"Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russian Music"

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Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russian MusicAuthor(s): Richard TaruskinSource: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 321-339Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/763585 .

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SOME THOUGHTS ON THE HISTORY ANDHISTORIOGRAPHY OF RUSSIAN MUSIC

RICHARDTARUSKINpreliminaryversion of this article was originallyread as a paperin asymposium organized by Malcolm H. Brown on "Fifty Years ofAmericanResearch n Slavic Music," given at the fiftieth nationalmeetingof the AmericanMusicological Society, on 27 October 1984. The otherparticipants n the symposiumand their topics were as follows: BarbaraKrader Slavic EthnicMusics), Milos Velimirovic(Slavic ChurchMusic),

Malcolm H. Brown (RussianMusic-What Has Been Done), LaurelFay(The Special Case of Soviet Music-Problems of Methodology), MichaelBeckerman Czech Music Research).MargaritaMazo was the respondent.My assigned topic for this symposiumwas "What Is To Be Done,"butbeing no Chernyshevsky, till less a Lenin, I took it on withreluctance.I know only too well the fate of researchprospectuses.All the ones I'veseen, whatever the field, have withinonly a few years takenon an aspectthat can be most charitablydescribed as quaint, and the ones that haveattempted o dictateor legislatethe activityof futuregenerationsof scholarscannotbe so charitablydescribed. It is not as thoughwe weretryingto finda complexmedical cureor a solution to the armsrace.We arenotcrusadingon behalf of any program;nor have we any overridinggoal that demandsthe subordinationof our individualpredilections o a team effort. We aresimply curious to know and understand he music we love as well as wepossibly can, andeagerto stimulate nterest n it. I, for one, am content tosit back and await the discoveries andinterpretationsf my colleagues, thedirectionof whose researchI am in no positionto predict.I love surprises.It seems fair to say, however, thatthe maincontributionof Americanscholarsto the studyof Russianmusicwill be interpretive ndcriticalratherthanphilologicalor factual. This for two reasons:one simpleandobvious,the othervery complex.The simple factor is practical. We will never have the freedom ofaccess needed to do fundamental ource researchon a grandscale. Thoseof us who are passionatelydrawn to problemsof textualcriticism or "cre-ative process" will do betterto concentrateon Ives or Beethoven than onChaikovskyor Musorgsky-and I say this in full recognitionof the accom-plishmentsof scholarslike JohnWiley and RobertOldani,Americanswhohave done excellent work on just these two Russians.' I have even done alittletextologicalworkon Musorgskymyself.2But I think t significantthat

'See R. John Wiley, Tchaikovsky'sBallets (London:Oxford UniversityPress, 1984). Oldani'sdissertation,New PerspectivesonMussorgsky's Boris Goduno"'' Michigan,1978), containsa chapteron "Stemmata," which has been publishedas "Editions of Boris Godunov" in Malcolm H. Brown,ed., Musorgsky: n Memoriam1881-1981 (Ann Arbor:UMI ResearchPress, 1982), pp. 179-214.2'"Little Star': An Etude in the Folk Style," in Musorgskv n Memoriam,pp. 57-84.321

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the MusorgskysourcesI investigatedare located in Parisandthe Chaikov-sky sources Wiley took as his startingpoint are in Cambridge,Massachu-setts. We Americanswill nevergain freedom of access to the mother ode,the archives of Moscow and Leningrad.We had best leave them to theSoviets, who, as we all know fromourpersonalexperience,aredeterminedthat if majordiscoveries are to be made there, then they will make them.And I think, in all fairness, we should let them, for it is in the area ofempirical source research thatRussian scholars are underthe fewest con-straints,and I thinkwe can all agreethatby and largetheirpublications nthis field-I am thinking,of course, of Findeizen,Lamm,Dianin, Orlova,andGozenpud among manyothers3-have been impressiveand (given therealitiesof Soviet life) reliableenough. Needless to say, we will never beable to document Balakirev'santi-Semitismor Glinka'smonarchism romSoviet publishedsources, but it would be unrealistic o expect that any ofus will be shown to the relevant documents n the archives,either.This bringsme to my complex factor, on which I will spend the restof this piece. There is no area of music historiographyhat is in greaterneed of fundamentalrevision than that of Russian music, and here thecorrectivecan only come from the West. I am not just talkingaboutsen-sational but trivialmatters ike the circumstances urroundingChaikovsky'sdeath.4 Nor am I talkingaboutsuch mattersof recentcontroversyas Shos-tokovich's purportedmemoirs,5which, however temptingas a source ofscurrilous informationand opinion, are at presenta source which no oneamong us would touch, in any professionalcapacity,with a ten-footpole,

