Changing the Music Itself: Valentina Goncharova and Late Soviet Subjectivity

Between 1987-1991, Valentina Goncharova recorded improvised experimental music at her seaside home in Tallinn, Estonia. Despite a graduate degree and active performance in the early-1980s avant-garde jazz and rock scene(s), the majority of Goncharova’s recorded music has only been released for the first time in the past 18 months. Two recent albums (Recordings Vol. 1 and Vol. 2) document the composer’s output, offering us a window into understanding the particularities of gendered musicking in the late-Soviet period. As an unofficial musician living far from the cultural centres of Russia, she was unable to easily perform with an ensemble. She turned instead to electronics: overdubbing violin and synthesisers on a modified reel-to-reel tape recorder, that (due to technological failure) lent itself to her characteristic drones and overlapping textures. Influenced in part by the music of Yoko Ono, Brian Eno and musique concrete, this ambient aesthetic also stemmed from Goncharova’s material conditions. Looking to the conditions that influenced Goncharova’s musical creation (and widespread listening available only recently) prompts a methodological discussion regarding the status of Latour’s actor-network-theory in musicology. While on one hand, actor-network-theory resonates with feminist theory in stressing that technology and gender relations are not ‘separate spheres,’ but rather mutually constitutive. On the other, attending to this music reminds us of whether it is ‘sufficient to theorise the musical assemblage without reference to subjectivity’ (Born and Barry 2018). This paper, drawing from the ‘post-Foucauldian’ paradigms of late-Soviet subjectivity (Yurchak 2008) begins to understand what a post-Latourian approach might look like