Podiumsdiskussion »The Tower of Babel: Vermessung einer postsowjetischen Landkarte Neuer Musik«

Surveying a Post-Soviet Map of New Music

The first part of the panel discussions, held in German, highlights the historical context of the project »The Tower of Babel«. Since the late 1970s, the music scene in many Soviet republics, from Georgia to Ukraine, from Belarus to the Baltic countries, formed an avant-garde, became central to the struggle for independence and at the same time the cradle of a national identity. What did the creation of a cultural identity through music mean twenty or thirty years ago, and what does it mean today? How important is this cultural identity for the composers involved in the project »The Tower of Babel«?

The second part, held in English, deals with the perspective of a postcolonial future of cultural networks: the composition of the Soviet cultural scene can be described as homophony, with Russian culture leading the way and the national cultures of the Soviet republics acting as accompaniment. In many republics of the former USSR, academic music served as an instrument of artistic protest against the colonial policies of the center's cultural authorities. These processes also influenced the development of music after the collapse of the USSR and shaped the work of a new generation of composer:s that emerged at the beginning of the 21st century. The symposium »The Great Russian Musical Tradition and What Should We Do with It?« organized by the composers' group Structural Resistance (StRes) in St. Petersburg in the early 2000s addressed these tensions between the past and the future. This contrast has become particularly evident in recent years due to the neo-imperial turn in Russian culture. Is it possible to design a postcolonial future for the music scene of the former USSR? Can we promote a dialogue between representatives of different national schools of composers and thus overcome the challenges of past and present socio-cultural cataclysms?

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