Russian Music at Home and Abroad : New Essays

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Taruskin

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (560 p.)

Place of Publication:

University of California Press 2016

Summary:

This new collection views Russian music through the Greek triad of"the Good, the True, and the Beautiful" to investigatehow the idea of "nation" embeds itself in the public discourse about music and other arts with results at times invigorating, at times corrupting. In our divided, post-Cold War, and now post-9/11 world, Russian music, formerly a quiet corner on the margins of musicology, has become a site of noisy contention. Richard Taruskin assesses the political and cultural stakes that attach to it in the era of Pussy Riot and renewed international tensions, before turning to individual cases from the nineteenth century to the present. Much ofthe volume is devoted to the resolutely cosmopolitan but inveterately Russian Igor Stravinsky, one of the major forces in the music of the twentieth century and subject of particular interest to composers and music theorists all over the world. Taruskin here revisits him for the first time since the 1990s, when everything changed for Russia and its cultural products. Other essays are devoted to the cultural and social policies of the Soviet Union and their effect on the music produced there as those policies swung away from Communist internationalism to traditional Russian nationalism; to the musicians of the Russian postrevolutionary diaspora; andto the tension between the compelling artistic quality of works such as Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps or Prokofieff's Zdravitsa and the antihumanistic or totalitarian messages they convey. Russian Music at Home and Abroad addresses these concerns in a personal and critical way, characteristically demonstrating Taruskin's authority and ability tobring living history out of the shadows.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Part One. Not By Mind?

1 Non-Nationalists, and Other Nationalists

2 Revenants

3 Crowd, Mob, and Nation in Boris Godunov

4 Catching Up with Rimsky-Korsakov

5 Not Modern and Loving It

6 Written for Elephants

7 Is Th ere a Russia Abroad in Music?

8 Turania Revisited, with Lourie My Guide

9 The Ghetto and the Imperium

10 Two Serendipities

11 Whats an Awful Song Like You Doing in a Nice Piece Like Th is?

12 The Birth of Contemporary Russia out of the Spirit of Music (Not)

Part Two Revisiting Stravinsky

13. Just How Russian Was Stravinsky?

14 How The Rite Became Possible

15 Diaghilev without Stravinsky? Stravinsky without Diaghilev?

16 Resisting The Rite

17 Stravinskys Poetics and Russian Music

18 Did He Mean It?

19 In Stravinskys Songs, the True Man, No Ghostwriters

20 Un Cadeau Tres Macabre

Index

ISBN:

9780520422698

0520422694

OCLC:

939277870