AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Thursday afternoon 49
A GENEALOGY OF POLYSTYLISM: ALFRED SCHNITTKE
AND THE LATE SOVIET CULTURE OF COLLAGE
Peter Schmelz
Washington University in St. Louis
Alfred Schnittke is widely credited with the development of polystylism, an all-embracing
approach to composition that forms a crucial trend in late twentieth-century Western music.
By the 1980s the term polystylism was common among Soviet intellectuals as well as Western
critics and scholars. In 1984 Russian poet Nina Iskrenko even penned a “Hymn to Polystylistics”
(gimn polistilistike) that some literary scholars have taken to be a unique artistic
credo, ignoring Schnittke’s clear precedent. Given polystylism’s pervasiveness from the 1980s
onward, it is understandable that musicologists such as David Haas and Pauline Fairclough
would point to earlier invocations of the idea. Yet both read Schnittke’s formulation back on
related, albeit notably different earlier concepts or terminology from the 1920s and 1930s (e.g.,
raznostil’nost’ ). Based upon Haas’s work in particular, others have perpetuated the notion that
Vladimir Shcherbachov advocated polystylism in the 1920s, although he seems never to have
used the word.
More important than any purely etymological tracing, however, is the actual development
of the phenomenon masked by these purported earlier sightings of the term. As an investigation
of Soviet music from the 1950s through the 1970s reveals, even as Schnittke articulated his
own version of stylistic citation, adaptation, and allusion, he simultaneously affixed a name
to something that already existed, and indeed was flourishing. Schnittke’s new conceptual
framework was revised and adapted from an increasingly common Soviet practice stemming
from the stylistic montages of the 1920s and 1930s—especially those in film—, as well as
from socialist realist musical practice more generally. In a study of Shostakovich’s creative
interrelationships with his students, David Fanning discusses the possible influence of Boris
Chaikovsky’s quotation laden Second Symphony (1967) on Shostakovich’s own quotation
rich Fifteenth Symphony (1971). He writes that “the very fact that Shostakovich’s quotations
have provoked such intense curiosity suggests the lack of clear historical precedents.” Yet both
Chaikovsky and Shostakovich participated in a broad network of composers similarly employing
collage or related techniques. This paper maps out this network as it traces the origins
and development of stylistic mixture and quotation in Soviet music, as well as the genesis and
dissemination of Schnittke’s own idea of polystylism.
Finally, this paper corrects many of the misapprehensions surrounding polystylism by
considering Schnittke’s likely sources both East and West. It surveys the important Soviet
examples that had an impact on him, among them Boris Chaikovsky, Arvo Pärt, Edison
Denisov, Sergey Slonimsky, and Rodion Shchedrin, as well as undeniably influential Western
composers such as Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Luciano Berio. Because Schnittke’s sources
were not limited to the Soviet Union or its immediate neighbors like Poland, this examination
of Schnittke’s intellectual and musical forebears also suggests the deeper political, social, and
musical connections behind the widespread turn to collage and quotation in the 1960s and
early 1970s throughout Europe, America, and the USSR. In this sense Schnittke’s polystylism
reflects not just a late Soviet trend, but also a more general late twentieth-century culture of
collage.