(5 of 6)
Russia's music is systematically organized—from the mightiest flames of Russian creative inspiration down to the lowliest tuba spit valve. A Soviet bureau called Glavnoe Musicalno Pravelenya (Glavmus for short) spends over 6,000,000 rubles a year ($1,200,000) keeping Soviet composers well-fed and commissioning them to write operas and symphnies. It even runs a "composers' country house" at Ivanovo, about 100 kilometers from Moscow, where all good Russian composers go in the summertime. One of Russia's top composers, Armenian-born Aran Khachaturian, calls it "an institution for the production of masterpieces and pigs." The estate has 66 cows, 8,000 chickens and ducks, 135 pigs, and room for 20 com posers. In the main building the composers eat, sleep, loaf and criticize each other's music. Nearby are five dachas, or cottages, where each composer can lock himself in to work in privacy. There, during the past two summers, Shostakovich finished his Eighth Symphony, Khachaturian, his Second, and Prokofiev finished his Fifth and began his Sixth. Prokofiev worked in a glassed-in verandah — containing couch, grand piano, chair and table —overlooking a pond where Ivanovo village kids swim.
Prokofiev's music, like everybody else's in Soviet Russia, has to be okayed first by his fellow composers in a private "sitting," before it can be played in public. The sittings were pretty rough during the 1936-37 purge of "formalism" in music — which meant an end to fancy musical tricks that the masses could not understand. Shosta kovich was a prime target, and Prokofiev caught a few glancing blows. Now, considering that at one sitting rival composers can make or break a year's work by one of their colleagues, the sessions are fairly harmonious. Fellow members, regarding another's work in the communal spirit, can tell him he has been composing too many chamber works, and should change his pace. Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony was commissioned (the going price for sym phonies: from 8,000 rubles up, plus performance bonuses) after his fellows decided that, since his last symphony was written in 1930, it was high time for another.
At first Prokofiev, the ex-emigre, was held suspect by the others, but the indus try with which he turned out marching songs and heroic legends during the war, despite recent stretches of illness, seems to have proved his musical patriotism.
Says Khachaturian: "He has behaved like a real Soviet citizen." Aggressive Rhythms. Whether Glav mus is getting its money's worth in quality is for future generations to judge. But of its stimulating effect on quantity production there can be no doubt. Since 1939, recognized Soviet composers have written more than 66 symphonies, 46 operas, 22 ballets, 150 orchestral suites, fantasies and overtures, 40 cantatas, 400 smaller choral works and 150 quartets, quintets and other chamber music. Much of it is pretty uniform in style: restless, intensely energetic music, full of theatrical climaxes and aggressive rhythms, as cannily constructed, and at its worst about as emotionally appealing, as a linotype.