Vladimir Dukelsky. In Defence of Forgotten Music
Abstract
Research materials include historical documents and publications, memories and the Society’s discography. The article outlines external and personal reasons which encouraged Dukelsky to establish the Society. The article investigates the repertoire policy of the Society and spotlights those who were actively engaged with the Society and its media promotion.
The analysis of available historical records allowed to reconstruct the stages of the Society’s life cycle and to suggest a hypothesis on why there was a long break in its publishing activity. The year 1958 and the establishment of the namesake record label affiliated with Contemporary Records became the turning point for the Society. Conceptually, the Society for Forgotten Music functioned in line with the early 1930s project initiated by Dukelsky—the Composers’ Protective Society. The two societies, however, used fundamentally different organisational approaches. Unlike the Composers’ Protective Society that staked on wide publicity without due financial support and had certain social and political aspects on its agenda, the Society for Forgotten Music was, in fact, a series of educational historical concerts. In other words, the latter was more narrow in scope and limited its activity to the domain of art. Dukelsky made serious preliminary research before the concert programme was compiled. As a result, the Society for Forgotten Music developed into a resilient project which gained support from high-profile critics and facilitated the performance and first-time recordings of music by such composers as G.B. Viotti, J.L. Dussek, G. Lekeu, and others.
Keywords: Vladimir Dukelsky, Vernon Duke, Society for Forgotten Music, musical life of the USA, 20th century musical societies
For citation: Maksimova A. S. Vladimir Dukelsky. In Defence of Forgotten Music [Electronic source]. In: Sovremennye problemy muzykoznaniya / Contemporary Musicology, 2020, no. 4, pp. 90–103. (In Russ.) DOI: 10.56620/2587-9731-2020-4-090-103
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.56620/2587-9731-2020-4-090-103
Copyright (c) 2020 Antonina S. Maksimova
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/