Authors

John Nelson¹; Maia Sigua²;  ¹ Aleksanteri Institute, Finland;  ² Tbilisi State Conservatoire, Georgia

Discussion

In her keynote speech at the BASEES 2022 conference, Dr. Olesya Khromeychuk discussed the place of Ukraine on the mental map of the contemporary academic community. Things are even more complicated when it comes to the music of the former Soviet republics. In most books, articles, and international publications, discussing Soviet music means discussing Soviet Russian music, and music from other Soviet countries is either not or only barely mentioned.

History always seems to repeat itself. When considering the ‘Two Empires’ it was a clear policy of both the tsarist and Soviet empires that the literature, music, and language of the peripheral countries were irrelevant and should be banned in order to centralize on the ‘Great Russian Empire’ and what it offered. The richness provided by the ethnographical regions was not recognized. Georgian art music, which emerged as a result of resistance to the cultural colonization of the Russian Empire and completed the first stage of its development during the period of short-lived independence, was oriented towards the West by nature. Sovietization cut off the paths of further development marked by the first classics, or, rather, turned these paths into clichés conforming to socialist realism.

This article demonstrates the complex path of the formation of modern Georgian art music through the tsarist Russian and Soviet empires, from nationalism and socialist realism to attempts to overcome Soviet cultural colonialism in the Soviet era by personalities still rarely seen in the World music or the Soviet music history textbooks.