Fay, Laurel E.

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FAY, Laurel E.

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: Cornell University, Ph.D. (musicology).

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER:

Musicologist. Has taught at Ohio State University, Wellesley College, and New York University; consultant specializing in Russian music for publisher G. Schirmer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Otto Kinkeldey Award, American Musicological Society, 2001, for Shostakovich: A Life.

WRITINGS:

Shostakovich: A Life, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Fay's articles have appeared in the New York Times, Musical American, Opera News, Stagebill, and Keynote, as well as various scholarly publications.

SIDELIGHTS:

In the late 1970s, when Laurel E. Fay was still a graduate student in musicology at Cornell University, she became intrigued by rumors of the impending publication of a book purported to be the memoirs of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, as told to writer Solomon Volkov. Fay, who was writing a dissertation on Shostakovich's string quartets, wrote Volkov to ask if she could provide any help to him, and also to ask whether he had any unpublished biographical material about the composer.

When Volkov's book came out, Fay was puzzled by it. She noticed that much of the material in it seemed familiar, as if she had read it before. In November 1979 another scholar noted that two substantial sections in Volkov's book were identical to passages in published interviews with the composer. "Then it all began to click for me," Fay told Paul Mitchinson in Lingua Franca. "And it didn't take me very long then to find another five passages." In April 1980 she presented her findings at a meeting of the Midwest chapter of the American Musicological Society. She then published her research in the academic journal Russian Review. Her article "Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?" presented damning evidence that Volkov had plagiarized much of his book from other sources. Volkov denied the charges, and his supporters launched into vitriolic attacks on Fay, largely because they opposed her view that Shostakovich was not, as Volkov had written, a dissident against the Soviet dictatorship. Fay, however, rarely mentions her attackers in print. As Mitchinson noted, "Fay coolly presents verifiable details about her subject."

In 2000 Fay published her own biography of the composer, Shostakovich: A Life. While researching the book, she spent three years in Russia, gleaning material from Russian archives. In an interview with Tamara Bernstein of the National Post, Fay said "I wanted [ Shostakovich ] to be a quiet book. I wanted it to be useful—so that when people want to know the background to a piece of music, for instance, they can go to something that will be accurate." Praising Fay's efforts, Jeremy Eichler wrote in the Nation that the book "is a remarkably straightforward, nonsensationalized treatment of the composer's life and work. As such, it is a sorely needed contribution to a field that has been overheated with controversy, the flames of which have been stoked by the very paucity of reliable facts about the composer's life." He added that Fay's adherence to only verifiable facts resulted in a relatively "flat" presentation. However, in Notes, Marina Frolova-Walker found this flatness to be desirable. She commented that although most biographies emphasize narrative and a certain injection of personal opinion on the part of the author, Fay avoids this in her biography of the composer, with favorable results: "Fay's dryness and her reluctance to exercise personal judgment has resulted …in a far more valuable contribution to Shostakovich studies." A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book a "careful and detailed study." Simon Morrison, writing in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, praised Fay's "meticulous attention to detail," her avoidance of the ideological controversies surrounding Shostakovich, and her use of "the highest scholarly standards" to produce a "multifaceted portrait" of her subject. The critic also wrote, "Her documentary work is of value precisely because questions of intention will probably continue to inform audience experiences of the composer's music, and because of the troubling and perplexing nature of his career."