Representing Russia's Orient

Abstract

This book examines the musical ramifications of Russia’s nineteenth-century expansion to the east and south and explores the formation and development of Russian musical discourse on Russia’s own Orient. It traces the transition from music ethnography to art songs and discusses how various aspects of (music) ethnographies, folk song collections, music theories, and visual representations of Russia’s ethnic minorities, or inorodtsy, shaped Russian composers’ perception and musical representation of Russia’s oriental “others.” Situated on the periphery, minority peoples not only defined the geographical boundaries of the empire, its culture, and its music but also defined the boundaries of Russianness itself. Extensively illustrated with music examples, archival material, and images from long-forgotten Russian sources, this book investigates the historical, cultural, and musical elements that contributed to the formation and creation of Russia’s imperial identity. It delineates musical elements that have been adopted to characterize Russians’ own national hybridity. Three case studies—well-known leader of the Mighty Five Milii Balakirev, lesser known Alexander Aliab’ev, and the late-nineteenth-century composers affiliated with the Music-Ethnography Committee—demonstrate how and why, despite the overwhelming number of pejorative images and descriptions of inorodtsy, these composers decided to disregard their social and political differences and sometimes confused and combined diverse minorities’ identities with that of the Russian “self.” The analysis of the arrangements of folk songs of Russia’s eastern and southern minorities reveals the trajectory of the ways their music was treated, from denigration and “othering” to embracing peoples from all the provinces of the empire.