3NikolaiFindeizen's monumental urveyof pre-nineteenth-centuryussianmusicalliterature.Och-erki po istorii muzykiv Rossii (2 vols., Moscow/Leningrad:Gosizdat, 1928-29) has never been sur-passed. A revision andupdatingby MilogVelimirovicof a half-century-oldranslationby S.W. Pring,commissioned by the American Council of Learned Societies but never published, is currentlyinprogress. Pavel Lamm's epoch-makingcriticaleditions of works by Musorgsky,Borodin and othersare well known. Sergei Dianin. son of one of Borodin'sclosest friends, publisheda complete editionof the composer's letters (Pis'ma A.P. Borodina [4 vols., Moscow: Gosizdat, 1928-1950]) and abiographywhich has been translated nto English(Borodin,. rans. RobertLord[London:OxfordUni-versityPress, 1963]). AlexandraOrlovahascompileddocumentary hroniclesa la Deutschfor a numberof nineteenth-centuryRussians. Her best known work of this kind is Trudy doi M.P. Musorgskogo(Moscow:Muzgiz. 1963), which has been translatedntoEnglish by Roy GuentherMusorgskv's Worksand Days [Ann Arbor: UMI ResearchPress, 1983]). AbramGozenpudis the foremost present-dayhistorianof the Russianoperaticstage. In seven volumes issued between 1959 and 1975. he chronicledthe musical theater n Russia from its beginningsto the Soviet period.His ballet-historian ounterpart,VeraKrasovskaia,has some half-dozensimilarvolumes of fundamentalmpiricalresearch o her credit.4The story of Chaikovsky'sforced suicide on accountof a homosexual liaison with a boy fromthe highest aristocracywas publishedby AlexandraOrlova almostimmediatelyuponher emigration othe West ("Tchaikovsky:The LastChapter,"MusicandLettersLXII(1981), 125-45) and was given,even before its publication n full, a huge play in the popularpress. Itsevidentiary upport s extremelyflimsy, however, and its uncriticalacceptanceby David Brownin his articleon the composerfor TheNew Grove, where the matter s set forth as if establishedbeyonddoubt, is one of thatdistinguishedpublication'smost serious lapses.5Testimonv:The Memoirsof DmitriShostakovichas Related to and Edited by SolomonVolkov,.trans. AntoninaW. Bouis (New York:Harper& Row, 1979).

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thanks to the work of one of my colleagueson the aforementionedpanel.6What I am talkingabout is ourgeneralunderstanding nd interpretation fthe whole phenomenonof Russia's emergenceas a producerof artmusic,and our culturalevaluationof the music she has produced.Here we mustconfrontnot only the extremelymendaciousandtendentioushistoriographythat emanates from the USSR, which many Westernscholarscontinuetorely upon far too uncritically,in my opinion, but also a greatmany unex-aminedassumptionsthat can cloud our own consciousnessand have pre-vented our view of Russian music and musical life from fully outgrowingits childhood.In 1939 Stravinskyasked, at the beginning of his lecture on "TheAvatarsof RussianMusic," "Why do we alwayshearRussian music spo-ken of in terms of its Russiannessrather hansimply in terms of music?"7The questionremainsrelevant our-and-a-halfecades ater,thoughof courseStravinsky'suse of the word "simply" is objectionable. It is preciselybecauseit's easy that we talk aboutRussian music in termsof its Russian-ness; and as we all know, nothing is harderthan to talk about music interms of music. I'm not at all surewe even want to do that, if the resultisgoing to be the kind of blinkered,ahistoricalandjargon-riddendiscoursethat often passes for "theory" or "analysis"-but that, of course, is an-otherstory.8Still, the habit of speakingof Russianmusic above all in terms of itsRussianness has ingrainedmany prejudicesand lazy habits of thought. Itis often taken for grantedthateverythingthat happened n Russianmusichas a direct relationship, positive or negative, to the national question,which questionis often very reductivelyconstrued n termsof "sources infolk song and churchchant," as AlfredSwan put it.9 This in turncan andoften does become a normativecriterion:an overtly quotationalnationalcharacteris taken as a mark of value or authenticity,and its absence,

