Review of Gavin Dixon, ed., Schnittke Studies (Routledge, 2017)

For Schnittke, “polystylism facilitates this process and creates a musical environment in which the present and the past can engage in mutually illuminating dialogue” (99). [...]the composer was able to position himself within the Germanic musical lineage, which he greatly valued, all the while continuing to confront his own complicated cultural and ethnic background. In this instance, however, the composer’s irony is so aggressive as to reach the level of blasphemy (162). [...]Adamenko shows that the First Symphony is, paradoxically, both the “funeral of the genre” (Dziun 2004) and the restoration of the symphony as a viable contemporary genre in the twentieth century (163). [...]the author successfully demonstrates that the work is full of methods of traditional organization from the previous centuries, and that the apparent “avant-garde” surface is just that—surface-level. Applying Marsh’s analysis, one would identify both passages as instances of his third (terminal) schema. [...]the concerto’s coda is in the key of C minor, which symbolized isolation for Schnittke, and is just a step away from the heavenly D major (184).