Shared and Divided Musical World. The Composers of the Moscow Troyka between Transnational Success and Changing Cultural Policies in the Last Third of the 20th Century

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Klaus Gestwa
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Musicology
• Term: from 2013 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 237899283

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998), Edison Denisov (1929-1996) and Sofia Gubaidulina (*1931) formed a group of composers known as the Moscow Troyka. They all belonged to a generation of composers who graduated from Moscow Conservatory in the 1950s and early 1960s and became famous and popular at home and abroad in the 1970s. The aim is to write a political and social history of Soviet music culture in the context of the Cold War and to question conceptions commonly used to describe the Brezhnev era such as stagnation or stability. Exploring the dynamics of the time, the goal is to grasp the ambivalences as much as the mutual entanglements in this social context.In order to analyze the complexity of the Soviet avantgardistic musical culture, a multi-perspective approach will be applied. It will combine a biographic study with a musicologist-historical analysis of the composers creative work. The research project is clearly based in history, at the same time using interdisciplinary approaches to exchange ideas with musicological experts. In this respect, the project aims to get insight into the complex relationship between music and modernity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants