Professor Pauline Fairclough
B.A., M.A.(N'cle), Ph.D.(Manc.)
Expertise
I am a cultural historian specialising in Soviet music, especially the period under Lenin and Stalin, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and most recently, the sexual politics of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Current positions
Professor of Music
Department of Music
Contact
Press and media
Many of our academics speak to the media as experts in their field of research. If you are a journalist, please contact the University’s Media and PR Team:
Biography
I encountered Russian music via my first love, which was 19th-century Russian literature. I found Soviet cultural history endlessly fascinating: the sheer commitment and passion artists brought to their work in this stressed social environment is both moving and awe-inspiring. So-called 'classical music', which is frequently derided and sidelined in my own culture, took pride of place in Stalin's Russia, though of course the status (and subsidy) came at a price.
I began my career as a Shostakovich specialist, and it seems I will never entirely succeed in escaping from him - my short biography of him came out in 2019 and I am currently writing a book about his opera 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' and its disturbing sexual politics. But my most substantial work in the last decade was on Soviet concert culture under Lenin and Stalin - a study of how both Russian and Western classics were either rejected or appropriated in the Soviet Union, 'marketed' to the new proletarian audiences and used as benchmarks - or cautionary tales - for Soviet composers themselves.
Research interests
I am a cultural historian specialising in Soviet music and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. My first book, A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (Ashgate, 2006) was an in-depth study of Shostakovich's symphonic masterpiece, which had to wait twenty five years for its premiere in the post-Stalin era. My second book, funded by an AHRC Early Career Fellowship and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, was Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin (Yale, 2016), which was co-winner of the BASEES Women's Forum Book Prize in 2018 and won the 2017 Choice award for Outstanding Academic Title. It has been translated into Spanish as Clásicos para las masas (Akal, 2021).
I have edited four volumes: The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (with David Fanning, Cambridge University Press, 2008), Shostakovich Studies 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Twentieth Century Music and Politics: Essays in memory of Neil Edmunds (Ashgate, 2012) and 1917 and Beyond: Continuity, Rupture and Memory in Russian Music (MHRA, 2019, with Philip Bullock). I have a fifth edited collection forthcoming from Indiana University Press, co-edited with Peter Schmelz, Unpredictable Encounters: Reconsidering Russian Music.
My biography of Shostakovich, written for Reaktion Books' 'Critical Lives' series, was published in 2019 and translated into Turkish in 2023.
From 2021-23 I held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and my study of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for Oxford University Press's 'Keynotes' series is currently in production, due to be published in 2025.
I am General Editor of Routledge's Slavonic and East European Music series and with Olga Digonskaya of the Shostakovich Archive in Moscow, I run the 'Shostakovich and his Epoch' study group of the International Musicological Society. From 2017-2022 I was an elected Vice-President of the Royal Musical Association. In 2024 I co-founded the Royal Musical Association Study Group 'Music of Eastern Europe and Eurasia'. Our inaugural conference, 'Music on the Move in Communist Europe' was held in the Department of Music, University of Bristol, in 2025.
Conferences organised:
'Music on the Move in Communist Europe', with Dr Mariia Romanets, Department of Music, University of Bristol, 28-29 May 2025.
'Russian and Soviet Music: Reappraisal and Rediscovery' with Patrick Zuk, Music Department, University of Durham, 11-14 July 2011. http://www.dur.ac.uk/music/russianmusicconference2011/
'Shostakovich 2006: International Centenary Conference' http://www.bris.ac.uk/arts/birtha/conferences/shostakovich
'1948 and all that: Music, Politics and Power in the Soviet Union' with Marina Frolova-Walker, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 2009: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/962
'Twentieth-century Music and Politics', Department of Music, University of Bristol, 14-16 April 2010 http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/birtha/conferences/music_politics
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk: Sexuality, Stalinism And The Cold War
Principal Investigator
Description
Leverhulme Trust Major Research FellowshipManaging organisational unit
Department of MusicDates
01/09/2021 to 31/08/2023
Classics for the Masses: socialist realism and the Western canon in Soviet music, 1917-1964
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of ArtsDates
01/10/2013 to 01/07/2014
Cataloguing and digitsiation of Shostakovich archives
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of ArtsDates
01/11/2012 to 01/11/2013
The performance and reception of western classical music in Soviet Russia.
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of ArtsDates
01/05/2011 to 01/02/2012
SHOSTAKOVICH INTERNATIONAL CENTENARY CONFERENCE
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of ArtsDates
29/09/2006 to 29/10/2006
Thesis supervisions
‘Qualcosa che si deve sentire’
Supervisors
The influence of folk-song on Gustav Holst
Supervisors
Affective Communities
Supervisors
Publications
Recent publications
22/05/2023Socialist realism, kitsch and the middlebrow symphony
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow
Review, The Routledge Handbook to Music Under German Occupation, 1938-1945,
Music and Letters
Personal Friendships, Professional Manoeuvres
Slavonic and East European Review
The Russian Revolution and Music
Twentieth Century Music
Dmitry Shostakovich
Dmitry Shostakovich
Teaching
I teach various Russian music courses each year - both 19th-century opera and Soviet music - as well as classes in 20th-century music history, with special focus on music's intersection with broader political trends and ideologies. Each year I teach a final-year course on Aesthetics, which is really an investigation of music's role in society during the 20th-21st centuries: we start with Plato and end with Spotify, sandwiching Tolstoy, Adorno, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Mario Vargas Llosa and Shoshana Zuboff in between.