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The Bolsheviks' 1917 political coup caused a seismic disruption in
Russian culture. Carried by the first wave of emigrants, Russian
culture migrated West, transforming itself as it interacted with
the new cultural environment and clashed with exported Soviet
trends. In this book, Klara Moricz explores the transnational
emigrant space of Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir
Dukelsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Nicolas Nabokov, and Arthur Lourie in
interwar Paris. Their music reflected the conflict between a
modernist narrative demanding innovation and a narrative of exile
wedded to the preservation of prerevolutionary Russian culture. The
emigrants' and the Bolsheviks' contrasting visions of Russia and
its past collided frequently in the French capital, where the
Soviets displayed their political and artistic products. Russian
composers in Paris also had to reckon with Stravinsky's
disproportionate influence: if they succumbed to fashions dictated
by their famous compatriot, they risked becoming epigones; if they
kept to their old ways, they quickly became irrelevant. Although
Stravinsky's neoclassicism provided a seemingly neutral middle
ground between innovation and nostalgia, it was also marked by the
exilic experience. Moricz offers this unexplored context for
Stravinsky's neoclassicism, shedding new light on this infinitely
elusive term.
"Jewish Identities" mounts a formidable challenge to prevailing
essentialist assumptions about 'Jewish music,' which maintain that
ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence
that must manifest itself in art created by members of that group.
Klara Moricz scrutinizes concepts of Jewish identity and reorders
ideas about twentieth-century 'Jewish music' in three case studies:
first, Russian Jewish composers of the first two decades of the
twentieth century; second, the Swiss American Ernest Bloch; and
third, Arnold Schoenberg. Examining these composers in the context
of emerging Jewish nationalism, widespread racial theories, and
utopian tendencies in modernist art and twentieth-century politics,
Moricz describes a trajectory from paradigmatic nationalist
techniques, through assumptions about the unintended presence of
racial essences, to an abstract notion of Judaism.
Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourie explores the varied
aesthetic impulses and ever-evolving personal motivations of
Russian composer Arthur Lourie. A St. Petersburg native allied with
the Futurist movement and profoundly sympathetic to Silver Age
decadence, Lourie was swept away by the Revolution; he surfaced as
a Communist commissar of music before landing in Europe and
America, where his career foundered. Making his way by serving
others, he became Stravinsky's right-hand man, Serge Koussevitsky's
ghostwriter, and philosopher Jacques Maritain's muse. Lourie left
his mark on the poems of Anna Akhmatova, on the neoclassical
aesthetics of Stravinsky, on Eurasianism, and on Maritain's
NeoThomist musings about music. Lourie serves as a flawless lens
through which aspects of Silver Age Russia, early Bolshevik rule,
and the cultural space of exile come into sharper focus. But this
interdisciplinary collection of essays, edited by musicologists
Klara Moricz and Simon Morrison, also looks at Lourie himself as an
artist and intellectual in his own right. Much of the aesthetic and
technical discussion concerns his grandly eulogistic opera The
Blackamoor of Peter the Great, understood as both a belated
Symbolist work and as a NeoThomist exercise. Despite the importance
Lourie attached to the opera as his masterwork, Blackamoor has
never been performed, its fate thus serving as an emblem of
Lourie's own. Yet even if Lourie seems to have been destined to be
but a footnote in the pages of music history, he looms large in
studies of emigration and cultural memory. Here Lourie's life, like
his last opera, is presented as a meditation on the circumstances
and psychology of exile. Ultimately, these essays recover a lost
realm of musical and aesthetic possibilities-a Russia that Lourie,
and the world, saw disappear.
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