Contemplating Shostakovich: Life, Music and Film

• Main Authors: Kirkman, Andrew, Ivashkin, Alexander
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2012; Taylor and Francis; Ashgate
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: 20th Century Music; Central Asian, Russian & Eastern European Studies; Movie Music; Music; Music Theory; Dmitri Shostakovich; Moscow Conservatoire; string; Young Man; shostakovichs; Ninth Quartet; Shostakovich; kompozitor; Dmitrii Shostakovich; mtsensk; Fourteenth Symphony; Znamennyi Chant; Viola Sonata; Cello Concerto; publishers; Main Character; Kreutzer Sonata; Hawkes Music Publishers; Mtsensk District; Valentin Silvestrov; Eighth Quartet; Dmitrii Dmitrievich; sovetskii; Isaak Glikman; Film Music; dmitrii; Alexander Ivashkin; district; Shostakovich's Music; Sovetskii Kompozitor; Fourth Symphony; quartet; hawkes; Grigorii Kozintsev; Soviet Composers
• ISBN: 9781138250444; 9781409439370; 1138250449; 1409439372
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315573779

Contemplating Shostakovich marks an important new stage in the understanding of Shostakovich and his working environment. Each chapter covers aspects of the composer's output in the context of his life and cultural milieu. The contributions uncover 'outside' stimuli behind Shostakovich's works, allowing the reader to perceive the motivations behind his artistic choices; at the same time, the nature of those choices offers insights into the workings of the larger world - cultural, social, political - that he inhabited. Thus his often ostensibly quirky choices are revealed as responses - by turns sentimental, moving, sardonic and angry - to the particular conditions, with all their absurdities and contradictions, that he had to negotiate. Here we see the composer emerging from the role of tortured loner of older narratives into that of the gregarious and engaged member of his society that, for better and worse, characterized the everyday reality of his life. This invaluable collection offers remarkable new insight, in both depth and range, into the nature of Shostakovich's working circumstances and of his response to them. The collection contains the seeds for a wide range of new directions in the study of Shostakovich's works and the larger contexts of their creation and reception.