Defining Russia Musically [Hardcover]

Richard Taruskin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 1997

In this text, musicologist Richard 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. The book 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. It 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 of the book, 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The term hermeneutics is omitted from most recently published music dictionaries, but it is making a comeback in scholarly musicological studies. Increasingly, there is an attempt to understand works in their historical contexts rather than by application of possibly inappropriate analytic formulas or culturally biased aesthetic judgments, which are cited and "deconstructed" so as to make way for new interpretations. Taruskin, the leading American Russian music scholar (Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, LJ 12/95), here collects 14 essays on Russian art music and Russianess in general, most based on lectures he gave in 1993 and 1994. His usual originality, passionate arguments, and deep, broad research are present as Taruskin treats music by and scholarship on Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Stravinsky (again), Shostakovich, and others. For academic and large public libraries.?Bonnie Jo Dopp, Univ. of Maryland Lib., College Park
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Richard Taruskin has again demonstrated that anything he writes leads to serious thinking and reevaluation of hitherto held views.... Required reading for anyone seeking a full understanding of music in Russia. -- Milos Velimirovië, Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 600 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (April 14, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691011567
• ISBN-13: 978-0691011561
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,412,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Clear and precise 'defining', June 15, 2000

By 

Joan Renter (Barcelona, Spain) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Defining Russia Musically (Paperback)

Taruskin's name is associated by the experienced reader of Russian music books with texts of in-depth treatment (I bet nobody could research more exhaustively on Stravinsky), rigorous demands of his texts for clarity and entertaining style for the non-scholar reader. Defining Russian Music offers through a series of essays a description very accurate of what Russian music is from the beginning of the formation of a Russian musical identity to the Soviet period and, what I think is more important, why it shows these characteristics. A passage I found very interesting explains the origin of a Pushkin's poem and compares settings of it by three composers from different periods. A non rough-reading text, fully illustrated with musical examples, this book is a must-have for people who appreciate Russian composers and their work as all Taruskin's books up to now.

8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Always something for thought and contemplation here, June 7, 1999

By 

Rachel Abbinanti ([e-mail]) (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Defining Russia Musically (Hardcover)

Musical scholarship today is like a dialogue within itself as well as informing the larger populace, sometimes you don't know which comes first. But here Taruskin must draw battle lines in the sand so to stake a claim,like the one against his benign enemy Peter van den Toorn. Taruskin is this side of the scholarship that shuns the guild system of note to note musical analysis the kind the Schenkerian ideologies have spawned in academia today. This is why his insights are so fascinating. It is incredible to think of all the Russians you hear at primary concert venues throughout the United States it seems we have had virtually nothing to guide our listening habits The music of Shostakovich is a great example,what we have had to guide our listening is his music was a veiled critique of the tyrannical Stalinist system that brutalized and pulverized culture,no one disagrees here. But one important question we never seem to have answered including Taruskin here, was Shostakovich a socialist,what did he actually think of the economic systems of the West?. Taruskin in two brilliant essays one on Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth" and the other on the "Fifth Symphony" we have insights we have heard before, again Shostakovich the culture hero victim.. We also learn of Stravinsky's reactionary cast. I really didn't know he was an anti-Semite. Well you might say how does this effect his composition?. Well Taruskin makes a good argument for Stravinsky's treatments of subject matter, as in the obvious anti-social dimensions in the "Rite of Spring" where the virgin is sacrificed as an inevitability, no resortment to struggle, a concept anathema to Stravinsky. What this kind of social scholarship unleashes is at the very heart of the music's value It is easy to see now Stravinsky's brutalization of sound,not only in the obvious choice of the "Rite of Spring" but Stravinsky's taming his voices subjecting them to a passivity,to a one-dimensional function, as part of a texture,And where has Stravinsky found his voice when there is one?, in borrowings,particulary Russian folk. These four last hermeneutical essays are for me the high point of this volume. Also Scriabin and Tchaikovsky complete it. I never understood any scholarship for Tchaikovsky, what's there to discuss,his relations with the Tsar's aristocracy? Except that Taruskin works at another level of contemplation,in saying things as this music has an immediacy that is borne through lived experience, it is not premeditated music, the kind we find in the West with an obsession for global order and pitch configurations. You will always find something to think about(even in Tchaikovsky)t with this kind of social and political scholarship which Taruskin espouses.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Clear and precise 'defining', June 15, 2000

By 

Joan Renter (Barcelona, Spain) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Defining Russia Musically (Paperback)

Taruskin's name is associated by the experienced reader of Russian music books with texts of in-depth treatment, rigorous demands of his texts for clarity and entertaining style for the non-scholar reader. Defining Russian Music offers through a series of essays a description very accurate of what Russian music is from the beginning of the formation of a Russian musical identity to the Soviet period and, what I think is more important, why it shows these characteristics. A passage I found very interesting explains the origin of a Pushkin's poem and compares settings of it by three composers from different periods. A non rough-reading text, fully illustrated with musical examples, this book is a must-have for people who appreciate Russian composers and their work as all Taruskin's books up to now.