Soviet Music as Bricolage: The Case of the Piano Works of Nikolai Rakov (1908-1990)

• Main Author: Kumamoto, Yuki
• Other Authors: Viardo, Vladimir, 1949-
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Texas 2020
• Subjects: Nikolai Rakov; Rakov; Claude Levi-Strauss; Levi-Strauss; Soviet Piano Music; Soviet Music; Bricolage; Social Realism; Hermeneutics; Miniature; Contingency; Four Preludes op.6; 10 Concert Etudes; Variations in B minor; Music; Musical Performances
• Online Access: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1703341/

Much socialist realism art from Soviet-era Russia has been misunderstood by scholars. It has been considered "synthetic art," which ordinary citizens were forced to admire under the Soviet regime. It also has been interpreted as peasant kitsch art because of its seemingly unacademic and unchallenging theoretical language utilized in order to meet the expectations of Soviet communism. This ideology conditioned artists to make art accessible and nationalistic to serve the perceived needs of the Russian proletariat. Nikolai Rakov (1908-1990), a Soviet-era composer, is also all too often received as a second-class socialist realistic composer. There are, however, other approaches to understanding art created in Soviet Union. Within music scholarship, alternative perspectives on Soviet art remain largely unexplored. It is in that spirit that I turn to Rakov, whose works carry his artistic idea of irresistible beauty, elegance, irony and charm. They evoke colorful images and feelings that draw the audience into Rakov's own compositional world despite his reputation of technical simplicity and uninventive language at a glance. In this dissertation, I therefore turn my attention to the aesthetic side of Rakov's music in order to reevaluate his works. In order to achieve this, I develop and utilize a hermeneutical approach grounded in Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Savage Mind to examine and gauge Rakov's musical aesthetics. I closely evaluate two characteristics of Rakov's music through Lévi-Strauss' ideology of bricolage: 1) miniature structure and 2) contingent chords. This dissertation examines three of Rakov's piano works: Variations in B minor, Concert Etudes, and Four Preludes.