Censorship and Orthodox Church Music
Ivan Moody
The paper presents the idea of censorship as it has affected the music sung during the services of the Orthodox Church. It begins with an examination of what censorship has historically been in this regard, concentrating specifically on the context of its canonical basis and its application to the tradition of Byzantine chant, and progressing thereafter to specific examples that illustrate the way censorship of various kinds has influenced and shaped a number of traditions of Orthodox church music. Then it looks at other traditions of Orthodox sacred chant in the Balkans, namely those of Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, and in particular the way in which the mere fact of the existence of sacred music was dealt with after the advent of communism.
The last section deals with Russia, where the legal battle over the publication of Tchaikovsky’s setting of the Divine Liturgy became emblematic of the whole question of censorship in sacred music, and later attitudes in the Soviet Union towards the inconvenient existence of liturgical compositions as part of Russian cultural history.
Between Periphery and Centrality: Byzantine Musicology during Communist Romania
Cătălin Cernătescu
After 1950, in the writings on the history of Romanian music, there is a constant preoccupation in approaching the Byzantine musicology topics, being a domain able to adequately justify the presence of local “multisecular” musical practices. The Communist Party’s strategy of reaffirming national identity and cultural heritage on an international level will create unexpected opportunities for researchers of sacred music. Due to its ability to build solid historical bridges to the ancient past, Byzantine musicology, once largely overlooked and censored, would gain increasing importance. Since it could conveniently link modern Romanian culture to that existing on the territory of the former Dacia, this field began to be employed in official publications, having the usefulness of a vehicle that could successfully deliver the mainstream themes promoted by the regime, such as nationalism, bimillenarism and Romanian exceptionalism.
Sacred Music as a Subversive Force in Socialist Yugoslavia
Melita Milin
The Communist Party of Yugoslavia that had organised the partisan army to fight against the German Nazi forces as occupiers in World War II was well prepared for establishing its one-party system after the war. In March 1945, the Central Committee of the Party of Yugoslavia decided that control over culture in the new state should be institutionalised and very promptly a department for propaganda (Agitprop) was founded within that highest political body. The Union of Serbian Composers followed the general line of disciplining creative artists and in one of its typical statements it recommended that its members should “develop and help the fight against influences of idealistic conceptions, decadency and the vulgarisation of music”. After the conflict and break with the USSR in 1948 and the resulting rapprochement of Yugoslavia to Western countries, the conditions for a more liberal cultural climate were gradually built, enabling thus a quicker development in the direction of contemporary Western compositional trends. Criticism of modernism, decadence, and experimentalism observed in some of the newly composed music lasted for some time more, finally calming down after 1960. However, censorship subsisted in Yugoslavia for longer, but outside strictly art music: the church music sphere was always perceived as belonging to oppositional and enemy activities. In the article are examined the attitudes of the cultural officials both towards performing sacred music composed in the past, and the use of church melodies in new works.
Women in 19th-Century Czech Musical Culture and Their Representation in Encyclopaedias: Thoughts on Selection Processes in Music Lexicography (and/or Musicology)
Anja Bunzel
In this paper, I examine a variety of music and art encyclopaedias dating from the 19th to the 21st centuries with regard to their inclusion of musical women within the context of 19th-century Czech musical culture. I ask whether there are differences in coverage regarding the women’s birthdates and/or fields of activities, and regarding the individual encyclopaedias. Second, while I am hesitant to speculate as regards the possibility of systematic institutional censorship, I explore possible regularities (and irregularities) in selection patterns across the sample, also with a view to contemporary socio-political trends representative of the times during which the publications emerged. In the light of this, the purpose of the paper is two-fold. Quantitative in nature, it sheds light on hundreds of lesser-known 19th-century female musical protagonists within the context of Czech musical culture. Furthermore, it is devoted to a contextualisation of the findings with regard to discussions typically encountered in lexicography and encyclopaedia writing.
The Forgotten Sounds of a Century. Romanian Music and Lithographies From the 19th Century: Reflections on Half a Century of Censorship
Karina Șabac
Towards 1850, a fully developed industry of editors, lithographers, instrument-manufacturers from UK, Germany, France, and Austria arrived with its 400 years old legacy to a region deeply steeped in folklore and Byzantine traditions: the Romanian Principalities. At this point we see arguably one of the fastest cultural transformations of a nation, the process of assimilation of occidental standards being greatly catalyzed by the instauration of a new constitutional monarchy in Romania with King Carol I (1866-1914) and the innovative Queen Elisabeth (1869-1916). As my research revealed, she has been the only queen-musician in modern history (a good pianist herself) to personally encourage and support the development of international cultural exchanges and local music styles with tireless effort. The European music industry profited greatly from this opening, as my study will show, but the following half a century under the communist regime and censorship unfortunately erased a great amount of archives.
My recent discovery of the first music scores produced in Bucharest in the 19th century has motivated this study to define an important missing puzzle in European music history. With information from the cover of the scores and the archives of the national libraries in Bucharest, London, Vienna, Weimar, and Leipzig I reconstructed the image of an unprecedented international collaboration between art-patrons, society, editors, musicians, and manufacturers alike from a time when electricity and railway systems had not been in place yet.
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