UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item Russian Jazz with Bolshevik Trimmings: Modernist Composer-Pianists in Revolutionary Russia(2021) Tumanov Pavlov, Mijail V; Dedova, Larissa; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this project is to highlight the piano compositions of the extraordinarily diverse period in Russian music between the emergence of pre-Revolutionary modernism in the early twentieth century and the publication of the “Muddle Instead of Music” article in 1936, the lack of State intervention in artistic matters up until the early 1930s proved to be a boon for Soviet composers. The title of this project is taken from Karleton Hackett’s review of the 1921 premiere of Prokofiev’s opera The Love for Three Oranges in the Chicago Evening Post. Hackett’s misguided characterization is very telling – The Love for Three Oranges contains neither jazz nor Bolshevik influences. The figure of the composer-pianist played an important role in the development of Russian piano music in the early twentieth century; every one of the composers featured in this project was an accomplished pianist. This project presents but a small fraction of the solo piano repertoire created by the remarkable innovativecomposers of early twentieth-century Russia. A number of these composers failed to remain relevant in the post-1936 political climate and have thus vanished from history books. Yet their works offer a wealth of exciting new repertoire for pianists. In addition to discussions of each work and composer featured, special attention is given to Samuil Feinberg, whose life and works remain in obscurity. An extensive analysis of Feinberg’s Second Piano Sonata, Op. 2, and Berceuse, Op. 19a, is included since available information on Feinberg’s musical language is very scarce. References to thorough analyses and discussion of works covered is provided in the bibliography.Item Failure, Death, and Legacy in the Late Works of Shostakovich(2016) Bermudez, Joshua Adam; Haldey, Olga; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The years 1967-1975 were turbulent for Dmitri Shostakovich, who faced severe health problems and recurring doubts about his life’s work. This led to the development of a preoccupation with mortality during the final years of his life, a subject that was frequently represented in communications with friends, colleagues, and the public. It also became a recurring theme in his compositions written at this time, affecting his choice of texts for vocal works and elements of his musical style. The majority of the compositions from this period are unique in Shostakovich’s œuvre, featuring formal structures that often diverge radically from standard models, a harmonic language less tied to traditional tonality, and a frequent use of dodecaphony. The works of his final four years, though, largely dispense with these elements, pointing to a shift of focus from the tyranny of death to the redeeming quality of artistic legacy.Item Community through Comedy: Cultural Consciousness in the Russian Soviet Anekdot(2013) Smirnova, Michelle Hannah; Kestnbaum, Meyer; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The way by which nationality and citizenship are codified in law or used by political entrepreneurs to mobilize populations is different from how individuals make sense of themselves. Although sharing a particular attribute or physical connection offers some sort of relational identity, it is the product of belonging both to a category and network of individuals in addition to the feeling of belonging which produces a bounded groupness. The Russian Soviet anekdot--a politically subversive joke--provides an intimate view into the perspective of the Russian people living under the Soviet regime. The anekdot serves as a discourse of "cultural consciousness," connecting otherwise atomized people to a homeland, collective culture and memory. Beyond its transgressive properties, politically subversive texts like the anekdot articulate the details of an intimate set of knowledges that insiders "are taught not to know" (Taussig 1999). In this dissertation I look at how the characters and narratives construct (1) the boundaries of "we"--who belongs and who does not by exploring how different groups are "marked" in the anekdoty, (2) how the collectivity negotiates their understanding of leaders, institutions and State propaganda as a means of rejecting or reifying aspects of Soviet power, and (3) what sort of collective memory and identity is conveyed through the expressions of the public secret, nostalgia and/or regret. The anekdot reveals power dynamics at multiple levels: within the family, between ethnic groups and geographical regions, and between people and state. Together these multiple identities and relationships express a form of "cultural consciousness" among Russians uniting this group in a shared identity and network amid the disintegration of the Soviet Union.Item From The Tito-Stalin Split to Yugoslavia's Finnish Connection: Neutralism before Non-Alignment, 1948-1958(2008-09-22) Kullaa, Rinna; Lampe, John R; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)After the Second World War the European continent stood divided between two clearly defined and competing systems of government, economic and social progress. Historians have repeatedly analyzed the formation of the Soviet bloc in the east, the subsequent superpower confrontation, and the resulting rise of Euro-Atlantic interconnection in the west. This dissertation provides a new view of how two borderlands steered clear of absorption into the Soviet bloc. It addresses the foreign relations of Yugoslavia and Finland with the Soviet Union and with each other between 1948 and 1958. Narrated here are their separate yet comparable and, to some extent, coordinated contests with the Soviet Union. Ending the presumed partnership with the Soviet Union, the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 launched Yugoslavia on a search for an alternative foreign policy, one that previously began before the split and helped to provoke it. After the split that search turned to avoiding violent conflict with the Soviet Union while creating alternative international partnerships to help the Communist state to survive in difficult postwar conditions. Finnish-Soviet relations between 1944 and 1948 showed the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry that in order to avoid invasion, it would have to demonstrate a commitment to minimizing security risks to the Soviet Union along its European political border and to not interfering in the Soviet domination of domestic politics elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Following Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Soviet bloc, its party leadership increasingly granted the Foreign Ministry resources needed to establish a wider and more important range of diplomatic relations than those of any East European state. The placement of Tito's closest associate Kardelj as Foreign Minister from August 1948 to January 1953 carried the process forward. It created a Yugoslav Foreign Ministry that produced political analysis independent from that of Tito's own committee on foreign relations. By 1953, the ministry regarded the Finnish model of neutralism as a solution to the Yugoslav security dilemma. It came to abandon that in favor of the Non-Aligned Movement only after 1958, when it became clear that relations between Yugoslav and Soviet parties would not be harmonious even after rapprochement.