The History of one Song: Concerning Study of the Musical Heritage of the Soviet Period

Abstract

The article is devoted to David Tukhmanov’s song Victory Day set to Vladimir Kharitonov’s text, which became a symbol of the momentous victory of 1945 in the Great Patriotic War. Reconstructing the history of the development of this song, the author examines the mechanisms of the formation of the genre of the mass song. The article raises the problem range of applying various scholarly approaches for studying the musical heritage of the Soviet period. Examination is made of the sociocultural context of creating the song, as well as the performance aspect of its existence in the political and ideological discourse which formed in the 1960s and 1970s in Soviet society. Analysis is applied to the composition’s musical and poetic text and the peculiarities of the genre-related features. The leading tendencies of the musical text are traced out: the interpenetration of the genres in the form of synthesis of the march and the tango; a rejection of the established canons of the mass song. It is highlighted that the poetic text corresponds to the conceptions of the composer and the poet: to create an artistic image which simultaneously combines in itself social cohesion and humanism in correspondence with the demand of society’s movement towards civil consolidation. In his conclusions arrived upon in his article the author discloses the nature of the mechanism of the birth of the mass song and the means of its functioning and also outlines the facts which shows the topicality of the given type of mass culture at its present stage.

Keywords: mass song, musical culture of Russia, David Tukhmanov’s song Victory Day, anthem, march, tango