Rethinking Russian Music: Institutions, Nationalism, and Untold Histories

In 1984, the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin predicted that "the main contribution of American scholars to the study of Russian music will be interpretive and critical rather that philological or factual. ... We will never have the freedom of access needed to do fundamental source research on a grand scale."¹ At the time, English-language studies of Russian music were small in number and often tinged with Cold War prejudices.² Soviet publications, while more plentiful, were also written under constraints that led to a distorted narrative of the development of Russian music. Thankfully much has changed in the last quarter-century, and with access to primary source material has come a wealth of literature and a rethinking of the most accepted beliefs about music in Russia and the Soviet Union.³ The post-Soviet task of correcting misconceptions and filling lacunae has not been the exclusive domain of musicology, as evidenced by the selection of studies under review here: three are the work of historians with musical backgrounds (Simo Mikkonen, Amy Nelson, Kiril Tomoff), two are from Russian émigré musicologists (Marina Ritzarev, Marina Frolova-Walker), and one is a biography/ memoir filled with firsthand accounts of musical life in the Soviet Union (Valentina Chemberdzhi). Spanning the 18th century to nearly the present day, these studies contain a quantity of new material and represent a remarkable move forward for our understanding of the history of Russian music. Despite the absence of a common methodological thread, these studies share the goal of refuting and correcting well-established myths about the history of Russian and Soviet music. Frolova-Walker, for instance, offers a sober evaluation of the oft-debated and frequently distorted topic of what is in fact "Russian" about Russian music. Mikkonen, Nelson, and Tomoff address Soviet institutions that have been long subjected to black-and-white interpretations, when in truth they have nuanced histories that tell us much about why Soviet music developed the way it did. Ritzarev's study challenges the idea that Russian music began only with Mikhail Glinka in the 1830s, while Chemberdzhi endeavors to dispel rumors and speculation concerning the life and career of Sergei Prokof'ev, one of the Soviet Union's most significant composers.

Music in 18th-century Russia has never attracted much attention from scholars; it is often perceived as an uninteresting mix of works imported from the West and less inspired vernacular music derived from foreign models. Eighteenth-Century Russian Music demonstrates that there is, in fact, a great deal of variety and richness in the music from this period that has been overlooked.⁴ Ritzarev examines secularization, Westernization, and urbanization—familiar themes of 18th-century transformation—through the lens of an unfamiliar genre: the sacred or "spiritual" concerto (dukhovnyi kontsert). The choice is significant, as it departs from earlier studies that focus on opera, a genre that existed in 18th-century Russia predominantly in the form of light, comic works fashioned by foreign composers.⁵ Ritzarev argues that it was not opera but the sacred concerto that satisfied the Russian public's desire for art music in an Orthodox world suspicious of Western genres and instrumental music. The sacred concerto...