Music and Liberation II: Pushing the Official Boundaries

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Soviet musicians active during Perestroika often worked on the edge of acceptability, bending the officially sanctioned rules of style, lyricism, technique, and interpretation. Recent scholarship has underscored the role of “ad hoc infrastructures” (Sonevytsky 2023) that supported localized subcultures and the “sonic overload” (Schmelz 2020) that characterized experimental approaches to musical composition during this period. Similar trends have emerged under the current political regime in the Russian Federation, in which musicians have trudged forward in radically new and unexpected directions in response to increased censorship. This panel delves into the myriad ways that musicians in the late Soviet Union and today have pushed against official boundaries, shedding new light on the vast creative space that exists between the categories of official and unofficial culture.

Three papers offer insights into the ways that musicians have tested official limits, followed by a response by Ryan Gourley. Gabrielle Cornish examines how musicians began to test the limits of the human body and the boundary of life and death itself, showing how carnal methods of performance became a way of asserting personal sovereignty within the existing power structures of late socialism. Aleksandra Marciniak discusses how Russophone hip-hop artists have used foreign social media to evade censorship and promote anti-war and anti-government statements. Returning to the late socialist period, Jacob Richey offers a close analysis of the songs of Egor Letov, revealing his deep connection to the development of militant stiob and the style of the National Bolshevik Party.

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Ryan Christopher Gourley, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Late Socialism's Noisy Bodies - Gabrielle Cornish, U of Wisconsin-Madison

• From Late-Socialist Irony to Post-Socialist World: The Songs of Egor Letov - Jacob Christopher Richey, U of Pittsburgh

Discussant

• Ryan Christopher Gourley, UC Berkeley