6LaurelE. Fay, "Shostakovich versusVolkov:Whose Testimony'?" TheRussian ReviewXXXIX(1980), 484-93. This extremely important ritiquehas never, alas, been reprinted n a musicologicalpublication,with the result that innocentmusicologistscontinueto rely on Volkov's book. Fay hasshown that all of the pages of typescript signed as read and approvedby Shostakovichcontainedtranscriptsof materialpreviouslypublishedin the USSR, and thereforethat none of the sensationalnew materialin the volume bears even this much "testimony" as to its authenticity.As she furtherpointsout, moreover,even shouldthe authenticityquestionbe settled, theequallytroublesomequestionof veracityremains. A greatdeal of evidencesuggeststhatin his lastyearsShostakovich,with a historyof collaborationwith the Soviet regime that he was desperate o live down, becameextremelyimage-conscious, in ways thatare reflectednot only in his memoirs,both authenticated nd not, but in suchmattersas the choice of texts to set to music, etc.7IgorStravinsky,Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. ArthurKnodel and IngolfDahl (New York:Vintage Books, 1959), p.95.8Itis well told by Kerman n his vociferoussquib "How We Got IntoAnalysis andHow To GetOut,"CriticalInquiryVII(1980), 311-22; also in KingsleyPriceed. On CriticizingMusic (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 38-54, underthe title "The State of Academic MusicCriticism."

9I.e., in the subtitle to his posthumoushistory,RussianMusic (New York:Norton, 1973). Thisratherchaotic melange, in which rare insights rub shoulders with bald misstatementsof fact, surelyrepresents he state of its author'snotes at the time of his death, not the book he meant to give us. Itspublicationwas a dubious service to the memoryof a greatscholar.

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conversely, as a markof valuelessness.'?The result is our tendencyto usethe word Russianin comparativeor superlative orms:this is a "very Rus-sian" tune, so-and-so is the "most Russian" composer,and so forth. Notonly musiciansdo this, of course. One non-musicianwho did it delightfullywas JohnUpdike,who, returningrom a StateDepartmentourof the SovietUnion, exclaimed enthusiasticallyto an interviewer, "Russia is so Rus-sian!"" But what Updike said with tongue in cheek is maintainedwithdeadly solemnityby so many musiciansabout, let us say, Glinka. It is onhis use of folklorethat his statusas "foundingfather"of Russian music isusually said to depend. And when that status gets challenged in a sim-plistically revisionist spirit, as it does from time to time, it is usually bynoting the frequency with which earlierRussian composers, all the wayfrom Verstovskyback to Matinskyand Pashkevich,quotedfolk songs intheir operas. A dissertationby a well-known student of Russian music,entitled"The Influenceof Folk-Songon RussianOperaUpto andIncludingthe Time of Glinka," is devoted to providingGlinka with an indigenouspatrimony, urning he father,as it were, into a son.12 Butthis view distortsthe pictureboth of the earliermusic andof Glinka. The differencebetweentheirrespectiveemploymentsof folklorewas real, and not simply a matterof degree but of kind-this is somethingto which I shall return.But whatmakes Glinka a founding fatherhas most of all to do not with his beingthe "formulatorof the Russianmusical language,"13whateverthat maymean, but ratherwith the fact that he was the first Russiancomposer toachieve world stature.In short, with GlinkaRussian music did not departfrom Europe, but precisely the opposite-it joined Europe.In the contextof the usualhistoriographical latitudes,this statementmay have a ring of

"'GeraldAbraham, orexample,dismissesthe work of theforeignmusicianswhofurnishedmusicalentertainments o the eighteenth-centuryRussian court by noting that "they neither influencednor,except in a few doubtfulcases, were they influencedby, churchmusic or folk-music," with the resultthat "it can hardlybe said thatthey contributedmuchor directlyto the music of the Russianpeople"(The Traditionof WesternMusic [Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1974],.pp. 49-50). But thisis more or less like Dante's consigningthe Greekphilosophers o the higherreachesof Hell. Besides,who are "the Russian people'"?Does this category include only peasants'?Then Musorgskynevercontributed o theirmusic either. Abraham'scareless criterionof value is preciselythat of Leo Tolstoy,(though, obviously, throughno fault of Tolstoy's orAbraham's)which in turnconditioned he repressiveartspolicy of the Soviet state. For a philosophyof art that drawsits normativevalues from outside artis always susceptibleto totalitarianperversion.Fora discussionof the Tolstoyanrootsof Soviet musicesthetics see my review of Molchanov's The Dawns Are Quiet Here ("CurrentChronicle," MusicalQuarterlyLXII [1976]., 105-15).

