Description

By (author) Taruskin Richard

Short /annotation:
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. The author assesses the political and cultural stakes that attach to it in the era of Pussy Riot and renewed international tensions.

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This new collection views Russian music through the Greek triad of “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful” to investigate how 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 of the 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; and to 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 to bring living history out of the shadows.

Table of contents:
PrefaceIntroduction: My Wonderful World; or, Dismembering the TriadPART ONE: NOT BY MIND?1. Non-Nationalists, and Other Nationalists2. Revenants3. Crowd, Mob, and Nation in Boris Godunov: What Did Musorgsky Think, and Does It Matter?4. Catching Up with Rimsky-Korsakov5. Not Modern and Loving It6. Written for Elephants: Notes on Rach 37. Is There a “Russia Abroad” in Music?8. Turania Revisited, with Lourie My Guide9. The Ghetto and the Imperium10. Two Serendipities: Keynoting a Conference, “Music and Power”11. What”s an Awful Song Like You Doing in a Nice Piece Like This? The Finale in Prokofieff”s Symphony-Concerto, Op. 12512. The Birth of Contemporary Russia out of the Spirit of Music (Not)PART TWO: REVISITING STRAVINSKY13. Just How Russian Was Stravinsky?14. How The Rite Became Possible15. Diaghilev without Stravinsky? Stravinsky without Diaghilev?16. Resisting The Rite17. Stravinsky”s Poetics and Russian Music18. Did He Mean It?19. In Stravinsky”s Songs, the True Man, No Ghostwriters20. “Un Cadeau Tres Macabre”Index

Biographical note:
Richard Taruskin is the Class of 1955 Professor of Music emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1987 to 2014, after twenty-six years at Columbia University (man and boy). He is the author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, On Russian Music, Defining Russia Musically, and the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music.

Primary cover copy:
“In surveying the continent of Russian music, Richard Taruskin has breathtakingly altered its scholarly appearance, displaying its arc in space as if through a telescope and its textures as if through a microscope. His new book casts a resolute and penetrating eye on contemporary Russia and the processes now underway there, wh