The world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin has devoted
much of his career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and
Soviet music in new and sometimes controversial ways. "Defining
Russia Musically" represents one of his landmark achievements: here
Taruskin uses music, together with history and politics, to
illustrate the many ways in which Russian national identity has
been constructed, both from within Russia and from the Western
perspective. He contends that it is through music that the powerful
myth of Russia's "national character" can best be understood.
Russian art music, like Russia itself, Taruskin writes, has "always
been] tinged or tainted ... with an air of alterity--sensed,
exploited, bemoaned, reveled in, traded on, and defended against
both from within and from without." The author's goal is to explore
this assumption of otherness in an all-encompassing work that
re-creates the cultural contexts of the folksong anthologies of the
1700s, the operas, symphonies, and ballets of the 1800s, the
modernist masterpieces of the 1900s, and the hugely fraught but
ambiguous products of the Soviet period.
Taruskin begins by showing how enlightened aristocrats,
reactionary romantics, and the theorists and victims of
totalitarianism have variously fashioned their vision of Russian
society in musical terms. He then examines how Russia as a whole
shaped its identity in contrast to an "East" during the age of its
imperialist expansion, and in contrast to two different musical
"Wests," Germany and Italy, during the formative years of its
national consciousness. The final section, expanded from a series
of Christian Gauss seminars presented at Princeton in 1993, focuses
on four individual composers, each characterized both as a
self-consciously Russian creator and as a European, and each placed
in perspective within a revealing hermeneutic scheme. In the
culminating chapters--Chaikovsky and the Human, Scriabin and the
Superhuman, Stravinsky and the Subhuman, and Shostakovich and the
Inhuman--Taruskin offers especially thought-provoking insights, for
example, on Chaikovsky's status as the "last great
eighteenth-century composer" and on Stravinsky's espousal of
formalism as a reactionary, literally counterrevolutionary
move.
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