28-29 May 2025, Victoria Rooms, Department of Music, University of Bristol

Convenors: Pauline Fairclough and Mariia Romanets

Invited speakers including:

Leah Batstone (University of Vienna)

“A Ukrainian Choir and the ‘Russian Schoenberg’: Placing the music of Mykola Roslavets”

Gabrielle Cornish (University of Wisconsin)

“Remapping the Soviet Empire Through Song”

Fiona Jackson (University of Bristol)

“Incidental or consequential? Collaboration between composers and avant-garde theatre directors in the late Soviet period and its significance for British-Soviet cultural relations.”

Kevin C. Karnes (Emory University)

“The KGB, the DAAD, and (Soviet) Latvian Artists in (West) Berlin, 1977-1992”

Elaine Kelly (Reid School of Music, Edinburgh University)

“The Third World in East German Popular Music”

Jānis Kudiņš. (Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music)

“The Uniqueness of Postmodernist Localization Before the Communist Crash: Views from Outside on the Soviet Latvian Music (International) Festival in 1986”

Ivana Medic (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts)

“Chasing the avant-garde: Serbian composers in specialization across Europe during the 1960s and 1970s”

Bogumila Mika (University of Silesia in Katowice)

‘Vibrating strings of dark times’. Polish art music of the long 1980s in the context of social and political events.”

Mariia Romanets (University of Bristol)

“Ukrainian composers in Post-WWII Displaced Person Camps in Germany: Precarity, discrimination and national politics”

Rebecca Mitchell (Middlebury College)

“Negotiating Orthodox Sound in a Soviet World: Chant Revival and Georgian National Identity, 1917-2024”.

Peter J. Schmelz (Johns Hopkins)

“‘Sorceress at the Microphone’: Sainkho Namchylak’s Experimental Collaborations”

Nana Sharikadze (V. Sarajdishvili Tbilisi Conservatoire)

“Notes for future historians: Georgian music and politics, a personal assessment”

Maia Sigua (V. Sarajdishvili Tbilisi Conservatoire)

“Two Decades of Georgian Art and Culture in Moscow – a Tribute to…”

Rūta Stanevičiūtė (Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre)

“Darmstadt Goes East: Resemantization Versus Sovietization of the Post-War Avant-garde Impulses in Soviet Lithuanian Music”

Iryna Tukova (National Music Academy of Ukraine)

“Composer Agency in Soviet Ukraine: Borys Liatoshynsky’s Efforts to Have His Fourth Symphony Heard”

Zbigniew Wojnowski (Oxford University)

“The travels of Anna German: traversing Cold War boundaries from Uzbekistan to Australia”

Ana Diaconu (National University of Music, Bucharest)

“Composer Mikhail Andricu in correspondence with the French cultural space – a case of resistance under communism through communication”

For full details of the conference, click here.