Socialist History, One Sound at a Time

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable brings together scholars from musicology, ethnomusicology, history, and Slavic studies to interrogate the role sound played in twentieth-century socialism. Building on the recent “sonic turn” in Slavic studies (Safran 2022; Cornish and Kendall 2023; Bohlman 2023), our roundtable aims to facilitate sustained inquiry from participants and attendees about the relationship between sound and political ideology, how we might unravel sound from historical archives, and how sound can both challenge existing narratives and reveal new histories of state socialism. Amid continuing calls to decentralize Soviet Russia in studies of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, each scholar will use a single sound to demonstrate how aural experience provides an important means to recalibrate our geographical, ideological, political, and temporal borders. Brooks-Conrad asks how gender, medium, and empire converge through a study of a single Kazakh recording. Cohle will discuss Promin’, a Ukrainian radio station that championed anti-Soviet youth culture through its programming, language, and format. Cornish focuses on the sounds of the Khrushchev-era dvor to excavate how sound collided with Soviet nationalities policy in Central Asia. In Georgia, Fairley uses a WWI-era sound recording of Georgian revolutionary poetry to open up new possibilities for the study of early Soviet peasant life. Reaching beyond the Soviet Union, Johnston explores the material and geopolitical constraints of radio broadcasting in Czechoslovak-Vietnamese relations. And lastly, Costache traces how minoritized Romani soundings cut through the hegemony of the socialist culture industry in Romania. Each participant will speak for 6-8 minutes to allow time for ample discussion.

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Gabrielle Cornish, U of Wisconsin-Madison

Roundtable Speakers

• Allison Brooks-Conrad, U of Pennsylvania

• Ana Cohle, Princeton U

• Ioanida Costache, Stanford U

• Brian Fairley, U of Pittsburgh

• Rosamund Therese Johnston, U of Vienna (Austria)