A Letter to Shostakovich

Shostakovich, me old bourgeois lickspittle, what's up? Still suffering from the humanistic illusion that work and struggle enable man and give point to existence?

Your belaboured thematic scraps and contrived recapitulations reveal a man desperately searching for order by appealing to the past. Why, in the middle of the twentieth century, this outmoded expression of optimism? I have heard that you have gone so far as to state that the composition of music is, for you, the "bringing into being a work that must be permeated with great ideas and great passions, that must convey through its sounds tragic suspense and deep optimism and must reaffirm the beauty and dignity of man". Now, Shostakovich, that sort of talk just wont wash these days. Todays truth, as everybody knows, is not order, optimism, discipline, beauty and dignity, but chaos, pessimism, nihilism, ugliness and meanness. Face the facts, Shostakovich. And if you have faced the facts and are doing your bit to change them, well, don't. We just dont like do-gooders, Shostakovich!

Today's musical message, as everybody knows, is S.H.I.T. spells anything and everything goes, and goes down the drain. Chance music, Shostakovich, is all the rage today. And the marvellous thing about this systematised chaos is that anybody can do it We'll all puke together as the ship goes down. Marvellous.

I must admit you started off well enough, me old fellow. I believe that you had a satisfactory background, with parents and relatives close the pre-1917 revolutionary underground. And, joy to my heart, you had diverted your revolutionary zeal into a genuine thin-blooded nihilism by the thirties. But why did you give up your independence in 1936 and thereafter more-or-less conform to the "simple optimism" requirement of the authorities? Well.

orities? We'll never end the world that way; may even prolong it for a while. You see, what keeps people going is faith. . . all kinds of faith, and at root, faith in life itself. Your music may not be the most potent music ever, Shostakovich, but it suffices to keep the flame of faith flickering. If you dont hurry and put it out someone might come along and fan it into a blaze. And you don't want to be thought of as a party to pyromania, do you?

Today's catchcry, Shostakovich, is non-comprehensibility. Your music, in contrast, is so similar in basis to music that there is grave danger of a few simple optimists liking it. If Beethoven (you like Beethoven, don't you?) was writing music today, he'd be writing music like Stockhausen's not like yours. Baffle the ears, blow the mind, Shostakovich; there may not be, as a result, any history for you to make your name in, but we'll all have a fucking ball. Why serve the aims of the Soviet ethos, Shostakovich?

We would rather destroy the State than do another's bidding. Its cheering to hear the occasional bleat of sarcasm and despair in your music even now, but more of it man, more. Alexei Tolstoy is reported to have said of your seventh symphony that you have laid your ear against the heart of your country, well, Shostakovich, if all the heart of your country contains is simple optimism you should do something about it. You of the U.S.S.R. don't want to be left behind when we finally make it down the drain, do you? Ennui and senselessness are what you need, man. Why don't you write a serial, piece on the basis of the note cell S.H.I.T., for example. We've been doing it for years here.

A record of yours got into my hands the other day, In fact it was this that got me writing this letter to you in the first place. It's a pressing of your First Violin Concerto, with Leonid Kogan and the Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kyril Kondrashin; and, on the flip side, your First Cello Concerto, with Mikhail Khomitser and the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gennady Rozdestvensky. I hate to admit it, but your fans will love it. Record quality is good. The soloists and solo orchestral instruments are sharply delineated, though sometimes rather at the expense of the orchestral body. The soloists perform well.

These facts are almost enough, Shostakovich, to make me cry, but, I must admit, there are a few redeeming features: the old narcissistic trick of a thematic cell spelling out your own name is good for a mock-heroic giggle. And the farmyard hubbub of the second movement of your violin concerto, the burlesquery-banality-boombitty-boom of the Allegro con brio of your cello concerto (to take but two examples) make me feel that, thank badness he doesn't really mean all this nobility and pathos. For nobility and pathos there is, by the bucketful. For nobility, listen to the Passacaglia of the Violin Concerto. The tone is splendid and grave and full of religious sentiment. The pathos largely derives from the tension (though not conflict) between the soloist and the orchestra, and the Britten-like use of the brass. Now, Shostakovich, I far prefer your strictly-in-contempory-spirit sarcasms in the upper registers of the woodwinds, the hollow eerieness of the celeste and so on. And why all these folk elements? These double stoppings in open fifths, these gypsy-like violin glissandi? Somebody might want to get up and dance. And we can't have that now, can we? Too natural by far.

I believe that the solo parts were written for the virtuosi Oistrakh and Rostropovich, but I was disappointed that you let virtuosity be shackled by the maticism. The answer for the seventies (as it was in the fifties) is to go one further than Schoenberg and make your scores [unclear: comy] unplayable.

Furthermore, though everybody agrees with you that a diatonic basis is essential if communication with your audience is to be achieved, you really must wake up, Shostakovich: communication is passe. In short sir, you are an anachronism.

— Earle Grey