Grand Canyon Times

Arizona State University (ASU) professor of Musicology Peter Schmelz has received the 2022 American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for his recent book on Soviet music.

Schmelz, an expert in 20th- and 21st-century music in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, has garnered three awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. He has now received the American Musicological Society’s 2022 Otto Kinkeldey Award for his book titled “Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR."

“The award from the American Musicological Society was especially gratifying because it is an award from other musicologists,” Schmelz said in a recent ASU news release.

The Otto Kinkeldey Award is given annually to recognize a “musicological book of exceptional merit that provides a genuinely fresh perspective on the music of Schnittke and Silvestrov as well as its broader significance," the release added. “The book brings the music, the era and its attendant ambivalences and confusions alive."

Schmelz, a professor of musicology in ASU's School of Music, Dance and Theatre, explained that he got the inspiration for "Sonic Overload" from writing his first book, “Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music During the Thaw,” which discussed the sociocultural meanings of avant-garde music composed in the Soviet Union during the 1960s; the release said. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Schmelz completed the "Sonic Overload" project with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“I had long been interested in Schnittke’s music, but I had grown increasingly captivated by Silvestrov’s,” Schmelz said in the release. “As I started kicking around ideas for the second book, I realized that polystylism would be an ideal way to tie the two composers to one another and to larger cultural currents in the Soviet Union.”

Schmelz also noted that it was important to recognize the contributions of the composers, especially for the work they did at the height of the Cold War.

“I hope that readers come away from 'Sonic Overload’ with a better sense of its direct topics — the mature polystylistic music of Alfred Schnittke and Valentin Silvestrov and its importance within the late USSR,” he said. “I also hope that I demonstrate their connections to larger global trends related to collage, quotation and information overload. They are two crucial composers from the late 20th century who tell us about what it meant to be alive during this period of great upheaval and technological change and how identities were (and are) negotiated by filtering the informational torrent of the constant, unrelenting exposure to new sounds, images and ideas. And how music can act as a consistent yet transitory personal archive and shield against that torrent.”

The research and writing took more than 10 years for Schmelz to complete, after doing archival research in mid-2010 at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, thanks to a grant from that archive; the release said. He completed the manuscript in early 2020.

Schmelz commented that the award added to the gratification after years of work.    

“It suggests that 'Sonic Overload’ has had resonance within the field beyond readers in its immediate subject areas, which was always my hope," he said in the release. "I think that the example of polystylism and information overabundance in the late USSR has much to tell us about our own lives and times, as we continue to grapple with an ever-increasing amount of sounds, ideas and images.”