Representing Russia’s Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song Adalyat Issiyeva.

Abstract

At the heart of Adalyat Issiyeva’s impressively researched, richly documented, and persuasively argued new monograph lies a simple, yet powerful thesis: namely, that ‘Russia’s (musical) ethnographies about its Asian and Caucasian neighbors played a pivotal role in the formation and development of Russia’s own musical identity’ (p. 4). To be sure, the question of Russian musical orientalism is hardly new. In 1883, Vladimir Stasov identified the ‘eastern element’ as one of the features that distinguished Russian national music from that of western Europe, particularly the Austro-German tradition. More recently, studies by scholars such as Marina Frolova-Walker and Richard Taruskin have exposed the ideologies that shaped the emergence of Russian musical nationalism, including its oriental element, and Issiyeva duly incorporates their insights into her own analysis. What distinguishes her approach from almost all preceding scholarship, however, is the detailed attention it pays to ethnographic approaches to the music of the non-Russian peoples of the Russian empire, and its particular focus on the art song repertory, rather than the more familiar genres of opera and programme music (both orchestral and instrumental). As Issiyeva observes in her introduction: ‘little has been said about how the ethnographic knowledge and construction of the Russian Orient contributed to the formation of Russian identity in general, and to music identity in particular. Nineteenth-century music histories generally treated Russian music and Russia’s Asian music as separate, nonoverlapping categories’ (p. 5). While drawing productively on ideas advanced by Frolova-Walker and Taruskin, Issiyeva makes equal use of scholarship on British and French colonialism, and of work by historians of the Russian Empire, in order to fashion a thoughtful, flexible, and fruitful methodology.