CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – What was Dmitri Shostakovich saying – or not saying – with his cycle of 15 string quartets? And why do we interpret his music as we do? Twenty scholars from fields ranging from musicology to Slavic, European and East Asian literatures and cultures to Russian and Soviet history will try to answer these questions during a two-day symposium at the University of Illinois. The Feb. 21-22 event will end with the Pacifica Quartet’s performance of quartets 11, 13, 14 and 15 by Shostakovich.
Shostakovich lived and composed under Soviet rule. His relationship with the Stalinist regime varied from rosy to rocky. The government gave Shostakovich the Stalin Prize five times, yet also publicly rebuked him on multiple occasions. The question of whether his music contained coded comments on Stalinism has occupied top minds in musicology and music history since shortly after the composer’s death in 1975. The symposium, hosted by the university’s department of Slavic languages and literature, School of Music, the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center, and others, will take a broad interdisciplinary approach that goes beyond Shostakovich’s musical response to the political events of his day. The scholars will examine his quartets in the context of his complete body of work, his time and today.
Keynote addresses will be given by Richard Taruskin, Laurel Fay, and Simon Morrison. Taruskin, a professor of musicology at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of six books, including the six-volume “Oxford History of Western Music.”
He also is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and to New Republic magazine.
In 2001, the BBC listed Taruskin among the 60 “most powerful” figures in music.
Fay is the author of “Shostakovich – A Life” published by Oxford University Press, and described by Library Journal as “an “important contribution to Shostakovich scholarship.” Fay is best known for her research disentangling fact from fiction in Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovich memoir, “Testimony.”
Morrison, a professor of music at Princeton University specializing in 20th-century works, has written books on Russian opera and the composer Sergei Prokofiev. Morrison is working on a book about Shostakovich. Morrison restored the score of the original version of Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” for the Mark Morris Dance Group, recently performed at Illinois. Morrison’s remarks will focus on the question of auto-citation in the Shostakovich quartets.
Members of the Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet will participate in a discussion forum about the quartets. Pacifica, the faculty quartet in residence at the U. of I., recently was named quartet-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The quartet has performed the Shostakovich cycle in Chicago and New York City, and will take it to London’s Wigmore Hall. The forum will be moderated by Henry Fogel – a former president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the dean of Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts.
Other panel discussions will address the topics of cultural and musical climate that surrounded Shostakovich, the way his work was received in its time, his adaptations of other artists’ work and other artists’ adaptations of his.
Most symposium events will take place at Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St. in Urbana. All events are free with the exception of the Pacifica Quartet performance. Concert tickets are available through Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Students may e-mail slavic@illinois.edu regarding discounted tickets.
