¶ … ups and downs of Russian music throughout the Soviet Union's tumultuous history and will also describe the impact that music has on the Russians today. This paper will describe the music during the pre-revolutionary years, post-revolutionary years, the Stalin years, the post-Stalin years and Gorbachev's perestroika years.
The years before the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Russian revolution of 1917 are considered the pre-revolutionary years. The Russian Revolution of 1905 was an unsuccessful attempt to topple the ruling czar and it all started with the Bloody Sunday Massacre. The Russian revolution of 1917 succeeded in overthrowing the imperial government and replacing them with the Bolsheviks.
The pre-revolutionary years, in Russia, were filled with Byzantium liturgical chants, nationalistic folk songs, operas, and symphonies. In 988, Prince Vladimir of Kiev decided that Russian's national religion would be Byzantine Orthodoxy and that's how the Byzantium liturgical chants ended up in Russia. However, after the Russians created their own style of liturgical chants, it was called znammeny chants. This type of music was entirely vocal and there were no musical instruments accompanying the chants.
Russian folk music had been around since the tenth century but really did not become great until the eighteenth and nineteenth century under the impact of Russian nationalism, which came at the expense of Napoleon's invasion and defeat in the nineteenth century (Spector 227).
Russian themes were evident in the folk songs and choral arrangements and in the creation of a new national opera (Spector 228). Three Russian empresses, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great, introduced opera to Russia. Because of Napoleon's invasion, the Russians had a lot of pride concerning their country, and the Russian operas that were written stemmed from that nationalistic pride.
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Suddenly Western Music no longer needed to follow all the old rules. Just as the abstract painters dispensed with the traditional canon of art at just the same time, so also men like Bartok and Stravinsky take a fresh look at what constituted good music. According to Bartok, the aesthetic success of this new homophonic-polyphonic music would depend upon the "harmonic entity" that results from the rise and fall of
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Then in 1949, China was liberated and the state controlled by Mao Zedong, took over all music and artistic activities. Mao made great efforts to change musical traditions which he had associated with the older, defeated Chinese society. Promoted revolutionary songs and "Yangko Plays," (Yu Run 1991). He moved the traditional away from professionalism, and towards exploring the life of the proletariat, the common people. Mao then allowed Russian
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As Paxton (2005) points out, the Russian Revolution was directly responsible for the rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany. The Russian Revolution, comprised of and led largely by a Jewish demographic, represented a threat to the nationality and national interests of European states. Fascist movements were not limited to Italy and Germany—they appeared in England, France, Spain and elsewhere—but Italy and Germany emerged as the primary Fascist states because
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