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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, November 2, 1967
Soviet artists want freedom
By Linda McCrerey Kansan Staff Reporter
Young artists in the Soviet Union are attempting to throw off the government's shackles and express their own ideas, according to Harold Schonberg, senior music critic of the New York Times.
Schonberg, who recently toured the Soviet Union with three other editors of the Times, explained his impressions of the Soviet Union's music to an audience of about 150
He said he was "simply flabergasted" at the changes in the Soviet Union since he first visited it in 1961.
Wednesday in Swarthout Recital Hall.
A small but increasingly active group of avant-garde composers are bringing more personal freedom into musical expression, Schonberg said. Under Stalin, artists worked under handicap of governmental restraints and individual ideas were repressed.
Pay raise memorandum needs more support
A "better-documented" revision of a memorandum requesting a pay raise for assistant instructors will be prepared for University officials.
The original memorandum, presented last week to Francis Heller, acting provost and dean of faculties, by the Student Association of Graduates in English (SAGE) said KU graduate students pay about twice as much in fees as K-State graduate students pay.
Checks with K-State prove this isn't exactly so.
A KU graduate student pays
$13.75 for each semester hour or
$82.50 for six hours.
A K-State graduate student pays $8 per semester hour plus a flat $11 activity fee, or from $19 for one hour to $59 for six.
K-State students pay $164 for seven hours or more and KU students pay $169 for seven or more hours.
Dave Holden, Winona, Minn.,
graduate student and chairman of SAGE, said he thinks most KU assistant instructors are enrolled in more than six hours. He is making a survey to find out.
Heller said the revised memorandum will be considered when determining how the University can live within its 1968-69 budget which will be allocated by the legislature this January.
"If we raise the assistant instructors pay something else will have to go. We have to be sure our key faculty members are adequately compensated first," Heller said.
He said no action can be taken this year.
"We are controlled by the budget approved by the legislature last March. We cannot change the rate of pay for any instructor during the academic year," he said.
Holden said the group would try to get copies of the revised memorandum to legislators.
Schonberg said two factors influenced the trend to freer artistic expression: the fall of Khrushchev—who didn't really appreciate modern music—and the impact of "cultural interchange" by which artists can now visit other countries and bring back new ideas.
"My conclusion was that Soviet society is built in a strata—it's a class-conscious society," he said. At the top are the intellectuals, including the leading artists.
"Artists stand on a much higher level in the Soviet Union than in the United States" as far as public respect goes, Schonberg said.
"Music, as is everything in the Soviet Union, is state controlled," he said. All composers who want to gain official approval must join a national union, whose members can compose anything they want. "Avant-garde composers are not members," he added.
Small avant-garde
The Soviet Union has few avant-garde composers, Schonberg said, "but those few are good one.
"There's great mass experimentation with music in the Soviet Union today, the kind characteristic of the United States 30 to 35 years ago. In five more years, the international vocabulary of music will have entered their language completely."
Most people in the Soviet Union cannot listen to records because their equipment is so poor. Schonberg said, and good concerts outside Moscow are hard to find because the orchestras have "terrible standards, really provincial." However, many people in the Soviet Union own radios and can hear modern music on the Voice of America.
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