Music Man

The Ivor Novello Awards are given for contemporary popular music, so you would scarcely expect to find the name of Dmitri Shostakovich featuring - he was a serious composer who died nearly 40 years ago.  Yet he is nominated in the Best Contemporary Song category as co-composer of a little ditty called "Ill Manors"performed by the rapper Plan B.  So what's going on?  Well the song uses a snatch of his 7th Symphony as an ostinato (repetitive) backing for the rap.  The 7th Symphony is known as the "Leningrad" and was written around the time of the WWII siege of that city, and, whatever Shostakovich might or might not have intended, has become irrevocably associated with the suffering of the citizens of that city at that time.  What would he have thought about the current situation? Difficult to say, because he himself was a bit of an enigma - during his working life he presented himself as a good, straight-down-the-line Soviet, but in what are said to be his memoirs (published after his death by someone else) the claim is that he was strongly against the regime, and that his music contained all sorts of hidden anti-Soviet messages.  So who knows?