Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination by Natalie K. Zelensky

Abstract

Reviewed by: Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination by Natalie K. Zelensky David Salkowski Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination. By Natalie K. Zelensky. (Russian Music Studies.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. [xiii, 235 p. ISBN 978025304118 (hardcover), $85; ISBN 9780253041197 (paperback), $35; ISBN 9780253041203 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. [End Page 66] One of the vexing questions of Russian émigré music in the twentieth century is to what extent it constituted a community. Some of the most prominent Russian composers of the century (Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, and, for a time, Sergey Prokofiev) and many of their lesser-known counterparts (for example, Vernon Duke [Vladimir Dukelsky], Arthur Lourié, and Aleksandr Tikhonovich Grechaninov) settled in the United States. Yet these composers hardly formed a coherent group in terms of compositional style, cultural sensibilities, or even social networks and professional institutions. What these composer-centric questions fail to account for, however, is the dynamic process of identity and community formation at work every day among the thousands of Russians who settled in the US after the Bolshevik Revolution as they sang, danced, published, and broadcast a musical “Russianness” for themselves and their US hosts. Natalie Zelensky takes up this very process in Performing Tsarist Russia in New York. She is well suited to the task: as an ethnomusicologist who draws on personal interviews as well as archival evidence and the rich material culture of sheet music publications and LP jackets, she is able to account for, at once, the intimate, the communal, and the commercial in ways that previous studies of elite émigré composers have not. While Grechaninov, Rachmaninoff, and, to a greater extent, Duke make appearances throughout the book, they are but representatives of the collective protagonist, the generation of White (i.e., anti-Bolshevik) Russians who fled the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917–22), which Zelensky terms the “First Wave” of emigration. Throughout the five chapters, Zelensky charts this generation’s development at discrete moments up nearly to the present day. Importantly, as the subtitle of the book indicates, the fascination in the United States with the brand of Russianness presented by the émigré community forms a running secondary theme that helps explain its increasingly eclectic incarnations, such as the movie star Yul Brynner’s tall tales of his own origin (pp. 95–96) and popular songs like the “Fox-Trotsky” (pp. 79–86). Particularly illuminating are the first three chapters, where Zelensky sustains engagements with song and the ways in which it absorbed class, ethnic, generational, and ideological difference into an amalgamated Russian identity. In chapter 1, Zelensky analyzes the programs of the “Russian Evenings” that took place in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s alongside recordings of the performers they featured, such as Olena Voron ova. This analysis reveals some of the most intriguing ironies of the émigrés’ self-presentation. Though most of the First Wave émigrés were ethnic Russians from the upper classes, they represented themselves aurally through the music of the peasantry in folk song, and of one of Russia’s marginalized ethnic minorities in “gypsy” romance. The glorification of the “folk” is perhaps unsurprising, since the First Wave émigrés were not only presenting themselves as Russian to themselves and their host country but also asserting that they were preserving the real Russia that the Soviets had tried to destroy. Zelensky demonstrates the paradoxical and constructed nature of this “real Russia” through descriptions of Voron ova’s stylized “folk” vocal production alongside the lavish, archaic “boyar” costumes donned by performers of this music, a phenomenon she aptly terms “class-dressing” (p. 48). The centrality of “gypsy” song to ideas of Russianness in the US is more complicated. Zelensky effectively blends affective and historical explanations of how the White Russian émigrés, who once occupied a hegemonic position vis-à-vis the marginalized Roma people in Imperial Russia, came to appropriate “gypsy” song during their own [End Page 67] period of itinerancy. In a compelling summary of the genre’s cathartic appeal, Zelensky describes “the gypsy romance as simultaneous instigator and alleviator of toska,” that...