CERES Brown Bag Talk

Music Criticism, Ideological Critique: Olin Downes and the Soviets

Kevin Bartig, Professor of Music History, College of Music
Michigan State University

In 1929 and 1932 the long-serving and influential New York Times music critic Olin Downes toured the Soviet Union as a guest of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS). During these visits he attended performances, evaluated new compositions, and consulted with cultural bureaucrats on institutional structures. As the first prominent US music critic to visit the Soviet Union since the Revolution, his experiences garnered significant attention and had an enduring impact on his subsequent criticism. Yet Downes was a tendentious and selective reporter, one well aware that his first-hand observer status bestowed a transnationally constructed authority. In reconstructing these tours and their aftermath, I show that Downes's impressions of Soviet musical culture were intertwined with his desire to foster a middlebrow, national art music at home. Ultimately, Downes's interest in the Soviet Union was brief, but his experience there shaped his nationalist agenda for American music for years to come.

 

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