Peter Schmelz, Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), ISBN: 978-0-19754-125-8 (hb).

What happened to the Soviet seventies? Conventional wisdom carves the Soviet Union into a series of alternatingly repressive and progressive (or, at the very least, less repressive) regimes. After Lenin’s death in 1924, the utopian underpinnings of the Bolshevik Revolution gave way to the terrors of Stalinism. Coming to power in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev denounced his predecessor’s ‘cult of personality’ and loosened restrictions on domestic and cultural life. Following a period of discontent within the Soviet Central Committee, Leonid Brezhnev spearheaded Khrushchev’s ousting and, in 1964, assumed power; he would lead the Communist Party for nearly twenty years, until his death in November 1982. In a sort of interregnum, the next two general secretaries, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, lasted just over a year each before dying suddenly, at which point Mikhail Gorbachev, the great progressive, came to power and opened the country to those both within and without. For historians of the Soviet Union – and, indeed, music scholars who study the region – much ink has been spilled on the eras of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev. Yet the tenure of Brezhnev, whose stay in power was second in length only to Stalin’s, has long been overlooked. Much of this has to do with its sobriquet, ‘Stagnation’, which allegedly spoke to the era’s political, economic, and creative malaise. In recent years, however, historians of the Soviet Union have increasingly called these notions into question. Were the Soviet seventies really stagnant? Did the vibrant cultural life of the Thaw just disappear? And how did we get from the Thaw to Gorbachev’s reforms? Upon closer inspection, the Stagnation was not particularly stagnant – and, indeed, as scholars such as Christine Evans, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Neringa Klumbytė, and Juliane Fürst have argued, it was a period of great experimentation and innovation. Music studies still has some catching up to do in this area, but Peter Schmelz’s excellent book Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR is an exciting and pathbreaking look into the Soviet seventies. Through close study of biography, published materials, critical reception, and scores, Schmelz both revisits the