Translated material
Actionism in concert performance
The Return Foundation has released a book and disc “Repressed Music”
Now many strategists of contemporary art complain about the lack of fresh ideas, bold thoughts and powerful energy of social and political criticism in the field of so-called “contemporary art”. The thriving market has almost devoured the leftist discourse and turned into a commodity everything that until recently was considered radical and shocking. The best art programs today run through society. They prefer escapism or intellectual dialogue with the global archive of human culture. The market is not able to chew up these areas.The project, which combined the best traditions of tough and uncompromising social actionism with the blessed idea of affirming the value of the autonomous language of art through a political message, was born in a musical environment. For several years, musicians from the independent foundation “Return” traveled around the world with the “Repressed Music” program. Works by composers who had been in Stalin's camps or Nazi ghettos were performed. Materials with their biographies were provided. And each concert turned out to be just that: an action - a thoughtful artistic and political demonstration, the organization of an event, a process of paramount importance in the life of society. The publishing house "Classics - XXI" has just released a book and CD "Repressed Music" - an archive of the entire project.
Collected in the book by publicist Mikhail Kaluzhsky, the stories of eight composers repressed by the Communists and Nazis (Vsevolod Zaderatsky, Alexander Mosolov, Alexander Veprik, Moses Weinberg, Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Victor Ullman, Erwin Schulhoff) turn upside down the everyday perception of the self, seemingly far from the bustle of the world of philharmonic life. The radicality of the project “Repressed Music” first lies in the fact that it confirms Mandelstam’s: “But music will not save you from the abyss!” The book describes in detail the persecution of dissident composers. In the USSR, persecutors formed flocks - official alliances. Their abbreviations sound revealing: the artist has the snarling AHRR (Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia), the musicians have the blood-sucking VAPM (All-Union Association of Proletarian Music). An article about the composer Mosolov, a constructivist, an innovator in the field of form, begins like this: “Out of the whole variety of literary genres, many domestic masters of artistic expression in the thirties of the 20th century chose the genre of denunciation.” It was on the denunciation of the “singers of the Soviet secret services” that the composer Mosolov was sentenced to eight years in the camps. Throughout the book, in separate inserts on a black background, it is proposed to familiarize yourself with examples of this genre, written, among other things, by famous Soviet composers and political figures.
All the foreign heroes of the book are Jews repressed under the Nazis. The book tells the story of the diabolical performance that the Fuhrer allowed himself against Jews from Eastern European countries. This refers to the Terezin camp in the Czech Republic, “exemplary” for the world community, which has become a decorative screen hiding the realities of Auschwitz and other death camps. An idyll of a flourishing city was created in Terezin. An intense concert and theater life was encouraged. Most of its participants were gradually transported in batches to Auschwitz... This is the history of music of the 20th century against the backdrop of documentary photographs with mountains of corpses and reproductions of the front page of the “organ of the cultural and educational part of the oil field No. 1 named after. Comrade Yagoda" of the newspaper "Vyshka" gives a painful shock.
However, the main part of the “Repressed Music” archive is, of course, a CD, where the compositions of all eight heroes are flawlessly performed by regular participants in the “Returns” Foundation concerts: Ekaterina Apekisheva, Alexander Kobrin, Boris Andrianov, Yaroslav Kostrykin, Maxim Rysanov, Kristina Blaumane, and herself themselves, the leaders of the fund and the ideologists of “Repressed Music”, violinist Roman Mints and oboist Dmitry Bulgakov. Thanks to the sound of the music itself, you understand the true radicalism of the program: a free creator is free even when he is socially crushed and mentally oppressed, even when he is charged with glorifying the regime by order of the party (the disc contains a surprisingly popular popular song, but - the most wonderful thing - also internally free, like the painting of primitive artists, the cantata “Stalinstan” by Alexander Veprik). A true creator cannot help but be free. This is how nature wanted... The project “Repressed Music” is wise. He maximally sharpens the problem of the dependence of the creative world of the “artist” on the “proposed circumstances.” The event outline outlined in the book largely confirms this dependence. The music on the disc refutes this.