What happened to the Soviet seventies? Conventional wisdom carves the Soviet Union into a series of alternatingly repressive and progressive (or, at the very least, less repressive) regimes. After Lenin's death in 1924, the utopian underpinnings of the Bolshevik Revolution gave way to the terrors of Stalinism. Coming to power in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev denounced his predecessor's ‘cult of personality’ and loosened restrictions on domestic and cultural life. Following a period of discontent within the Soviet Central Committee, Leonid Brezhnev spearheaded Khrushchev's ousting and, in 1964, assumed power; he would lead the Communist Party for nearly twenty years, until his death in November 1982. In a sort of interregnum, the next two general secretaries, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, lasted just over a year each before dying suddenly, at which point Mikhail Gorbachev, the great progressive, came to power and opened the country to those both within and without.

For historians of the Soviet Union – and, indeed, music scholars who study the region – much ink has been spilled on the eras of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev. Yet the tenure of Brezhnev, whose stay in power was second in length only to Stalin's, has long been overlooked. Much of this has to do with its sobriquet, ‘Stagnation’, which allegedly spoke to the era's political, economic, and creative malaise. In recent years, however, historians of the Soviet Union have increasingly called these notions into question. Were the Soviet seventies really stagnant? Did the vibrant cultural life of the Thaw just disappear? And how did we get from the Thaw to Gorbachev's reforms? Upon closer inspection, the Stagnation was not particularly stagnant – and, indeed, as scholars such as Christine Evans, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Neringa Klumbytė, and Juliane Fürst have argued, it was a period of great experimentation and innovation.Footnote ¹

Music studies still has some catching up to do in this area, but Peter Schmelz's excellent book Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR is an exciting and pathbreaking look into the Soviet seventies. Through close study of biography, published materials, critical reception, and scores, Schmelz both revisits the Brezhnev era as a generative period and reintegrates the Soviet Union into the musical discourses of the global 1970s. The result is a necessary and important contribution not only to Soviet music history, but also to our understandings of postmodernism, genre, style, and, above all, identity.

Schmelz's primary object of study is polystylism, which, although not unique to Soviet music, does show ‘Soviet music as a powerful, active participant on the world stage’ (3). His definition of polystylism is necessarily broad, and, crucially, renders the concept as a dynamic, generative process. ‘Polystylism’, he writes, ‘acts as both attitude and action. Always in motion, it is never stable. Polystylism represents a way of being – of becoming – in the world, a means for sifting, sorting, filtering, and organizing contemporary sonic spaces (and all contemporary spaces are sonic). Not just a way of composing, of writing, of filming, and of painting, it is a way of hearing, of reading, and of seeing’ (17). Here, too, we find one of the many strengths of Sonic Overload: Schmelz leans into the nuances and contradictions of polystylism (or, indeed, any musical style or genre) and tells a clear and compelling story without simplifying or essentializing the narrative.

Crucially, Schmelz argues, late socialist life was itself polystylistic. ‘It might’, he writes, ‘seem counterintuitive to look to the USSR for answers about information overload’ (4). To many, late socialism meant material shortages, long queues outside of stores, and censored media. Yet still, the Soviet intellectual market, it seems, was plenty saturated. This was, in part, due to the influx of mass media technologies that had ballooned under Khrushchev.Footnote ² More than ever before, Soviets were listening to cassette tapes, radio, and records or watching television. That many Soviets, starved of material goods, felt completely overloaded is one of many paradoxes Schmelz teases out in the book. ‘In an environment of real material scarcity’, he concludes, ‘having appetites whetted caused people to hunger for more’ (7).

Schmelz's methods are far reaching, and Sonic Overload is as much an intellectual history as it is a cultural one. His cast of characters features two stars: Alfred Schnittke (1934–98), born to a Jewish-German family in Russia, represents one side of polystylism; Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937), born in Ukraine, forms the other. The book unfolds as part biography, part critique, and Schmelz makes great use of oral histories and interviews to flesh out the story. His approach to archival materials mirrors that in his first book, Such Freedom, If Only Musical,Footnote ³ insofar as he sets them into dialogue with interviews and published material rather than drawing on them as his primary source of information. Crucially, he never takes any source – be it archival, published, or a composer's own words – at face value. His panoply of sources allows him to highlight inconsistencies, confirm theories, and paint a complex, multifaceted picture of life under late socialism.

