Dmitri Shostakovich

“Why don’t you add the motif to your composition?” His voice echoed through the large, empty classroom. Dmitri Shostakovich, my tutorial partner, is critiquing my music! What a dream! Dmitri Shostakovich, a Russian composer and pianist, is my classmate at Williams College. He has been assigned as my partner in the Music Composition Tutorial. I am looking forward to learn more about why and how he composes music in the style that he chooses. His music represents curiosity and creativeness, which are the perfect adjectives to describe Shostakovich himself. He lived in the Soviet Union during World War II and his experiences at that time gave him a different interpretation of life and it is reflected in his music. I wonder…

Solomon Volkov argues that Shostakovich was anti-Soviet, diametrically opposed to the Stalinist regime, who communicated dissent through hidden messages coded within his music. Laurel Fay, an American musicologist, disagrees with Volkov, stating that Shostakovich was a devout communist who respected and feared Stalin’s regime, and relied on Stalin’s favor to continue composing even as fellow artists and musicians were purged from the state and from memory. Fay argues that Shostakovich has been…

Communism and its effect on Shostakovich The music of Dimitri Shostakovich has been steeped in political turmoil for its entire existence. Shostakovich was one of many notable composers to arise in the twentieth century and he and his music were both handled very carefully by the Communist Party in Russia at the time. While Shostakovich had a deep love of his homeland, often criticising composers who left after the revolution, he was also very critical of the social injustice present in their…

The Nose The Nose features a twisted ending which is hard to conclude on what exactly happened. The narrator here tries to convince us that social rank plays an important part in determining a person’s life. The events of the story indicate that appearance was important for a man with a high rank. The value of fellow government official’s opinions is very high as Kovalyov says, “If the major doesn’t split his sides when he sees me, then everything is in the right place. (Gogol, 21).” At this…

Although Dmitri Shostakovich’s song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry does not have the international acclaim as some of his bigger orchestral works, it still remains one of his most powerful pieces that acted as a vehicle for his artistic and moral resistance against the rise of anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia during the end of Stalin’s life. From Jewish Folk Poetry was first composed in 1948 for soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and piano, and then later orchestrated in 1963. In 1948, not only was…

Alyssa Eaves Professor David Bergbreiter CHEM 227 22 November 2014 Dmitri Mendeleev: A Biography Today in American classrooms, the name Dmitri Mendeleev conjures up the sole image of a periodic table, secure and immutable with all its ordered numbers and letters marching along in dependable patterns. More than one hundred years ago in Imperial Russia, the name Dmitri Mendeleev would call to mind séance scandals, economic tariffs, hot air balloon rides, a nationwide push for the metric…

Salbutamol Discovery Chiral chemistry was introduced in 1848 by French chemist and biologist, Louis Pasteur. He discovered this new branch of chemistry after he separated two isomers of ammonium tartate (1). This paved the way for several progressions in the pharmaceutical industry. Although it took approximately a century for scientists to use chiral compounds as effective drugs, they have played a remarkable role in the life of plants and animals (1). The credit for discovering the chiral…

How are elements useful for a particular use? An element is made from one type of atom and this article is about the element Scandium. Scandium was discovered in the year 1879 by Scientist Lars Fredrik Nilson in the university of Uppsala. The origin of the name comes from the word Scandia, which is the latin name for Scandinavia. This element belongs to group 3 which consists of transition metals and Scandium shares this group with the element Yttrium. There are 4 groups in the periodic table…

Sam Kean, a Washington D.C. writer with works in The New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, The Believer, Air & Space, Science, and The New Scientist, has created a user-friendly book about how to explain the periodic table and the elements that occupy it by writing the book The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of Elements. He provides an insight into the world of chemistry that relates to his audience, even…

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev, born on February 8, 1834, was believed to be the youngest of 14 children. His father, Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleyev was a teacher at a local gymnasium. Around the time Dmitri was born, his father went blind and later died in 1847. Consequently to support the family, his mother Mariya Dmitriyevna Kornileva began working at a small glass factory in a nearby town, and eventually started managing it. On December of 1848, the factory burned down, and the family moved to St.…