Broadcasting of Ideology By Means of Music: The Case of “Working Class Culture” in the Early Soviet Times

This historical-theoretical research is based on the method of the comparative analysis of the texts, forming a discourse about music in the USSR in 1920s. The main purposes of the new sociology of music as an academic and ideological project were the designing of the explanatory models providing cultural legitimation of working class as the main agent of social action, as well as defending the necessity of art forms updating, which had to contribute into the construction of new types of society and personality. At the same time, musical space in the 1920th was riven by the different interpretation of the realization methods of these goals. Besides the search of the academic musicology and dominated musical forms democratization opportunities, the well-known avant-garde experiments (conducted by A.Avraamov, L.Termen, the composers of the “Association for Contemporary Music”) laid the foundation of innovative styles and acoustic practices.

There have been defined the conceptual bases of the early Soviet sociology of music such as social and economic determinism and naturalism; attention to the role of music in social dynamics; counteraction to "formalism" and cultural autonomy; aspiration to paradigmatic and disciplinary synthesis; the research of music functioning in the context of everyday life; strengthening of social integration as mission of creative and scientific activity. It has been established that music was given the aim to structure daily occurrence, motivate labor activity, cultural education and support an aspiration to solidary, collective action on the basis of emotional acceptance of ideological postulates of that time. The research attention has been focused also on transformation of the crucial points of the main ideologists of "proletarian culture" from the utopian romanticism directed to the achievement of class solidarity towards the total distortion of basic humanistic ideals in favor of fixing of the developed hierarchies of power.