Formalism (music)

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In the twentieth century, formalism in music came to be strongly associated with music composed in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era. The term was borrowed from Marxist literary theory, and was used to describe any music that was deemed by the Soviet cultural bureaucracy to lack appeal for the masses. An accusation that a piece was "formalist" was understood to imply that the work was too interested in aspects of form, at the expense of simple, uplifting music that glorified the Soviet state.

The regime, who applied the term as it saw fit, did not seek a clearly-articulated definition. In the period in question (roughly the 1930s to Stalin's death in 1953), in the Soviet Union any composer accused of formalism either conformed quickly or faced serious consequences. The allegation was usually accompanied with the threat (explicit or implicit) of punishment. Music being hard to describe in words, any counter-arguments (if an artist had been brave enough to make them) would have been difficult to frame, and could in any case have been politicised as a blow against the proletariat.

Two famous allegations of formalism were leveled at Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich was denounced in the Russian newspaper Pravda in January 1936 in connection with a Moscow performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The composer withdrew his Fourth Symphony before its planned first performance, and his subsequent Fifth Symphony was perceived, by at least one journalist if not by the composer himself, as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism".^[1] Another allegation came as part of the Zhdanov decree in February 1948, which cited Shostakovich together with a number of other prominent Soviet composers.

The proscription of formalism was not restricted to the Soviet Union. For instance, in Poland immediately after World War II the Stalinist regime insisted that composers adopt Socialist realism, and those who would not do so, including Witold Lutosławski and Andrzej Panufnik, had performances of their compositions banned in Poland for being "formalist".^[2] Other Eastern Bloc countries experienced similar restrictions (Zoltán Kodály complained to Panufnik of similar problems facing composers in Hungary).^[3]

The term "formalism" was also sometimes used by English-speaking music theorists and musicologists in the twentieth century to refer more generally to music using apparently strict, rule-driven, composition techniques such as serialism. This usage was often, though not always, given a negative connotation.

[edit] Notes

^ Volkov, Solomon (2004) Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator, p.183. Little, Brown. ISBN 0-316-86141-3.
^ Charles Bodman Rae (1999). The Music of Lutosławski (third edn.). Faber & Faber, London. ISBN 0-7119-6910-8.
^ Panufnik, Andrzej (1987). Composing Myself. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413588807.