"Working Class Music" in the Discourse of Early Soviet Sociology of Art

This research has a survey-analytical nature and uses the theoretical method of comparative historical analysis of texts. Through the selection and analysis of key works and archival documents, the conceptual basis for the sociology of music of the USSR during the 1920s is determined to form an academic project, developed in the frame of the record of state cultural policy. The transformation of the institutionalized academic domain music in a decade is described. The tasks involved in the sociology of music with the aim of state order for the formation of a proletarian music culture are reconstructed. It has been established that music was delegated the function of structuring daily occurrences, motivating labor activity, promoting cultural education, and supporting an aspiration to solidary, collective action based on the emotional acceptance of the ideological postulates of the time. The research also focuses on the transformation of the crucial characteristics of the central ideologists of the "proletarian culture" from the utopian romanticism directed toward the achievement of class solidarity to the distortion of basic humanistic ideals in favor of fixing the developed hierarchies of power.