{"product_id":"defining-russia-musically-9780691070650","title":"Defining Russia Musically","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin devoted much of his career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and Soviet music in new and sometimes controversial ways. Defining Russia Musically 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 Russias \"national character\" can best be understood. Russian art music  like Russia itself  Taruskin writes  has \"always been tinged or tainted . . . with an air of alteritysensed  exploited  bemoaned  reveled in  traded on  and defended against both from within and from without.\" The authors 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.  Taruskin 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 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 chaptersChaikovsky and the Human  Scriabin and the Superhuman  Stravinsky and the Subhuman  and Shostakovich and the InhumanTaruskin offers especially thought-provoking insights  for example  on Chaikovskys status as the \"last great eighteenth-century composer\" and on Stravinskys espousal of formalism as a reactionary  literally counterrevolutionary move.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45666333687861,"sku":"ByrdShop_0691070652","price":55.13,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780691070650.jpg?v=1782428601","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/defining-russia-musically-9780691070650","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}