Bakhtin and the Music of Dmitri Shostakovich

The present study examines various ways in which Bakhtin’s literary thought might be applied to Shostakovich’s music, addressing a range of established music-theoretical methodologies located within the broader context of Bakhtinian narrative theory.

The analytical approach is consequently multifaceted and engages multiple musical parameters, including pitch organization, rhythm, form, topical content, and emotional valence. In particular, five key terms deriving from Bakhtin’s critical writings serve as the template for codifying Shostakovich’s approach to musical narration: carnival, chronotope, heteroglossia, polyphony, and novelization. Several songs are presented as preliminary case studies that together provide a framework for the interpretation of individual scenes from The Nose and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, as well as aspects of the purely instrumental symphonic repertoire. Issues such as nonclosure are deemed neither problematic nor requiring any extrinsic accounting and are instead taken to be wholly Bakhtinian in both conception and practice. Nor does the methodology adopted here seek to disclose any kind of immanent narrative subtext; rather, it argues for modes of musical comprehension shaped in conjunction with Bakhtinian narratological thought.

This book is written for music scholars, primarily in sub-disciplines of Russian music and analysis.