In the twentieth century,
formalism in music came to be strongly associated with music composed in the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
during the
StalinJoseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953...
ist era. The
termIn literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and tropes...
was borrowed from Marxist literary theory, and was used to describe any music that was deemed by the Soviet cultural bureaucracy to lack appeal for the masses. An accusation that a piece was "formalist" was understood to imply that the work was too interested in aspects of form, at the expense of simple, uplifting music that glorified the Soviet state.
The regime, who applied the term as it saw fit, did not seek a clearly-articulated definition.
In the twentieth century,
formalism in music came to be strongly associated with music composed in the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
during the
StalinJoseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953...
ist era. The
termIn literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and tropes...
was borrowed from Marxist literary theory, and was used to describe any music that was deemed by the Soviet cultural bureaucracy to lack appeal for the masses. An accusation that a piece was "formalist" was understood to imply that the work was too interested in aspects of form, at the expense of simple, uplifting music that glorified the Soviet state.
The regime, who applied the term as it saw fit, did not seek a clearly-articulated definition. In the period in question (roughly the 1930s to Stalin's death in 1953), in the Soviet Union any composer accused of formalism either conformed quickly or faced serious consequences. The allegation was usually accompanied with the threat (explicit or implicit) of punishment. Music being hard to describe in words, any counter-arguments (if an artist had been brave enough to make them) would have been difficult to frame, and could in any case have been politicised as a blow against the
proletariatThe proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is proletarian. Originally it was identified as those people who had no wealth other than their sons...
.
Two famous allegations of formalism were leveled at
Dmitri ShostakovichDmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Russian composer of the Soviet period and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century....
. Shostakovich was denounced in the Russian newspaper
PravdaPravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
in January 1936 in connection with a Moscow performance of his opera
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk DistrictLady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is an opera in four acts by Dmitri Shostakovich, his Op.29. The libretto was written by Alexander Preis and the composer, and is based on the story Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov...
. The composer withdrew his
Fourth SymphonyDmitri Shostakovich composed his Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Opus 43, between September 1935 and May 1936, after abandoning some preliminary sketch material...
before its planned first performance, and his subsequent
Fifth SymphonyThe Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, of Dmitri Shostakovich is a symphony for orchestra composed between April and July 1937. Its premiere was on November 21, 1937 in Leningrad by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky. The work was a huge success, and is said to have...
was perceived, by at least one journalist if not by the composer himself, as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism". Another allegation came as part of the
Zhdanov decreeThe Zhdanov Doctrine was a Soviet cultural doctrine developed by the Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov in 1946. It proposed that the world was divided into two camps: the imperialistic, headed by the United States; and democratic, headed by the Soviet Union...
in February 1948, which cited Shostakovich together with a number of other prominent Soviet composers.
The proscription of formalism was not restricted to the Soviet Union. For instance, in Poland immediately after
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
the Stalinist regime insisted that composers adopt
Socialist realismSocialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style of realistic art which has as its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
, and those who would not do so, including Witold Lutosławski and
Andrzej PanufnikSir Andrzej Panufnik was a Polish composer, pianist, conductor and pedagogue. He became established as one of the leading Polish composers, and as a conductor he was instrumental in the re-establishment of the Warsaw Philharmonic orchestra after World War II...
, had performances of their compositions banned in Poland for being "formalist". Other Eastern Bloc countries experienced similar restrictions (
Zoltán KodályZoltán Kodály was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, educator, linguist, and philosopher.-Life:...
complained to Panufnik of similar problems facing composers in Hungary).
The term "formalism" was also sometimes used by English-speaking music theorists and musicologists in the twentieth century to refer more generally to music using apparently strict, rule-driven, composition techniques such as
serialismIn music, serialism is a technique, method , "highly specialized technique" , or "way" of composition, but also "a philosophy of life , a way of relating the human mind to the world and creating a completeness when dealing with a subject"...
. This usage was often, though not always, given a negative connotation.