Resonances of absence: Voice, nostalgia, and memory in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seven Romances on Verses by Alexander Blok

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seven Romances on Verses by Alexander Blok’s op. 127 (1967), is a profound meditation on voice, nostalgia, and memory, set against the backdrop of Russian Symbolism and late Soviet aesthetics. By setting seven of Blok’s poems for soprano, violin, cello, and piano, Shostakovich crafts a work where the voice is simultaneously central and destabilized, dissolving into fragmented musical textures. This article explores the cycle through Jacques Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism and différance, Roland Barthes’ le grain de la voix, Svetlana Boym’s typology of nostalgia, and Peter Kivy’s philosophy of musical expressivity. These perspectives reveal how Seven Romances embodies a deeply philosophical engagement with absence, longing, and the instability of meaning. Blok’s poetry, marked by mystical longing and existential uncertainty, finds an ideal counterpart in Shostakovich’s late compositional style, where silence and fragmentation speak as powerfully as sound. The soprano’s voice, often disrupted or absorbed by the ensemble, reflects Derrida’s trace, where meaning is continually deferred, resisting stable presence. At the same time, Barthes’ grain of the voice comes to the fore, as the raw, tactile qualities of breath, tone, and articulation emphasize the materiality of sound over textual clarity. This interplay between presence and disappearance renders the voice both expressive and spectral, echoing something irretrievably lost. Kivy’s enhanced formalism offers another lens, suggesting that music’s expressive power arises not from extramusical meaning but from its internal structures. In Seven Romances, Shostakovich exploits these structures, using harmonic instability and vocal dissolution to evoke emotions that resist direct representation. Nostalgia shapes the cycle’s structure and emotional depth, aligning with Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia, which acknowledges the impossibility of return. Rather than reconstructing a lost past, Seven Romances lingers in the fractures of memory, particularly in the final song, Music, where the voice dissolves, leaving only instrumental echoes. In this way, Shostakovich does not merely set Blok’s poetry to music — he enacts its themes, creating a sonic landscape where time, history, and identity blur into a haunting meditation on impermanence. Keywords: Dmitri Shostakovich, Alexander Blok, Seven Romances on Alexander Blok’s Verses, Russian Symbolism For citation: Petković Lozo, I. (2025). Resonances of absence: Voice, nostalgia, and memory in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seven Romances on Verses by Alexander Blok. Contemporary Musicology, 9(4) 2025, 170−225. https://doi.org/10.56620/2587-9731-2025-4-170-225