material in promoting socialism in two ways: first, it was an ideal medium through which to reinvigorate the utopian underpinnings of Marxist-Leninism after Stalin; and second, it was instrumental in distinguishing Soviet socialism from Western capitalism. Socialism needed to sound different from capitalism. Through archival research, musical analysis, historical sound studies, and interviews, I present a model for rethinking aesthetic modernism in the late socialist context. In doing so, I reintroduce the Soviet Union into broader discourses of musical modernism, invention, and the “new” in twentieth-century music history.
My project contributes to three primary fields of understanding: music and politics, the cultural history of late socialism in the Soviet Union, and the sensory experience of everyday life in the twentieth century. First, I augment narratives of music during the Cold War that position the United States and Western Europe against the Soviet Union in terms of aesthetic ideologies. These studies reinforce a binary that the “West” was inclined toward experimentalism while the Soviet Union, under the dictums of socialist realism, was more traditional. My research, however, shows that experimentalism was in fact encouraged by the Soviet government, though within the greater boundaries of socialist ideology. Second, I complicate cultural histories of the late Soviet Union, which generally demarcate the Thaw—a period of cultural relaxation—and Stagnation, when social, cultural, and political restrictions were reinforced and led to a lack of activity. By highlighting a continued emphasis on creativity, experimentalism, and innovation in the sphere of musical technology, I contribute to a growing body of literature that destabilizes the Thaw-Stagnation binary. And finally, my research adds to our understanding of the ways in which listening, sound, and hearing manifested in the lived experience of everyday life during the twentieth century. In doing so, I move away from a logocentric approach to history and instead position sound and sonic experience as a heuristic device through which to view the collisions of politics, culture, and globalization during the twentieth century.