In the Spring of 1931 the German section of the ISCM staged a small-scale festival at the old-fashioned, but horticulturally attractive spa of Pyrmont in Lower Saxony. Apart from a witty and graceful Violin Concerto by my friend and co-student from Schreker's masterclass at the Berlin Academy of Music, the Polish-American Jerzy Fitelberg (son of the renowned conductor of the Warsaw Philharmonic, Grzegorz Fitelberg), the quality of the works performed was rather poor. They were certainly lacking in colour against the background of rare azaleas and bulging rhododendrons.… My own piece, now (luckily) lost for ever – a Promenadenmusik for small orchestra, meant to flatter the ‘genius loci’ – was a flop, though Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein were both generous about it.

It can hardly have escaped the reader's attention that certain changes have taken place in Eastern Europe and beyond. In December 1980, when Lewis Foreman published his comments about Nikolai Roslavets in Tempo No. 135, discussion of the Russian modernists, of composers such as Roslavets, Lourié and Mossolov, was still largely impossible in the Soviet Union. It followed that it was extremely hard to find out what music had in fact survived in archives public and private, and even harder to get that music performed.

The attempt to relate a nonmusical event to a musical phenomenon creates problems for the musicologist. Compelled to search beyond the mere notes on the printed page, one may try to gain more penetrating insights into a particular work by scrutinizing historical circumstances concurrent with the genesis of the music. In the case of Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, the social and political background to this piece has been greatly emphasized. Yet could the efforts to relate the composer's compositional style to his troubles with the Soviet regime obscure musical issues? The Fifth Symphony, frequently viewed by many music historians as an apologetic musical response to the Pravda attack on the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, does not present as drastic a change in musical style as is commonly believed. An analysis of the four earlier symphonies reveals that they function importantly in the composer's evolution as a symphonist; Shostakovich refines several compositional techniques employed in these works and incorporates them in the Fifth Symphony, his first fully mature piece. The most salient features of the composer's early works that most clearly relate to his development as a symphonist shall be discussed in this essay. This process aims to reassess the hypothesis which suggests Shostakovich suddenly mended his ways in light of official criticism.

No-one in his right mind would want to be in Tikhon Khrennikov's shoes. He has the dubious distinction of being the number two villain of Shostakovich's memoirs Testimony, second only to Stalin. Shostakovich nicknamed him the ‘bloodhound’. But he is also a curious historical survival: the only dictator of an arts organization in the Soviet Union who was appointed by Stalin and, 42 years later, still occupies the same position, his head still on his shoulders.

Much of what follows concerns itself with issues which are inevitably (and properly) extra-musical. But the musical significance of the recently-exhumed and now partially recorded ork by Dmitri Shostakovich which seems to be called (or thought of as) Antiformalisticheski Rayok is worth stressing at the outset. This little cantata ‘for reader, four basses, mixed chorus and piano accompaniment’ could hardly be claimed as one of the Soviet master's major utterances: it is, rather, a particularly bitter and subversive satirical squib – much of its fascination stems from the explicitness and political discomfort of the attack, and the identity of its targets. On the other hand, it is a not unimportant contribution to a specifically Russian tradition of musical satire: it can be seen to be taking its place in – and rendering more intelligible – the development of Shostakovich's personal commitment to that tradition, as he moved from the zany and anarchic grotesquerie of his early film, ballet and theatre scores to the oblique but devastating critique of officialdom and philistinism that underlies such enigmatic pieces as the Preface to the Complete Edition of My Works, op. 123 and his very last song-cycle, the Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, op. 146. Rayok belongs in their company, but is neither oblique nor enigmatic: it represents, in an extreme vitriolic form, an aspect of Shostakovich's musical humour that could only express itself publicly through a protective mask of irony. The vitriol is here undiluted, because Rayok was written with no thought of publication: was indeed unpublishable at the time, and in the political conditions, under which it was conceived.

In 1957 the second Congress of Composers of the USSR took place in Moscow. It was as of little significance and just as boring as the previous ones. In the name of the Central Committee of the CPSU we were instructed by Shepilov, a secretary of the Central Committee on questions of ideology. Wishing to 'show off’ his ‘scholarship’, he weighed down his speech with a mountain of great names. In one phrase he combined the names of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky KorSAkov – this was how Shepilov declaimed the name of the composer of The Snow Maiden, making an illiterate howler by misplacing the accent on the A of the middle syllable. Shostakovich, who had been languishing from boredom, immediately revived and even started laughing on hearing this example of ‘scholarship’ in the speech of our instructor. Sitting down next to me, he warned me that as soon as the session was over, we were to go together to his dacha at Bolshevo outside Moscow. During the journey there he spoke of nothing but Shepilov's learned speech.

I have never in my life met such an extraordinary person as Filipp Moiseyevich Herschkowitz, nor am I likely to ever again. He was a man of sharp intellect and great learning; and he combined a deep love of true art with a merciless irony, which was directed at everything and everyone around him. His clever remarks, serious as well as humorous, would instantly become anecdotes that would go round the whole of Moscow. He lived in a minute oneroom flat with his young wife Lena and their cat Kisik, and could barely make ends meet. They refused to make him a member of the Union of Composers, Muzfond would have nothing to do with him, and those who could have helped to support him, or even just lend him some money steadily, became fewer and fewer in number. He would spend days poring over a volume of Beethoven sonatas, a Mahler or Schoenberg score, making ever more unique discoveries, which would one day, he thought, go to make up a book – his life's work.

Herschkowitz…was a quite brilliant theoretician and an interesting composer, who through horrifying and unimaginable circumstances found himself in the Soviet Union in 1941. He had lived in Vienna for some years…and had been unable to emigrate to another country. I do not know why this was so, but I think there was a quota for Rumanian citizens going to the USA. So he turned to the USSR. He found his way to Central Asia and later came to Moscow.

Before they performed my ballet Vanina Vanini in 1961, the renowned Bolshoi Theatre orchestra had never played any music that had been written in the 12-note system.

There was a lot of tension at the first rehearsal. The musicians neither understood or accepted the music. Their heads turned in bewilderment every time a phrase was taken up by a different instrument to the one that had begun it. It gradually dawned on me, and the musicians themselves, that they were simply incapable of playing the piece.

Born in 1934, Georgiy (Giya) Kancheli has begun to receive attention in the West rather later than Alfred Schnittke, who was born one year earlier. Kancheli, who comes from Tiflis (Tbilsi), in Georgia – and who should not therefore be described as Russian – studied piano and composition (with Ilya Tuskiya) in the Conservatory of his native town between 1959 and 1963, and he has himself taught there since 1970. Since 1971 he has also been musical director of the Rustaveli Theatre in Tiflis. He has received recognition as a People's Artist of the USSR, and been a State Prize winner, and following his emergence into the consciousness of countries outside the USSR interest in his music has spread considerably.