After an introduction that outlines the stakes of his project, Schmelz's book unfolds over three parts that trace the rise, popularity, and fall of polystylism over the last decades of the Soviet Union. Taken together, the ten persuasive chapters tell a story of the diversity, hierarchies, ideologies, and divergences of the socialist musical apparatus while simultaneously integrating Soviet music into broader global discourses in the 1970s. The first part, ‘Origins’, comprises three chapters that position polystylism within the broader musical landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter One maps the cultural networks around both official and unofficial art, music, and film in the Soviet Union. Tracing polystylism's origins back to Eisenstein's film experiments with collage and montage in the 1920s and 1930s, Schmelz lays the foundations for the later musical experiments during the Thaw: a period of relaxed cultural restrictions after the death of Stalin. He does so by setting the cultural figures of the first two Soviet decades – Eisenstein, Boris Asafyev, Viktor Shklovsky, and Mikhail Bakhtin – into dialogue with Schnittke's own writings and musings on polystylism. While these early writers linked montage and collage with new forms of art, Schnittke drew more deeply on his own personal experiences and personal identity – though, ever the puzzling interviewee, he would sometimes either walk back or deny some of his claims later on. Crucially, Schmelz contrasts Schnittke with another Soviet composer, namely Arvo Pärt, whose earliest polystylist compositions, while exciting and influential, were far more short-lived and under conceptualized than Schnittke's.

Chapter Two turns from genealogy to ideology, as Schmelz unpacks Schnittke's tenuous relationship with abstraction and narrative, his exposure to popular music, and his discourses on polystylism. For this chapter, Schmelz's primary text is Schnittke's polystylistic manifesto, ‘Polystylistic Tendencies of Modern Music’, which the composer presented at a UNESCO conference on music and tradition held in Moscow in 1971. Writing while completing his First Symphony, Schnittke fleshed out an ideology of polystylism that connected it with pluralism, distinguished it from collage, outlined the principles of quotation, and advocated for its vitality. Schmelz takes a paleographical deep dive into this speech by looking at its manifestation across a variety of sources: notes from the Ivashkin-Schnittke Archive at Goldsmiths, University of London, a Soviet publication of conference proceedings, and archival holdings on the UNESCO conference at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). Along the way, he intersperses analysis of Schnittke's music, focusing especially on the composer's Violin Sonata No. 2.

In the third chapter, Schmelz sets his two main characters into dialogue, as he compares Schnittke's compositions with Silvestrov's through a study of biography and music. Based in Kyiv for most of his career, Silvestrov diverged from Schnittke's approach to polystylism in a few crucial ways – although Silvestrov was somewhat cagey about his ideological underpinnings, preferring to express his ideas only through letters to friends rather than Schnittke's bold declaration at the UNESCO conference. If Schnittke's polystylism was characterized by conflict, at least by his contemporaries, then Silvestrov's was marked by unity and a balance of styles. Silvestrov, too, was far more wary of quotations and allusions to other compositions in his work than Schnittke. Like Schnittke, however, Silvestrov used polystylism as a means for exploring ideas of ‘self’ and ‘other’, and both men participated in what Schmelz calls ‘the polystylism of contemporary daily life’ under late socialism (84).

Part Two, ‘Embracing Polystylism’, shows the impact of Silvestrov's and Schnittke's compositions on the Soviet musical scene across a wide array of audiences. Throughout the three chapters that comprise this part, Schmelz treats many musical genres – ranging from the most abstract to the most mainstream – with care and seriousness. Chapter Four discusses ‘kitsch’, a concept that, Schmelz cheekily suggests, ‘we all know… when we see it and hear it. Or we think we do’ (91). Crucial to both Silvestrov's and Schnittke's polystylism was their relationship with popular music: the catchy tunes of Mikhail Tariverdiyev, bard songs of Bulat Okudzhava, and performance whims of singer Alla Pugacheva. Present, too, are influences from abroad, such as the guitar squeals of Jimi Hendrix and prog-rock of King Crimson. Schmelz's blending of so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres paves the way for two particularly intriguing historiographical paths. First, it enables him to explore critical reception of this music both within and without the Soviet Union – reactions that were, he points out, often more revealing of the critic than the composer. And second, and perhaps most refreshingly in the Soviet context, Schmelz proves that the aesthetics of kitsch – of the cheesy, pop croonings sponsored by the Soviet music industry – merits serious, good faith analysis.

