Khrennikov's Seven

Khrennikov’s Seven () was a group of seven Russian Soviet composers denounced in 1979 at the Sixth Congress of the Composers’ Union by its leader Tikhon Khrennikov for the unapproved participation in some festivals of Soviet music in the West. Khrennikov called their music “pointlessness … and noisy mud instead of real musical innovation”. The seven were listed in the following order: Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov, Alexander Knaifel, Viktor Suslin, Vyacheslav Artyomov, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Edison Denisov. These composers subsequently suffered restrictions on the performance and publication of their music. The tone of the denunciation harkened back to the First Congress of 1948, at which Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Myaskovsky, Klebanov, and others were denounced. By 1991, four of the seven had left the Soviet Union (Knaifel, Denisov, and Artyomov remained); Denisov left the country in 1994 and died in Paris two years later. Quotations “In 1979, the Communist Party tried to bring these rebels a group of younger composers known as “unofficial” composers to heel. The egregious hack Tikhon Khrennikov, head of the Soviet Composers’ Union, attacked seven of them by name in