TRADITION AND DISSENT IN MUSIC

Tradition and Dissent in Music: Dmitri Shostakovich..... Explain What You Understand By the Phrase Chamber Music

Tradition and Dissent in Music: Dmitri Shostakovich..... Explain What You Understand By the Phrase Chamber Music

Introduction

Widely imitated, Dmitri Shostakovich was perhaps the first great composer purposely and consciously to develop a political awareness as an integral part of his art and to accept, even seek, creative guidance from ideological, extramusical sources. His career was troubled and tense at times, yet he was honored more than any other composer of his time, possibly excepting Igor Stravinsky (McCaughey, 1998). A natural bent for the stage seemed thwarted by early criticism, and it is chiefly for his 14 symphonies that he is best known. This paper discusses tradition and dissent in music in Dmitri Shostakovich works. The paper also explains what is understood by the phrase chamber music in a concise and comprehensive way.

Discussion

Chamber music ensemble music for small groups of instruments, with only one player to each part. Its essence is individual treatment of parts and the exclusion of virtuosic elements. Originally played by amateurs in courts and aristocratic circles, it began to be performed by professionals only in the 19th century with the rise of the concert hall. In the broadest sense it existed as early as the Middle Ages. The ricercare and the concerted canzone of the 16th century are properly chamber music, although unlike later forms they were not for specific instruments but were usually performed by voices and whatever instruments were at hand. During the baroque period the chief type was the trio sonata. About 1750 the string quartet with its related types--trio, quintet, sextet, septet, and octet--arose. As developed by Haydn and Mozart the quartet became the principal chamber-music form (McCaughey, 1998).

Like most prolific composers, Shostakovich was uneven, and much of his output was produced to keep the pot boiling and the commissars happy. But when he was at his frequent best, the long arches of chilly melody, the gray, sagging harmonies, the caustic scherzi, and the joyless quickstep finales added up to a style of the utmost originality and distinction, and one in which numerous masterpieces were written: Lady Macbeth; the First, Fifth, Eighth, Tenth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Symphonies; the concertos for violin and cello; most of the chamber music (especially the fifteen string quartets) and song cycles. Whatever the true meaning of these anguish-drenched works, it seems increasingly obvious that their creator ranks with Bartok and Stravinsky as an indisputably great contemporary composer (McCaughey, 1998).

It is precisely because Shostakovich was a great composer that we feel the need to weigh in the balance his personal conduct, irrelevant though it must ultimately be to the significance of his music. The task is not a simple one. Testimony or no Testimony, it is no longer possible to regard Shostakovich as a faithful servant of the Communist party. Shostakovich:

A Life Remembered leaves no doubt whatsoever that he hated Stalin, hated Communism, hated the apparatchiki and the nomenklatura, and ...