Aram Khachaturian and socialist realism: A reconsideration

Aram Khachaturian remains a neglected figure in scholarship on Soviet music, his work often held as exemplifying Socialist Realism at its most conformist. In this article I suggest that folk music strongly influenced his style well before the imposition of Socialist Realism, and that his musical language and aesthetics have much more in common with those of contemporary composers in the West than has previously been assumed. A central focus of the paper will be to examine the role played by Soviet musicologists in placing questionable critical constructs on Khachaturian’s career and creative achievement