Out of the Rut?

Ever since the stern party-line decrees of five years ago (TIME, Feb. 23, 1948), Soviet composers have been avoiding "formalism" and trying to write music that even committees of commissars could understand.* Now it looks as if the party line may be switching key again. In the journal Soviet Music, top-ranking Composer Aram (Sabre Dance) Khachaturian calls the system of having committees review and pass judgment on new music a disaster and adds, "Let time and the public judge." Excerpts:

" 'Monumental' works [have been] composed for choirs and grand orchestras--and with nothing in them! One had to put up with it just because the title had something about 'Love for the Soviet Homeland' or 'The Struggle for Peace' and 'Friendship of the Nations.' But in the end.life itself gave a proper appreciation of these works--they were thoroughly forgotten in no time . . .

"There must be no more of this rotten practice of bureaucratic interference . . . Criticism, by all means. But let's have no more 'directives' from our bureaucrats with their constant worry about being on the safe side . . . let the artist find the solution to his creative problems himself, in the light of those vital tasks with which the party has confronted us all . . . I even think that certain works that have been turned down by the Composers' Union should be printed and performed . . . We must get out of the rut."

* Especially to be avoided: 1) "atonality, dissonance and discord," 2) "confused, neuropathological combinations that turn music into cacophony," 3) anything sounding like the "bourgeois" contemporary music of Western Europe and the U.S.

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