{"product_id":"defining-russia-musically-historical-and-hermeneutical-essays-9780691070650","title":"Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin has devoted much of his career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and Soviet music in new and sometimes controversial ways. \u003ci\u003eDefining Russia Musically\u003c\/i\u003e represents one of his landmark achievements: here 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. Russian art music, like Russia itself, Taruskin writes, has \"always [been] tinged or tainted ... with an air of alterity--sensed, exploited, bemoaned, reveled in, traded on, and defended against both from within and from without.\" The author's goal is to explore this assumption of otherness in an all-encompassing work that re-creates the cultural contexts of the folksong anthologies of the 1700s, the operas, symphonies, and ballets of the 1800s, the modernist masterpieces of the 1900s, and the hugely fraught but ambiguous products of the Soviet period.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTaruskin 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. He 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, 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. In the culminating chapters--Chaikovsky and the Human, Scriabin and the Superhuman, Stravinsky and the Subhuman, and Shostakovich and the Inhuman--Taruskin offers especially thought-provoking insights, for example, on Chaikovsky's status as the \"last great eighteenth-century composer\" and on Stravinsky's espousal of formalism as a reactionary, literally counterrevolutionary move.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Richard Taruskin\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Princeton University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 09\/25\/2000\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 616\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.88lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.30h x 6.18w x 1.41d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780691070650\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRichard Taruskin\u003c\/b\u003e, Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, is a regular contributor to \u003ci\u003eNew Republic\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eOpera News\u003c\/i\u003e, and many scholarly publications. His books include \u003ci\u003eOpera and Drama in Russia\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eStravinsky and the Russian Traditions\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eMusorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue\u003c\/i\u003e, now available through Princeton University Press in paperback.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Princeton University Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":40087125590131,"sku":"9.78E+12","price":57.95,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0555\/9255\/0515\/products\/img_9a774617-e8a7-4420-be75-ae4f06188c0d.jpg?v=1652538308","url":"https:\/\/bookstorenmore.com\/en-de\/products\/defining-russia-musically-historical-and-hermeneutical-essays-9780691070650","provider":"Bookstore N More","version":"1.0","type":"link"}