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Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR by Peter J. Schmelz (review)

2024; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2024.a919047

1534-150X

Daniel Elphick,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Reviewed by: Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR by Peter J. Schmelz Daniel Elphick Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR. By Peter J. Schmelz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. [xv, 408 p. ISBN 9780197541258 (hardcover), $120; also available as ebook, ISBN and price vary.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Viewed from the third decade of the twenty-first century, "polystylism" seems to have been a relatively short-lived phenomenon. It had apparently arisen in the early 1970s, but by the 1990s it had all but collapsed along with the Soviet Union. While the music that resulted was some of the most recorded and popular art music of the late twentieth century, the term's definition has proven slippery. Alfred Schnittke went from being the most recorded living composer during his lifetime to a more obscure composer since his death, so any study of polystylism might almost inevitably center on Schnittke as figure-head. Peter John Schmelz goes beyond any such history. Schmelz is one of the foremost historians of Soviet music, with his book Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Music during the Thaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). In his recent volume, Sonic Overload, he roughly picks up the chronology from his first book, though Sonic Overload is far from being simply a composer biography of Schnittke. It is eclectic in the figures and case studies mentioned, but Schmeltz focuses almost as much on Valentin Silvestrov. The musical reasons for doing so are self-evident, with a clear element of influence and exchange between Schnittke and Silvestrov. The combination also allows Schmelz to guide the reader into a history of Soviet music that moves away from the main cultural centers (even if only as far as Kyiv—hardly a peripheral center, but still, a shift away from Moscow and Leningrad). [End Page 520] Schmelz lays out the main aims of Sonic Overload as a reflection on "information overload" and to present "a musically centered cultural history of polystylism in the USSR from the 1960s to the 1990s" (p. 2). The result is a cultural and artistic history whereby the main prism and case studies will be musical, but this is not necessarily always the main focus. By working on Schnittke and Silvestrov, Schmelz complements two blossoming bodies of literature. On Schnittke, recent work, especially by Gavin Dixon (The Routledge Handbook to the Music of Alfred Schnittke [New York: Routledge, 2022]), sits alongside Schmelz's own, though Schmelz tends to focus on the interpretative side of examining Schnittke's music (though still alongside considerable archival work). On Silvestrov, Richard Louis Gillies (Singing Soviet Stagnation: Vocal Cycles from the USSR, 1964–1985 [New York: Routledge, 2022]) combines analytical and biographical approaches, and thereby explores new avenues but avoids the kind of forensic detail that Schmelz sometimes presents. Schmelz does, however, provide such thorough and detailed context for his case studies that the reader can become immersed in the historical period. For instance, the "overload" of the title emerged from a kind of "sensory deprivation" (p. 6) of the 1960s, which quickly became "as much curse as blessing" (p. 8) in the sheer volume of information unleashed upon the population, and Schmelz goes to impressive lengths to document and illustrate this to the reader. Schmelz thus provides a cultural history that spans some of the most seismic shifts in the late Soviet Union, including its collapse, but manages to avoid the pitfalls of scholars like Alexei Yurchak (Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006]) or Vladislav Zubok (Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia [Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009]), both of whom catastrophize and eulogize about the Soviet collapse—made much more pressing and urgent with the development of the Ukraine war since 2014. Schmelz begins by presenting "A Genealogy of Polystylism" (p. 33), identifying Schnittke's Second Violin Sonata ("Quasi una sonata") as a proto-work of the genre, and even drawing surprising parallels to socialist realism (arguing that the "accessibility" of socialist realism often resulted in a combination of different genres, paving the way for polystylism). Schmelz traces...