This chapter discusses serialism’s varied formal and sociopolitical meanings and implications – its aesthetics and, to a lesser degree, its mechanics – in the USSR, by examining the central figures in Soviet serialism, among them Andrey Volkonsky, Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, and Valentin Sylvestrov. It also points to representative compositions, performances, publications, and recordings. This chapter is particularly concerned with the aural culture of serialism in the post-war USSR as well as with thinking about serialism as both performative presence and material artifact. Other topics covered include the place of Soviet serialism in the cultural Cold War as well as the censorship and control of serialism in the USSR.

This chapter deals with the history of serialism in Central and Eastern Europe. Starting from the Polish perspective, it examines the successive stages of the response to the serial ideas in such countries as Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia (Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia), and the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia). The chapter draws attention to the social and political contexts of serialism’s development throughout particular periods (up to the outbreak of World War II, during the time of pressure from the totalitarian systems, and after the ‘thaw’ that emerged in the mid-1950s). It considers both the opportunities available to composers working in the so-called Eastern Bloc under the conditions of state socialism and those who worked in exile. Using examples of substantial works and influential figures, the relationship between original serial ideas and individual strategies for their transformative reception is also discussed.

This essay is an analytical investigation of the ‘heroic’ emotions epitomized by both the finale and the slow movement of the Eroica symphony as an entry point into the topic of Beethoven and musical emotion. Whereas the history of emotions is a rapidly expanding field in the humanities, it has yet to take root in musicology or music theory. William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling (2001), a founding text of the history of emotion, explores the transformation of emotion in eighteenth-to-nineteenth-century France in terms of the politicization of sentimentality. Given the Eroica’s debt to the rhetoric of revolutionary France, it would seem plausible to map Reddy’s arguments onto the analysis of Beethoven’s formal processes. I will argue that musical emotion in Beethoven is pivotal between a culture of sociability and sentiment (after Hume and Smith) and the establishment of ‘emotion’ proper in the nineteenth century.