Chapters Five and Six further advance Schmelz's study of polystylism's many primary sources, and we learn that Silvestrov and Schnittke, once again, differed in both their approaches and apprehensions around popular music. Chapter Five takes a particularly entertaining look at Soviet aerobics music – think Jane Fonda's workout tapes meets Ivan Drago – and compositional ethics. Meanwhile, Chapter Six pits Schnittke and Silvestrov against a younger generation of composers, for whom ‘polystylism directly responded to … lived musical experiences’ (197). The generational divide, Schmelz argues, ultimately kickstarted the decline of polystylism in both composers’ outputs. ‘Born of Schnittke and Silvestrov's generation’, he writes, ‘polystylism was eventually co-opted by the next’ (210). Reading this part of Sonic Overload, one is struck by how supremely human – that is to say, flawed, malleable, whimsical, and, ultimately, ordinary – these composers were. Here, too, lies one of the book's strengths: although ostensibly a blend of biography and musical analysis, Schmelz resists the urge to valorize or essentialize any of his main characters. The result instead is a sort of microhistorical study of the multivalent lives Schnittke, Silvestrov, or, indeed, any of us, live.

The final four chapters comprise Part Three, ‘Rejecting Polystylism’, which maps the decline of polystylism's significance in Soviet music and brings us to the fall of the Soviet Union – and beyond. Chapter Seven, based in part on Schmelz's earlier work on Silvestrov and eschatology, explores the uneasiness and displeasures of the Soviet 1980s in music.Footnote ⁴ Chapter Eight, likewise, showcases a shift in Schnittke's compositional practices from polystylism to the grotesque, and follows the composer, plagued by health problems, as he emigrates to Germany in 1990. Regardless of his intent, Schnittke's biography was, in many ways, grafted onto his music by listeners at this time. ‘In Schnittke's late compositions’, Schmelz explains, ‘listeners missed the multiplicity, hearing only loss and trauma. As a result, the sense of lateness already implicit in polystylism – consistently perceived in the West as a type of post music during the period of post culture – became magnified. Richness grew to excess and ultimately collapsed, exhausted’ (259). Entangled in this critical reception, Schmelz describes, were ideas of individuality, poignancy, and sincerity.

Chapters Nine and Ten bring us to perestroika and glasnost, initiatives started under Mikhail Gorbachev that increased transparency and openness in the late 1980s, and their impacts on polystylism. Here, too, the connections between everyday life and art are deceptively obvious: was not polystylism the sonic equivalent of the flood of individuality and expression at the twilight of the Soviet Union? Schnittke's music presents us with a paradox, as Schmelz writes: ‘[Schnittke] expressed enthusiastic support for a diversity of viewpoints … just at the moment when diversity, if not enthusiasm and hope, began to fade from his own music’ (297). It is tempting to make the parallel between reality and aesthetics, to view polystylism ‘as a surrogate for actual multivoicedness’ (297), but the true story, of course, is far more complicated. ‘Initiated at a point when Soviet citizens were severely restricted in many of their choices in terms of consumption’, Schmelz explains, ‘polystylism became a way to counteract material lack by grasping at abundance in an intellectual sense – it was a way of embracing the idea of a surfeit of ideas. When more choices emerged, both intellectually and materially, polystylism began to feel old fashioned, or even unnecessary’ (344). At its core, Schmelz explains in a short conclusion, polystylism was a utopian project that sought to ‘incorporat[e] into a single creation multiple musics past and present as well as the tensions between high – singing – and low – sex – that pervaded polystylism from its inception’ (353). Like all utopian projects, however, polystylism ‘inevitably came adrift’ (353). By rendering, as he does at the book's outset, polystylism as a dynamic process, Schmelz also allows for its progression into nothing – into ‘shadow sounds and unending endings’ (353). Polystylism encompassed the past, present, and future – better described as a goal, an ideal, a process than any set style. In this way, it mirrors the Soviet Union itself. The communist project, never fully realized, was an aspirational process, too.

As I write this review in spring 2022, I find it hard not to hear the echoes of Russia's brutal war in Ukraine. Much of the scholarship on Soviet music – including, I regret to say, my own – is actually scholarship on Soviet Russian music. By placing Schnittke, a Russian of German heritage, and Silvestrov, a Ukrainian who studied in Moscow, on equal footing, Schmelz has compellingly blown apart ideas of Russian superiority, even if only implicit, within the Soviet musical apparatus. Schmelz's nuanced take on these two men offers a refreshing riposte to stories that privilege the metropoles of Moscow and Leningrad. At the same time, however, Schmelz focuses almost entirely on the European part of the Soviet Union – Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics – and skips over the Central Asian nations of the Soviet empire. What might the polystylism of composers such as Giya Kancheli, from Georgia, or Tigran Mansurian, from Armenia, offer this story? How might their experiences – as both composers and Soviet citizens – augment our understanding of late socialist subjectivity? This is less a critique than it is an opportunity. Schmelz's story of polystylism should provoke future scholars to further expand what we mean when we say ‘Soviet music’. One can only hope that they take up Schmelz's challenge – and soon.