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Western Art Music In The Soviet Union During The Reign Of Stalin, 1924-1953, Liam Kircher

Music Student Scholarship

Westerners might have been accustomed to seeing war-related images on the cover of newspapers by the time they received the newest edition of Time magazine the morning of July 20, 1942. And indeed, that is what they got. But instead of the expected picture of a soldier or political leader, or even an ill-spirited caricature of the enemy, readers were graced with a representative from a different front of the war: the musical front. That day, Time venerably presented the American people with “Fireman Shostakovich,” the internationally renowned Soviet composer who famously joined the Leningrad fire department shortly before an …