Program

ACLS Project Development Grants, 2024

Project

A Forbidden Fruit? Sacred Music in the Soviet Union before Its Fall

Department

Humanities

Abstract

“A Forbidden Fruit?” is the first musically centered cultural history of the 1960s-1980s spiritual renaissance in the Soviet Union. Drawing upon oral history, memoirs, periodicals, and musical analysis derived from state and personal archives located in Armenia, Estonia, Russia and Ukraine, this project examines the composition and performance histories of over 20 musical works inspired by Western classical sacred music and by local religious traditions. While describing and categorizing the circumstances that made performance of sacred music desirable and possible in atheist state, this project illuminates Russia’s imperial practice of enforcing provincial status on its colonized republics, and inequality of composers’ experiences across the USSR that resulted from their nationalities and religious confessions.

Program

ACLS Project Development Grants, 2025

Project

A Forbidden Fruit? Sacred music in the Soviet Union Before its Fall

Department

Humanities

Abstract

“A Forbidden Fruit?” is the first musically centered cultural history of the 1960s-1980s religious revival in the Soviet Union. Drawing upon documents from archives in Armenia, Estonia, Russia, and Ukraine, oral history, memoirs, periodicals, and music analysis, it examines over twenty musical works inspired by Western classical sacred music and local religious traditions. While describing the circumstances that made performing sacred music possible in an atheist state, this project illuminates Russia’s imperial pressure on its colonized republics and the ethnic and religious discrimination of composers across the USSR. The final chapter describes music in newly independent states, as the performance of sacred works by local composers surged after the collapse of the Soviet empire.