Even among devotees of her music, Galina Ustvolskaya is often reduced to an intersectional victim of gendered and political repression, a fearful casualty of the Soviet system. Her percussive scores, including the Sixth Piano Sonata, have earned Ustvolskaya the nickname “lady with the hammers.” This article reviews the literature about this composer alongside scores from the beginning, middle, and end of her career, asking: Should her life and work be considered from a less empathetic perspective in order to take greater account of her craft, and to avoid the gendered, cultural, and political furrows that would narrow our conception of her music? Instead of defining Ustvolskaya’s life and work against our own expectations, this essay questions our assumptions.

Symphonic music composed under Stalin presents both ethical and aesthetic problems. Often assumed to have been composed in a compromised style by composers who were either coerced into abandoning their “real” modernist inclinations or who were in any case second-rate, these works have been labelled variously socialist realist, conformist, conservative, or even dissident, depending on the taste and opinion of those passing judgement. This article argues that picking and choosing which symphony is socialist realist and which is not cannot be justified either logically or historically, and that we should no longer attempt to define any non-texted or non-programmatic music in this way. The Anglophone term “middlebrow” holds out the possibility of describing this repertoire without implying ethical or artistic compromise on the composers’ part, acknowledging that, in the absence of any elite or “highbrow” musical culture, composers shared the aim of reaching a mass audience.

The purpose of the discussion, which served as keynote at a conference convened under the title “Music and Power,” is to complicate what is often a simplified and overly dichotomized view of that relationship. Two figures, Dmitry Kabalevsky and Tikhon Khrennikov, are singled out for commentary as musicians who wielded political power or conspicuously benefited from it under the Soviet regime. The titular serendipities were occasions through which the author was made unexpectedly aware of the ambiguities and nuances that attended the interactions of music and musicians with the Soviet state.

Many composers have incorporated monograms into their music, using pitch letters to spell out words and names. Alfred Schnittke's monogram technique pervades his works from the 1970s until the end of his career. He derived cryptograms from the names of performer-dedicatees, influential composers, and recently deceased friends, using a systematic procedure that accounts in some way for every possible letter in a given name. Although previous scholars have identified individual monograms in some works, the broader principles by which Schnittke generated and deployed his monograms had not been articulated until now. Many of Schnittke's monograms thus remained unidentified, and the ways in which they interact with twelve-tone technique had not been fully understood. Schnittke appropriated the well-known B–A–C–H and D–S–C–H monograms frequently, but other monograms appear in more than a dozen works. He derived monograms for Russian names from their German transliterations. Schnittke adhered to a principle of chromatic complementation, often integrating monograms into statements of the complete aggregate of twelve pitch classes. I interpret Schnittke’s monogram technique as a facet of the composer’s memorializing impulse, by which he sought to establish in his music the deep connections he felt to the past and the important people in his life.