Music: People's Composers

As every conscientious Soviet composer knows (or at least has been clearly told), music stood still 50 years ago. Even the best of them—Dmitry Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian and the late Sergei Prokofiev—learned that lesson. In 1948, the Central Committee of the Communist Party accused them of representing "the formalist perversions and anti-democratic tendencies in music. The music savors of the present-day modernist bourgeois music of Europe and America, which reflects the decay of bourgeois culture." Last week the Central Committee took another look at the nation's three ranking modern composers and decided that none of them had really meant to be too modern, after all.

The earlier judgment, said the committee, was the fault of Stalin, who was listening to such notorious tin ears as Beria, Molotov and Malenkov. Presumably, the "socialist realism" of Shostakovich's, Khachaturian's and Prokofiev's more recent works also helped clear the composers' names. But for the younger generation of Soviet composers, nothing had changed. In a burst of gratitude to the party, Shostakovich, 51, and Khachaturian, 55, promptly approved a decree criticizing "unhealthy trends" in recent musical works. To disassociate himself from the dangerous moderns, third-rate Composer Vano Muradeli, 50, chimed in with an expression of gratitude for the Central Committee's "justified criticism" of his opera, The Great Fellowship, added that he had edited all the formalist perversion right out of the score.