Shostakovich Part I and II
In this two-part series, musicologist Matthew Heck guides us first through an historical context that sheds light on Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s music – focusing on his string quartets. The second talk will take a closer look at musical and extra-musical stylistic elements through his Third Quartet.
Part II: “We are all sprung from under Gogol’s cloak”: Ambivalence in Shostakovich’s Third Quartet
In his second talk, Matthew guides us through a “holistic” analysis of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Third Quartet, focussing on the first movement. Drawing from musical analysis as well as informal listening-led storytelling, Matthew highlights the ways in which Shostakovich undermines conventions and destabilizes musical components to introduce a pillar of the composer’s aesthetic, a characteristic that the musicologist Levon Hakobian calls “an organic incapacity to refrain from being ambivalent or contradictory.” This multivalent quality runs through almost all of Shostakovich’s work and ties it both to Soviet forms of Aesopian expression and deeply rooted themes of Russian literature, particularly the uncanny and evanescent qualities that saturate the “Petersburg texts” of Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Recommended reading:
Wendy Lesser: Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets
“ A paean to Shostakovich’s quartets and their significance… Literate, sensitive and imaginative.” – New York Times Book Review
“Wendy Lesser, a quiet giant of the world of criticism, most recently turned her far-reaching curiosity on the chained genius. In Music for Silenced Voices, she gives us a biography written within the narrative framework of his fifteen quartets. Lesser’s premise is that the quartets are Shostakovich’s truest music – that they are “a kind of ‘diary’ that records ‘the story of his soul,’ as his widow puts it – they offer unparalleled access to the composer’s inner life.” – Alli Carlisle, Full Stop.
Julian Barnes: The Noise of Time
Barnes is the author of twenty previous books, and has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and more.
“A condensed masterpiece that traces the lifelong battle of one man’s conscience, one man’s art, with the insupportable exigencies of totalitarianism.” – The Guardian“
A tense and elegant study of terror, shame and cowardice, of a celebrated artist capitulating to power, yet on his own terms… Barnes interweaves the painful and the sublime to achieve an epic orchestral effect.” – Minneapolis Star Tribune
Matthew Heck