Stalin’s Playlist

We have the pleasure of inviting you to the public talk:

Stalin’s Playlist

given by

Marina FROLOVA-WALKER
Professor of Music History, University of Cambridge
Fellow of Clare College
***
The issue of Stalin’s musical tastes has never undergone any scholarly investigation: it remains a preserve of popular literature, where fact is often mixed with fiction. In this paper, I will approach it from one particular angle: the awards of Stalin Prizes in music, which are often seen by popular writers as a direct extension of Stalin’s personal preferences. Among the many surviving documents pertaining to Stalin Prizes, I have discovered lists of nominations which include Stalin’s own marginalia. Considering them together with relevant memoir literature will allow us to answer the question on whether Stalin was indeed routinely imposing his personal musical tastes on the nation.

Marina Frolova-Walker FBA is Professor of Music History at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Clare College. She is the author of Russian Music and Nationalism from Glinka to Stalin (Yale, 2007), Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics (Yale, 2016), co-author (with Jonathan Walker) of Music and Soviet Power, 1917–32 (Boydell, 2012), and co-editor (with Patrick Zuk) of Russian Music after 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery. In 2015 she was awarded the Edward J. Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association for ‘outstanding contribution to musicology’.