A myth about music, made popular by modern and postmodern 20th-century critics, is that it consists merely of certain frequencies deployed in various rhythms by a range of sources. This positivist view of music holds that music alone, without the aid of words or visuals, cannot refer or point to some experience outside itself. This…
Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony: Do You Hear What I Hear?
On Jan. 28, 1936, Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich picked up a copy of the newspaper Pravda and found that he had been labeled anathema to the USSR. Shostakovich’s 1934 opera, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” was “cacophonous” and “an insult to Soviet women,” Pravda claimed. His ballet of the same year, “The Limpid Stream,” was “infected with cynicism.”…
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