The Ways of Freedom: Experimental Music in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, 1980-1996

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This project aims to explore the cultural and (bio)political significance of late and post-Soviet improvised music by following the career of improviser, composer and avant-garde pianist Sergei Kurekhin, and his circle. Following his first solo release, The Ways of Freedom, in 1981, Kurekhin became a key figure in the informal music culture of Leningrad/St. Petersburg until his death in 1996. Kurekhin is best known as leader of Pop Mechanics, a spontaneous ensemble known for its absurd theatrics, ever-fluctuating membership, and shifting of styles within single performances; fusing high- and low-brow, old and new, in an eclectic collage that emphasised the 'in-between' Pop Mechanics represent a significant number of improvisers of the 1980s Leningrad scene, as many were, at one time, part of the ensemble. Additionally, the temporal span of Kurekhin's output offers a perfect lens through which to better understand cultural production during perestroika and after the fall of the Soviet Union - a period noted to have received little attention (Etkind 2014). Studying Kurekhin's milieu offers new insight into Soviet decline and illuminates the cultural shift that followed.In the only text to discuss Kurekhin's cultural output (regarding his personal engagement with news media), Yurchak writes that the 'history and analysis' of Kurekhin's 'remarkable artistic project still awaits its author' (2011:311) - a lacuna I aim to fill. The absence of Kurekhin from musicological scholarshipmakes this project fertile for new insight. There are numerous historiographies of experimental music (Piekut 2011, Adlington 2013, Born et al. 2017), yet these are focussed explicitly on Western Europe and U.S. contexts. By extending research into a Russian context, this project aims to widen experimentalist scholarship outside of its current borders. I aim to advance these understandings by following Kurekhin's career with a similar critical background to Yurchak (2006), focussed towards music/sound. In musicology, Schmelz (2009) has utilised Yurchak's concepts as starting points for his analysis of Soviet composers - though limited only to the genre of art music. Thus, Schmelz's research, while relevant, significantly differs in scope to this project.Recent literature (Piekut 2019) has begun to analyse the 'vernacular avant-garde', referring to artists 'not entirely delinked from the literate establishment,' that occupy 'a zone distinct from it' (Levitz and Piekut 2020). There is significant unexplored overlap with Yurchak's underlying concept of vnye ('inside/outside') that defines the liminal experience of late-Soviet life. The music of Kurekhin is situated perfectly to expand, advance and investigate both concepts. Through studying the biopolitical indistinction of Kurekhin's music, I will advance the vernacular avant-garde as a stable concept useful for analysis, that, whilst emanating from a the particular, can reflect back on avant-garde performance writ large.In advancing the first study of Kurekhin's musical milieu, I aim to:* Identify how the liminal social aesthetic of Kurekhin's oeuvre produced (bio)political subversion in the music-itself, performance, and performer interactions; to connect, advance and problematise biopolitical literature to sound/music studies.* Investigate Kurekhin's influence of Futurists (such as Mayakovsky). When no (post-)soviet future was imaginable (Yurchak 2006), Kurekhin's engagement with 'past-futures' inform us of artistic solutions to Soviet totality.* Examine Kurekhin's shift towards Nationalism in the 1990s; to find the limits of ironic (musical) subversion (oft cited as an inherently radical genre, Wilmer 2020), and locate a distinction between late and post-Soviet culture.* Explore the influences of non-Soviet artists on Kurekhin - from Cage (USA) to Einsturzende Neubauten Germany) - to situate 'Russian music in a World Context', as called for by Frolova-Walker (2018).