Musical Evolution and the Other: From State-Sponsored Musical Evolutionism in the USSR to Post-Soviet Crimean Tatar Indigenous Music

In the Soviet Union, logics of evolutionism undergirded the Communist party-state's interventions into many aspects of Soviet life, including the realm of “folk music.” In this article, I draw on the example of the Soviet institutionalization of a Crimean Tatar folk orchestra to demonstrate how Soviet musical evolutionism ordered and constrained vernacular musical practices in ways that have had long-term political consequences, especially concerning the politics of post-Soviet indigeneity. I argue that to delink teleology from musical evolution—akin to how evolution is understood in the physical sciences—would take a fundamental step toward decolonizing music studies. I conclude by comparing the Soviet case to contemporary discourses of musical evolutionism, observing how it risks exiling some musics to a present that is “less evolved.” Crimean Tatar language, translated by Adel Khairutdinova, Muslim Umerov, and Ayla Bakkalli