some more thoughts on the death of Nikolai Kapustin--how the formerly Soviet composer's work can reveal that metahistorical/political narratives in the West didn't really promote successful 3rd stream anymore than residual Socialist Realism might have

The more time passes since the end of the Cold War the more we in the West get to learn about what the arts were like in the Soviet bloc.  The more we learn about how diverse and varied music in central and eastern Europe and Soviet Asia was the more ludicrous the claim that Western arts are more diverse and liberal due to claims of "freedom". Not that I wish to have born anywhere else but the United States of America, for a variety of reasons I've no obligation to share at even my own blog, but my larger point is that now that the Cold War has been over for a generation or two certain mythologies that were applied to, say, jazz, by Cold War era intellectuals no longer have to be taken as "the" narrative for an urban style of popular music that has been truly global since a century ago.