The editorials in Pravda (“Muddle Instead of Music” and “Balletic Falsity”) provoked the greatest animation among musicians of all tendencies and specialties. Meetings organized by the Moscow and Leningrad composers' unions devoted to discussion of these articles took place in overflowing halls. Discussion of the Pravda articles was especially lively among the composers and music scholars of Moscow and Leningrad but also in a number of musical-opera theaters (Moscow's Bolshoi Theater and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater, Leningrad's Maly Opera Theater and Leningrad's Bolshoi Theater).

In the first few days of the discussion, most of the speeches suffered from abstractness and were declarative in nature, but at subsequent meetings the discussion acquired a more concrete nature. The overwhelming majority of speakers recognized without qualification the correctness and timeliness of Pravda's criticism. However, individual participants in the discussion in Moscow and Leningrad attempted to gloss over the significance of the articles in Pravda and to interpret them as an attempt at bad administering in the arts, and so forth.

Direct statements of disagreement with the Pravda articles were made by Sollertinsky and Rabinovich at meetings of Leningrad critics and music scholars. At a meeting on 5 February 1936, a music scholar (non-Party) stated that he disagreed with Pravda in its assessment of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, which he considers a brilliant work. At the same meeting, Sollertinsky stated that he intended to quit the music front. The statements by Sollertinsky and Rabinovich were condemned by the meeting. The same thoughts, but in more tempered form, were expressed by the Leningrad pianist and critic Druskin, who spoke out sharply against Dzerzhinsky's opera Quiet Flows the Don. All three—Sollertinsky, Rabinovich, and Druskin—are radical formalists wholly oriented toward Western European musical modernism. Their speeches evoked a sharp rebuff on the part of those gathered and were condemned in a resolution of the plenum of Leningrad critics and music scholars dated 7 February 1936.

A tight group of former ideologues and leaders of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAMP [sic]),

Recte RAPM throughout the document.

including the f[ormer] general secretary of this association L. Lebedinsky, the critic and music scholar Shteinpress, and the historian Keldysh, spoke at the discussion of Moscow composers.

In his speech, L. Lebedinsky denied that Soviet music had any accomplishments to its credit and made an attempt to focus Soviet composers exclusively toward the art of the deceased composer Davidenko and his tendency (RAMP), which was condemned by a decision of 23 April 1932. Lebedinsky asserted that “some of Davidenko's magisterial works are the very Soviet classics that will live for ages.”

Among the positive speeches, we should note the speech of Prof. Neigauz, a very prominent Soviet pianist.

Neigauz was close to Pasternak.

Prof. Neigauz subjected the conceit and arrogance that is still widespread on the music front to harsh criticism and stated that Shostakovich should have been grateful to Pravda for rousing him to new life and pointing out the correct paths of creativity. Protesting Formalism in musical creativity, Neigauz considers the articles in Pravda a “call to great art.” “The appearance of these articles,” says Neigauz, “despite their harshness, despite the fact that they have struck painfully at our entire ‘musical estate,’ is a joyous, life-affirming phenomenon.”

At the composers' discussion, the major theoreticians of Formalism in music kept their counsel. The desire to keep their counsel is characteristic for quite a number of composers and music scholars from both Moscow and Leningrad. The acknowledged head of the so-called “Moscow school” of Formalists, the major composer of symphonies N. Ia. Miaskovsky, former leader of the Association of Contemporary Music (ASM), which has joined an international association of bourgeois modernist-musicians, he did not even show up for the discussion, which lasted for three days. In the same fashion his students, the composer Shebalin and others, did not speak. In Leningrad, the most visible of the theoreticians of Formalism, the music scholar B. V. Asafiev (Igor Glebov), author of On Stravinsky [Kniga o Stravinskom], Musical Form as Process [Muzikal'naia forma kak protsess], and so forth, is getting off with silence. Characteristic is the unique artistic “double-dealing” of Asafiev, who propagates Formalism, extols the trans-sense music of the German Expressionists Schoenberg and Alban Berg, but himself, as a composer, composes music that is relatively accessible. It must, however, be borne in mind that Shostakovich was reared specifically on the theoretical compositions of Asafiev, who is the author of a number of complimentary articles about Shostakovich (including about Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District).

There is undoubtedly a conspiracy of silence among the Formalists of various tendencies, even those who have been enemies in the past. By way of example I can point to the Leningrad professor Shcherbachev, who is Shostakovich's artistic opponent but who in the hallways spoke out in his defense. Also Shostakovich's opponent is Miaskovsky, who in private conversations even before the appearance of the Pravda articles harshly condemned the ballet Limpid Stream. The day after Pravda's statement, Miaskovsky occupied a position of “friendly neutrality” toward Shostakovich. The conduct of all these individuals is nothing but a covert form of sabotage of the Party's instructions. In essence it stems from the principle of noninterference by the Party in the internal affairs of art.

In the course of the entire discussion, musicians' corporate, workshop biases, which hinder the development of straightforward Bolshevik self-criticism, still had a powerful effect. This circumstance was commented on by a number of speakers, and on the last day of the discussion the criticism took on a more direct and specific nature.

In no event should the discussion of the Pravda articles be considered exhausted at this point. The most prominent formalists have yet to disarm. Many artistic issues of Socialist Realism in music have only been posed and await resolution. The TsK VKP(b) Department of Cultural-Educational Work has proposed that the organizations of musicians and composers hold further discussion of all these issues on the basis of an analysis of specific works of musical art.