Ot Ayvza do Adamsa: Amerikanskaya muzïka XX veka by Ol’ga Manulkina (review)

This lavishly detailed account of concert music in the United States during the long twentieth century features impressive translations into Russian of select interviews and lectures, contemptuous screeds like “Who Cares if You Listen?” by Milton Babbitt, aphoristic ruminations by such composers as Charles Ives and Morton Feldman, some very entertaining quotations from archival documents housed in the United States and Russia, plus snippets from contemporaneous reviews by critics in both countries. But Olga Manulkina, a professor of music history at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, is no mere translator. She is a prolific scholar of music in the United States who blends biographical details and basic history with fresh technical and aesthetic insights. Manulkina aims at the shopworn teleological narratives of modernism without losing focus on her pedagogical mission and always inspiring an interest in the music under discussion. From Ives to Adams is not a Whiggish chronicle, and it offers unfamiliar takes on familiar topics (at least to the readers of this journal, obviously not the primary audience) throughout. The book might curry some debate, but because it brings its facts to the fight along with its concessions, it can defend itself. It deserves to be translated into English and might then even find a place in college classrooms across the United States. After all, if we can assign histories of Italian, French, and German music written by US scholars, why not read a survey of twentieth-century music in the United States as relayed by a Russian?

Manulkina has mastered the essential literature (pre–AmeriGrove II) and knows the canon as defined by the American musicological establishment. English-language sources referenced and relied upon include H. Wiley Hitchcock’s Music in the United States, Carol J. Oja’s Making Music Modern, Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, and, less for any original insights than the sake of convenience, Alex Ross’s compilation The Rest Is Noise.¹ We also hear from the prominent Russian musicologist Levon Akopyan, whom Manulkina quotes on several composers, including, strikingly, Edgard Varèse, and we become acquainted with the literature on jazz in the Soviet press during the 1920s. (The reaction was generally mixed and often aggressively racist: “A Jazz Band,” in the opinion of a reviewer for the journal K novïm beregam [To new shores], “is a kind of negro orchestra consisting of a group of banjos and an entire arsenal of percussion instruments served by demons raving in a cage; it offers something of the impression of a violent rhythmic orgy” [131]. Still, from the perspective of Bolshevist fantasies about harnessing the energies of the repressed masses, the music had its possibilities.)

There is much original research too, coming from archives, estates, libraries, publishers, and the collections of still-active composers. Manulkina demonstrates that the view from Moscow and St. Petersburg is especially relevant given the outsized contributions to American music by such Russian émigrés as Vernon Duke (Dukelsky), Serge Koussevitzky, Leo Ornstein, and Igor Stravinsky. Here she suggests forfeited innovation, a kind of creative brain drain opened well before World War II: Russia lost some astonishing musical talent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, owing to the expulsion of Jews and the Bolshevik coup d’état in 1917. She also considers those Russians who came and went in the United States but left a lasting impression, as did Sergey Prokofiev on his early tours, and delves more deeply into the careers of American composers like Aaron Copland, who manufactured an accessible sound that accorded perfectly with the official Soviet artistic doctrine of Socialist Realism.

The book is chronological and composer centered, with each of the luminaries of the long twentieth century taking center stage. There are also chapters dedicated to such genres as the American symphony and opera, broadly defined. Roy Harris and...