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The article analyzes the television music program "The Voice." Particular focus is given to the popular music covers; bad commercial aims; and status as a reality competition program on network television. The author discusses how the popular music cultures are constructed and circulate within music industries and in the mass media. It also provide a historical view of the program.

Bearing in mind the position occupied by Yugoslav postwar music, in this article I review certain compositional strategies implemented by Predrag Milošević in his piece A Peasant's Interview with a Foreign Journalist, by means of which this modernist composer stepped into the field of socialist realism. I will analyze the score in order to identify the most significant compositional-technical strategies used by the composer. Further analyses will encompass an interpretation of the piece with respect to the theories of socialist realism, while a separate segment of this article will be dedicated to some aspects of the relationship between this composition and writings published at the time of its creation. I will then use these analyses to emphasize some points in Milošević's work where one can observe connections with the theoretical output of his contemporaries, as well as with recent writings that focus on understanding the place of socialist realism in Serbian music history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the conceptual constructs of ‘public’ and ‘counterpublic’ to examine the collective singing of ‘Red Songs’, a state-approved, ideology-laden popular culture, in the city of Guangzhou, China. It approaches these two concepts from actions, practices and shared meanings which render the public/counterpublic visible and concrete. In Guangzhou, the interplays between hegemonic ideas expressed in the red songs and ordinary singers’ agency of re-interpreting and re-reading have shaped the fluidity and complexity of the cultural meanings and political discourses in which this grassroots public dwells. Singers do not simply re-assert the post-reform party-state’s political legitimacy by expressing political allegiance via red songs, but also creatively reconstruct and re-appropriate the meanings woven into red songs to critically reflect upon the social, cultural and moral transformations, as well as new cultural and ethical zeitgeists in the post-reform context. In the meantime, red song singing is also appropriated by New Leftist activists for cultivating new counterpublic political potentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian and Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev was one of the greatest musicians of the XXth century. The present paper aims to investigate the ways in which Communist ideology influenced his the musical language, to analyse the complex interactions between Prokofiev's musical creation and ideology. I will take into consideration especially the context of the Soviet music from 1917 to 1953, Sergei Prokofiev's position in the Soviet world, and the typology of the music composed by Prokofiev. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Cage's music was little known in the Soviet Union until the late 1960s, as official communist cultural policy would not allow his music to be performed or researched. This makes it all the more surprising that the only visit by the composer to Soviet Russia had become possible by 1988. The Soviet officials were planning a large festival of contemporary music in St Petersburg in 1988. With the changing climate Tikhon Khrennikov, the secretary of the All Soviet Union League of Composers, appointed by Stalin in 1948, was keen to be seen as a progressive at the time of Gorbachev's perestroika, and he approved the invitation for Cage to be present at the performances of his works in St Petersburg. This article includes interviews with the composer conducted by the author in 1987–1989, as well as recollections of the meetings with Cage at his home in New York City and in Moscow. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As Katerina Clark argues here, Dmitrii Shostakovich's turn to the quartet form in 1938 and his account of his First Quartet should be seen in the context of ongoing debates from that time about how the mandate for socialist realism might apply in music, a problematical question since music is the least representational of the arts. In making this point, Clark does not analyze the quartets themselves, but instead probes Shostakovich's statements about them, moving out from that narrow focus to place his remarks in the context of overall developments and controversies in Soviet culture of that decade—more specifically in the context of efforts aimed at liberalizing socialist realist practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]