Revolutions

[MUSIC PLAYING]Being an artist in Soviet Russia was never easy,and musicians were no exception.As this new Paris exhibition shows,Russian revolutionaries want to harness the power of musicto help create their socialist state.

Yet they were wary of it.Lenin himself said that listening to Beethovenmade him want to stroke the heads of his fellow humansrather than continue the revolutionary struggle.So after a decade of relative freedom,musicians were told to toe the line,throw out avant garde experiments,lose Western influences, and keep it simple.

Music was now for the masses.[MUSIC PLAYING][SPEAKING FRENCH]The late '20s are marked by a growing struggle between thosewho defended sophisticated music,open to Western influences, and thosewho wanted proletarian music that would do away

with all bourgeois and Western influence.They wanted all art, including music, to appeal to ...