Journal of Research in Music Education

In November, 1959, the composers Fikret Amirov, Konstantin Dankevitch, Dmitri Kabalevsky,¹ Tikhon Khrennikov, Dmitri Shostakovitch, and the musicologist Boris Yarustovsky made an official visit to the United States under an agreement between the American and Soviet governments which had made possible the visit of the Americans Roy Harris, Ulysses Kay, Peter Mennin, and Roger Sessions to the Soviet Union the year before. Yarustovsky wrote an account of his impressions for the February 1960 issue of Soviet Music, a journal of the Union of Soviet Composers.

In selecting excerpts from that lengthy report I have tried to retain both the breadth and the quality of Yarustovsky' s observations. Yarustovsky belongs to a society which believes that the artist is a potent ethical force and that his responsibilities to society take precedence over considerations of personal fancy. To us, the implications of that belief seem dangerous; to Yarustovsky, the danger lies in ignoring the implications.