Khrennikov's Seven

Khrennikov’s Seven (Russian: Хренниковская семёрка or Семёрка Хренникова) was a group of seven Russian Soviet composers denounced at the Sixth Congress of the Composers' Union by its leader Tikhon Khrennikov for the unapproved participation in some festivals of Soviet music in the West. Khrennikov called their music "pointlessness... and noisy mud instead of real musical innovation". The seven were listed in the following order: Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov, Alexander Knaifel, Viktor Suslin, Vyacheslav Artyomov, Sofia Gubaidulina and Edison Denisov. Some sources say, that they were put under official boycott. Newer research shows, that this might be a politically distorted perception. Inside the USSR, the speech was almost without consequences for the composers, however in the west it was taken as a proof of restrictive cultural politics. Publishers use this speech to promote their composers to this day. The composers themselves understood, that such rumours would likely be heard in the West. Artyomov gives dubious accounts of the performance of his symphony Way to Olympus at the Moscow Autumn Festival in 1979.

The tone of the denunciation harked back to the First Congress of 1948, at which Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Myaskovsky and others were victimized.

By 1991 four of the seven had left the Soviet Union (except Knaifel, Denisov and Artyomov), Denisov left the country in 1994 and died in Paris two years later.

"In 1979, the Communist Party tried to bring these rebels [a group of younger composers known as "unofficial" composers] to heel. The egregious hack Tikhon Khrennikov, head of the Soviet Composers' Union, attacked seven of them by name in terms that were an unintended compliment: he called their music "not representative of the work of Soviet composers"." (Gerard McBurney)

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