Alexander Mosolov

Following an early release, which had been argued for by his Conservatory teachers, Mosolov turned his attention to setting Turkmen and Kyrgyz folk tunes for orchestra.[1] Young Mosolov was greatly impacted by the cosmopolitan lifestyle into which he was raised; both German and French were spoken in the home and the family took trips to Berlin, Paris, and London.After the performance of his First String Quartet at the Frankfurt Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) on 30 June 1927 was met with critical acclaim, Mosolov shifted his focus to composition.[6] After the onset of socialist realism as the official aesthetic of the Soviet Union in 1932, Mosolov traveled to Central Asia, where he researched and collected samples of Turkmen, Tajik, Armenian, and Kyrgyz songs."[11][12][n 2] On February 4, 1936, Mosolov was expelled from the Composers' Union for treating waiters poorly and taking part in a drunken brawl in Press House, a local restaurant.His attempts were unsuccessful, and he was arrested on November 4, 1937, for alleged counter-revolutionary activities under Article 58, Paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag.[15] His quick release, having only served eight months of his eight-year sentence, was possible because he had been imprisoned not on political charges but on an overblown accusation of "hooliganism" brought by Mosolov's enemies in the Composers' Union.However, the compositions of Mosolov's later life were so uncharacteristic of his earlier style that one scholar noted that it was "impossible to discern the former avant-gardist in the works written from the late thirties onward".Widespread use of ostinato became the defining signature of Mosolov's music:[18] Iron Foundry is built of many ostinati working in tandem to create the sound of a factory, it is used in the Second and Fifth Piano Sonatas, etc.[23] One critic found in the music "no organized will to victory, in fact very little besides the petty-bourgeois anarchy", while conceding that it was "striving to find an individual idiom";[24] another called it a "grossly formalistic perversion of a contemporary topic".