Richard Taruskin in the Atlantic Monthly, February 1995:

On February 24, 1975, less than half a year before his death, having listened to a symphony by his former pupil Boris Tishchenko and said little, Shostakovich offered a sort of apology that might be taken as his Aesopian credo.

"I am generally closemouthed. I have neither the wish nor the ability to analyze or discuss the pieces I hear. I just listen to the music people give me to listen to. Either I like it or I don't. That's all."

Well, that's not quite all. There is more here than the doer's quarrel with the talker, more than the artist's familiar insistence on sensory immediacy and pleasure over secondary, rationalized response—though in this overanalytical age of ours that's a hint we might do well to consider at times. There is simply too much in Shostakovich's instrumental music that is strongly marked—too much that resonates, like Beethoven's or Tchaikovsky's music, with characteristic and functional genres, with the conventional iconicity of emotion, with intertextual allusion, with sheer violence—for us to doubt that at bottom he shared his society's faith in the reality of the latent content. Yet unlike the socialist-realist critics who tried to catalogue and thus circumscribe his "imagery" and "intonations," and unlike the more recent biographical paraphrasts (including the one who scandalously appropriates his name), Shostakovich insisted on keeping the latent content latent—and keeping it labile.

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