Stephen Johnson: "How Shostakovich Changed My Mind"

[Nick Armstrong]

This looks like it could be very well worth a read:




Released April 2. Publisher, Notting Hill Editions.

[Lat-Literal]

"Johnson focusses on the historical context of the composer’s music during Stalin’s Reign of Terror, as well as exploring the therapeutic effect of music on people suffering from mental illness. The work draws on interviews with players in the orchestra who performed Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony during the siege of Leningrad; an event during which nearly a third of the population perished from starvation. At the book’s heart is the belief that Shostakovich’s music; often a reflection of contemporary pain and suffering, has had a profound effect on many to rediscover pleasure in their own existence".

"I admire". This is a phrase that crops up several times in the thread on Shostakovich, all of which I read last night. It wasn't always clear to me whether his music of itself was being admired or the ability to produce a sophisticated coherence of considerable complexity in the context of struggle, external and internal. Johnson's book may well clarify the contribution he has made and can continue to make in regard to health along the lines of "we shall overcome". But I have to confess that I struggle with Shostakovich, just as I can struggle with some other composers of especial weight. It might be that I just want a pretty, accessible tune. I feel, though, there is more to it. Never reassured by self-help groups, I rarely sense a lark ascending as vying with the sad delicacy of a nocturne but rather it is a complimentary antidote. Redemption here is not being saved from sin or misery but lifted away into beauty.

In the absence of such things, the nature of any musical struggle in me concerns a depiction in music of, well, struggle. Consequently, beyond any admiration of overcoming, it is to be hoped that "How Shostakovich Changed My Mind" addresses the extent to which his music can improve health in others via some sense of empathy. It might consider too the strong possibility of a realisation in some that while current times are bad they are at least easier than life often was for him as revealed in his music. In fact, which is it mostly please, Mr J? An approach based in comparison or contrast? As for the music, to the extent that it can occupy its own non associative domain, there are a few other questions. Is it so successful that he is as some suggest to Beethoven what Prokofiev is to Mozart and, if so, what could that also do to advise? At one point in the thread there were some wild accusations about supposed immaturity and claims that the best thing that he ever produced was an anodyne waltz. While I feel sure immaturity does not apply and it may be a gross misrepresentation, I'd still like to know how both Beethoven and Shostakovich can be regarded as seriously heavyweight when arguably it is only Beethoven who achieved a recognisably orthodox musical authority.

[Serial_Apologist]

To equate or conflate an individual's suffering with that of a whole community is problematic, I would have to say.

[Lat-Literal]

To equate or conflate an individual's suffering with that of a whole community is problematic, I would have to say.

Would you expand a bit on that please?

I'm not sure where you are on Shostakovich. Isn't he sort of halfway between people who have mental health difficulties and do not live in a society experiencing mass starvation and a society experiencing mass starvation in which individuals suffer from mental health difficulties in the non-intellectual sense of being driven to absolute despair by the social conditions?

[greenilex]

The religious experience tends to do just this...use the individual to represent the suffering or transgression or exultation of the many.

[BBMmk2]

Must get this book. I haven't read a book for a long time now.

[Lat-Literal]

The religious experience tends to do just this...use the individual to represent the suffering or transgression or exultation of the many.

""All life for me is music"......."When asked if he believed in God, Shostakovich replied: "No, and I am very sorry about it." His Eighth Symphony (which he was forced to declare a "war symphony") was a celebration of life: "I can sum up the philosophical conception of my new work in three words: life is beautiful," he said during a 1943 interview. "Everything that is dark and gloomy will rot away, vanish, and the beautiful will triumph." (Source: Fay, Laurel E., Shostakovich: A Life, Oxford University Press, 2000.) D. 1975."

Although some claim that he did have some religion.

My questions probably still do apply.

They concern, albeit vaguely, the interfaces of the composer's character, wider society and his compositions.

And the degree to which these are to be separated out.

[Serial_Apologist]

Would you expand a bit on that please?

I'm not sure where you are on Shostakovich. Isn't he sort of halfway between people who have mental health difficulties and do not live in a society experiencing mass starvation and a society experiencing mass starvation in which individuals suffer from mental health difficulties in the non-intellectual sense of being driven to absolute despair by the social conditions?

I just don't think one can generalise in approaching these issues. I think that to jump from the variables involved in generalising from individual to wider community, and then invoking any one specific composer as emblematical when people find solace in all sorts and conditions of music, strikes me as hypothesising on limitless imponderables.

[Lat-Literal]

I just don't think one can generalise in approaching these issues. I think that to jump from the variables involved in generalising from individual to wider community, and then invoking any one specific composer as emblematical when people find solace in all sorts and conditions of music, strikes me as hypothesising on limitless imponderables.

That could be a problem with the book so I look forward to hearing a review of it by Caliban in due course.

[Serial_Apologist]

That could be a problem with the book so I look forward to hearing a review of it by Caliban in due course.

Caliban would be a good judge.