Sonic Overload

<em>Sonic Overload</em> offers a new music-centered cultural history of the late Soviet Union. It focuses on polystylism in music as a response to the information overload swamping listeners in the Soviet Union during its final decades. It traces the ways in which leading composers Alfred Schnittke and Valentin Silvestrov initially embraced popular sources before ultimately rejecting them. Polystylism first responded to the utopian impulses of Soviet ideology with utopian impulses to encompass all musical styles from high to low. But these initial all-embracing aspirations were soon followed by retreats to alternate utopias founded on carefully selecting satisfactory borrowings as familiar hierarchies of culture taste and class reasserted themselves. Looking at polystylism in the late USSR tells us about past and present near and far as it probes the musical roots of the overloaded distracted present.� <p/>Based on archival research oral historical interviews and other overlooked primary materials as well as close listening and thorough examination of scores and recordings <em>Sonic Overload</em> presents a multilayered and comprehensive portrait of late-Soviet polystylism and cultural life and of the music of Silvestrov and Schnittke. <em>Sonic Overload</em> is intended for musicologists and Soviet Russian and Ukrainian specialists in history the arts film and literature as well as readers interested in twentieth- and twenty-first century music; modernism and postmodernism; quotation and collage; the intersections of high and low cultures; and politics and the arts.<br>