Projects

Sounding Socialist, Sounding Modern: Music, Technology, and Everyday Life in the Soviet Union, 1956-1975

My dissertation examines the ways in which sound and music helped to shape the lived experience of late socialism. While scholars of sound studies have looked at the way communities interacted with sound in the twentieth century, they have largely focused on capitalist countries in Western Europe and North America. In contrast, musicological scholarship focusing on Eastern Europe has largely privileged composer- and work-centric narratives by looking at big names and compositional transformations, rather than ordinary people. As a result, the material, sonic, and consumer networks around late socialist music have thus far been overlooked. This absence of socialism from broader discussions of technology and post-war consumerism perpetuates myths of the Soviet Union’s isolation from global strains of modernity.

“Sounding Socialist, Sounding Modern” intervenes in these discussions to argue that the Soviet government strategically deployed both sound and music as part of the nationwide mission toward “socialist modernity.” Sound and music, officials believed, was a foundational material in building socialism in two ways: first, it was an ideal medium through which to reinvigorate the utopian underpinnings of Marxist-Leninism; and second, it was instrumental in distinguishing Soviet socialism from Western capitalism. Amidst the backdrop changing networks of official and unofficial cultural dissemination and a rapid increase in massive modernizing projects, music and sound help us to recontextualize the changing relationship between the state and individual during and beyond the Thaw. Through archival research, musical analysis, historical sound studies, and oral history interviews, I augment existing work that considers the politics of socialist modernity as well as present a model for rethinking aesthetic modernism in the socialist context. In doing so, I reintroduce the Soviet Union into broader discourses of musical modernism, invention, and the “new” in twentieth-century music history.