Music Behind The Iron Curtain

Complements the ongoing revival of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's music and explains its unique blend of Polish and Soviet Russian influences.

A collection of essays by various authors.

This volume examines the transnational character of popular music since the Cold War era to the present. Bringing together the cross-disciplinary research of native scholars, Eastern European Popular Music in a Transnational Context expands our understanding of the movement of physical music, musicians and genres through the Iron Curtain and within the region of Eastern Europe. With case studies ranging from Goran Bregović, Czesław Niemen, the reception of Leonard Cohen in Poland, the Estonian punk scene to the Intervision Song Contest, the book discusses how the production and reception of popular music in the region has always been heavily influenced by international trends and how varied strategies allowed performers and fans to acquire cosmopolitan identities. Cross-disciplinary in nature, the investigations are informed by political, social and cultural history, reception studies, sociology and marketing and are largely based on archival research and interviews.

Animation Behind the Iron Curtain is a journey of discovery into the world of Soviet era animation from Eastern Bloc countries. From Jerzy Kucia's brutally exquisite Reflections in Poland to the sci-fi adventure of Ott in Space by Estonian puppet master Elbert Tuganov to the endearing Gopo's little man by Ion Popescu-Gopo in Romania, this excursion into Soviet era animation brings to light magnificent art, ruminations on the human condition, and celebrations of innocence and joy. As art reveals the spirit of the times, animation art of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, funded by the Soviet states, allowed artists to create works illuminating to their experiences, hopes, and fears. The political ideology of the time ironically supported these artists while simultaneously suppressing more direct critiques of Soviet life. Politics shaped the world of these artists who then fashioned their realities into amazing works of animation. Their art is integral to the circumstances in which they lived, which is why this book combines the unlikely combination of world politics and animated cartoons. The phenomenal animated films shared in this book offer a glimpse into the culture and hearts of Soviet citizens who grew up with characters as familiar and beloved to them as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny are to Americans. This book lays out the basic political dynamics of the Cold War and how those political tensions affected the animation industry in both the US and in the Eastern Bloc. And, for animation novices and enthusiasts alike, Animation Behind the Iron Curtain also offers breakout sections to explain many of the techniques and aesthetic considerations that go into this fascinating art form. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the Cold War era and really cool animated films!

An overview of women's work in classical and popular music since 1900 as performers, composers, educators and music technologists.

Music Divided explores how political pressures affected musical life on both sides of the iron curtain during the early years of the cold war. In this groundbreaking study, Danielle Fosler-Lussier illuminates the pervasive political anxieties of the day through particular attention to artistic, music-theoretical, and propagandistic responses to the music of Hungary’s most renowned twentieth-century composer, Béla Bartók. She shows how a tense period of political transition plagued Bartók’s music and imperiled those who took a stand on its aesthetic value in the emerging socialist state. Her fascinating investigation of Bartók’s reception outside of Hungary demonstrates that Western composers, too, formulated their ideas about musical style under the influence of ever-escalating cold war tensions. Music Divided surveys Bartók’s role in provoking negative reactions to "accessible" music from Pierre Boulez, Hermann Scherchen, and Theodor Adorno. It considers Bartók’s influence on the youthful compositions and thinking of Bruno Maderna and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and it outlines Bartók’s legacy in the music of the Hungarian composers András Mihály, Ferenc Szabó, and Endre Szervánszky. These details reveal the impact of local and international politics on the selection of music for concert and radio programs, on composers’ choices about musical style, on government radio propaganda about music, on the development of socialist realism, and on the use of modernism as an instrument of political action.

'Epic... Wilson writes captivatingly with humour...anyone with an interest in eastern European sport will be consulting this book for years to come' FINANCIAL TIMES 'This fascinating and perceptive travelogue includes a fine collection of anecdotes too colourful for fiction' SUNDAY TIMES 'A blissful book, lovingly and stylishly written' DAILY TELEGRAPH From the war-ravaged streets of Sarajevo, where turning up for training involved dodging snipers' bullets, to the crumbling splendour of Budapest's Bozsik Stadium, where the likes of Puskás and Kocsis masterminded the fall of England, the landscape of Eastern Europe has changed immeasurably since the fall of communism. Jonathan Wilson has travelled extensively behind the old Iron Curtain, viewing life beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall through the lens of football. Where once the state-controlled teams of the Eastern bloc passed their way with crisp efficiency - a sort of communist version of total football - to considerable success on the European and international stages, today the beautiful game in the East has been opened up to the free market, and throughout the region a sense of chaos pervades. The threat of totalitarian interference no longer remains; but in its place mafia control is generally accompanied with a crippling lack of funds. In BEHIND THE CURTAIN Jonathan Wilson goes in search of the spirit of Hungary's 'Golden Squad' of the early fifties, charts the disintegration of the footballing superpower that was the former Yugoslavia, follows a sorry tale of corruption, mismanagement and Armenian cognac through the Caucasuses, reopens the case of Russia's greatest footballer, Eduard Streltsov, and talks to Jan Tomaszewski about an autumn night at Wembley in 1973...

In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.