#shostposting

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How did you guys discover Shostakovich? Personally, I discovered him the usual way - watching a YouTube video of an Irish guy having a full-on mental breakdown over music notation software back in 2020, and deciding that I absolutely needed to watch all of his other videos. One of those videos was on Shostakovich, and I was pretty new to composition at the time, so I was avidly curious to hear about this composer and his struggle against musical censorship. Then and there he cemented himself as my favourite composer of all time, and I have never been the same since

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I feel like a lot of composers would have been scolded, mocked and despised by the very same people who unquestioningly praise them as The Smartest Geniuses Of All Time if they were our contemporaries. I see a lot of people using the names of composers as elitist dogwhistles, and it both saddens me and makes me laugh. You know, like when people make Mozart out to be "the mostest smartest geniusest of all time with music that is Automatically Superior, unlike You Degenerate Peasants" just to degrade the intelligence of people they want to see as 'lesser than' (god, the emphasis on intellectual ability in classical music discussions is a WHOLE OTHER ISSUE regarding white supremacy and elitism, seriously don't even get me started). I really do like Mozart, but that's because I've actually thought about why I appreciate him and what I like about his music, instead of just blindly worshipping the so-called 'gods of intelligence'.

Like, bro you are inadvertently praising the "Leck Mich Im Arsch" guy as the pinnacle of all music. With a straight face and haughty self-important poise, expecting people to take you extremely seriously. You are unironically saying this. If Mozart were alive to hear it, he'd probably be laughing to himself.

There’s certain hobbies and interests that aren’t inherently conservative or regressive but do attract a lot of people who are those things or worse and when you’re a progressive person involved in those hobbies hearing that someone else is interested in your hobby usually has to involve some “But are you normal about it?” conversations before you get too excited

[alsosprachzarathustra03]

My Dmitri fanart

i have completely forgotten about how i promised to post my shostakovich fanart here so yeah there we go

Shosty at the piano :3

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I love Shostakovich's voice so much. Like, you'd expect with a guy that smoked a lot and a Testimony-esque reputation of being "the really bleak and pessimistic one" that his voice would be at least reasonably low… but no, it was. Really high. Either you expect it to be low and it's higher than you thought it would be, or you expect it to be high and it's still higher than you thought it would be. It somehow defies expectation no matter what, even if you already KNOW what he sounded like. I've seen people attempt to justify his voice pitch as a recording error or a 78rpm quirk or something but apparently it was also just like that. I've had friends say that he sounds like an Oompa Loompa and that he sounds like he inhaled helium 😭

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being autistic is so weird sometimes, like i swear you can be going through a horrific depressive episode and in constant pain every day from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep and you're like. hmm. i need to research the dead soviet russian classical music guy about this. and it actually helps

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I actually had a conversation about this with someone yesterday. A friend of mine told me he just discovered that Waltz No. 2 was written by Shostakovich, and that it’s one of his favourite classical music pieces. I got really excited, and I ended up talking to him about the piece. He was very shocked to hear that Shostakovich was NOT a 19th century composer.

For the record, Shostakovich was born in 1906 and was alive to watch Jesus Christ Superstar.

And he really liked it!

Shostakovich's Waltz No. 2 appears in the most Victorian/Edwardian media of any song from the 1950s

...oh you think I'm kidding? nope. Suite for Variety Orchestra No. 1, c. 1956

does it sound like it literally spun into being from the ether as a vampire whirled her Gothic Heroine prey around a ballroom c. 1887? yes. but it was written in the 1950s and the first documented performance was in 1988 and we all have to come to terms with that (me) (it's me I have to come to terms with that) (I struggle so much with it)

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Fun Facts about Dmitri Dsch Shostakovich

Dimitri “Shosty” Shostakovich is one of most the esteemed composers of the 20th century. But Did you know he actually…

Wrote music

Lived in the 19th century

Topped the USSR charts for 12 weeks in a row

Smoked 500 cigarettes a day

Composed his first piano piece when he was 2

Was fluent in Russian

Read three (3) books

Was arrested for making music

Wore clothes made entirely out of his own music

Taught his cat how to speak fluent Russian

Literally invented Football

Encoded a specific motif into his music that scientific researchers have found to actually be his musical pronouns in the music (D-S-C-H)

Played chords on the piano one time and everyone got pissed off at him because he kept playing chords and he got arrested for playing piano chords

Found popularity due to the use of his controversial “Waltz No. 2” in 1926 due to its inclusion in hit film “Goncharov”

Had a friend who once kept eating pies full of ants it was like a whole thing

Was a rapper for 2 years

Created the world’s first “music notation software”

Had hair that everyone thought to be black due to the nature of black and white photographs, but that is incorrect. His hair was actually blue

Killed countless Nazis with his psychic powers

Wrote video game soundtracks

Kicked out of Heaven for writing music

Famously boycotted Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza

Had a diet consisting entirely of the 6 billion metric tons of hate mail he received twice a day

Pirated Disco Elysium

Kept turning everyone gay on accident

had His NOSE FELL OFF it kept FALLING OFF

Made Hitler cry

Was brazillian and kept yelling “Уауw, тхат wас а гуд пиеce оф мусик! И ам а геныус!” whenever he composed

Served cunt

Was killed by the government on two separate occasions

Wrote an opera one time and nobody fucking cared

Played Solitaire (Windows 7)

Spent every day sitting around doing fuck all

Was openly bisexual

Killed Joseph Stalin

He wa the best composer ever of all time…

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why does… why does the omega one look like… no…

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heartbreaking: world’s most obnoxious shostakovich fan has just discovered picmix

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is there a maximum word count or can i write an essay so large that the file size of the plaintext alone rivals Doom

Conversation where I ask someone why they like Shostakovich so much and they say they don’t know then they ask me the same and I don’t know either so we’re both stood there like::

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behold

dmiitri

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Reading Shostakovich’s letters to Sollertinsky makes me feel like I’m a cartoon bully from one of those American teen shows that just stole the flowery secret diary of a teen girl with a secret crush. Except the ‘diary’ is about 100 years old and is translated to my native language and also everyone mentioned is now dead. Is this history

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Yes. But then I found out. a second time. It’s complicated. you had to be there

Looking at fanart of Shostakovich is so healing to me like yes PLEASE I would like to see more I feed off of this stuff. You do not understand how happy I get when I see people who appreciate Shost’s work and commemorate him using their skills as an artist, it’s literally the best thing ever. Like YES!! There’s other people out there who like Shostakovich enough to devote time and effort into creating art of him!!!

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Still can't believe he's dead bro 💔💔💔 (referring to a guy born in 1906) (it is 2025)

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did shostakovich have a favourite colour. important question

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i keep bringing up Shostakovich and his music to my friends during casual conversations in the exact same manner as Philomena Cunk brings up the 1989 release of Belgian techno anthem "Pump Up The Jam"