''Jane Howard,"Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?"Life, LXI, no. 19 (4 November1966), 81.'2The authorof this 1961 Oxford dissertationhas also publishedhis findings, andpropagatedhisviewpointon Glinka's patrimony, n a numberof articles. See GeraldSeaman,"RussianFolk-songinthe EighteenthCentury," Music & LettersXL (1959), 253-60; idem, "The NationalElementin EarlyRussian Opera, 1779-1800," Music & Letters XLII (1961), 252-62; idem, "Folk-song in RussianOperaof the 18thCentury," Slavonicand East EuropeanReviewXII, no. 96 (December 1962), 144-57. A good correctiveto this viewpoint(which is thatof most Soviet writersas well) is given in SimonKarlinsky,"Russian Comic Opera n the Age of Catherine heGreat," 19thCenturyMusicVII (1984),318-25. The sources of the genre and its treatmentof various social types (which accounts for itscitationsof variousindigenousmusical styles) is therepersuasively racedto the Frenchtheater.13Gerald eaman, History of RussianMusic, vol. I (New York: FrederickA. Praeger, 1967), p.155.

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paradox,but it is exactly what Yury Keldysh, for example, had in mindwhen he wrote that Glinka, not Verstovskyand not Pashkevich, formed"the boundarybetweenthe past and the future of Russianmusic."14 Withthe advent of a Russiancomposer whom his compatriotscould regardasbeing "on a level (Yes! On a level!) withMozart,with Beethoven, or withanyoneone chooses,"15Russianmusicianswere, so to speak,enfranchised.They no longerhad to feel that theirs was an altogether nsignificant,mar-ginal or callow culture,althoughat the same time no Russian "classical"musicianhas ever been wholly withoutan inferioritycomplex vis-a-vis thevenerablemusical traditionsof WesternEurope-and this was as true ofRussiancomposersof world-wideprestige like Chaikovskyor even Stra-vinsky, as it was of more strictly regional talents-a neurosis that oftenfound its outlet either in belligerencetowardEuropeon the one hand, orrevulsion at Russia on the other.Now this differencein perspectiveon Glinka-the Western view thatregardshim as the firstauthenticallynationalRussiancomposerversus thenative view that sees him as the first universalgenius of music to havecome from Russia-is trulya critical one. For if Glinka is valuedonly forhis nativetraits-certainly not the traitshe valued mosthighlyin himself!-then a Chaikovskywill always seem an ambiguousand somewhatsuspectfigure, to say nothing of a Scriabin. Just look at the way these two aretreated n any generalmusic historytextbook n the West. Chaikovsky,oneof the most conspicuous of all composers of any country in the actualconcert ife of the lasthundredyears, is givena total of twenty-twoscatteredlines in the text by which most Americanmusic historystudents n collegetoday are still educated,and he is introduced verywherewith an apology.In the chapteron nineteenth-centurynstrumentalmusic, Chaikovsky, to-getherwith Dvorak,is brought n at the veryend, thus:"They have a placein this chapterbecause, althoughtheir music is in some respects an out-growthof nationalist deas, their symphoniesare essentially in the line ofthe GermanRomantic radition." And in the chapteron "Nationalism,OldandNew," Chaikovsky s sneaked n once more as a thoroughlyperipheralfigure: "Tchaikovsky's two most popular operas . . . seem to have beenmodelled afterMeyerbeer,VerdiandBizet, thoughnationalsubjectsandafew traces of nationalmusical idioms occur in both of these and, much

'4storiia russkoimuzyki,I (Moscow/Leningrad:Muzgiz, 1948), 369.'5TheDiaries of Tchaikovsky, rans.WladimirLaKond(New York:Norton, 1945), p.250 (entryof 27 June 1888).

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more conspicuously, in some of his less familiar works for the theater."16Poor Chaikovsky!He is implicitly denigrated or not being as "national"as his "kuchkist" rivals, but all the same is ghettoized along with them inthe inevitable chapter on nationalism. Confined as he is to the ghetto,Chaikovskyis rarely comparedwith such counterparts s Brahmsor Bizet,except to note his ostensible derivationsfrom them;he is comparedonlywith fellow denizens of the ghetto, next to whom he is seen as "assimi-lated" and therefore nauthentic.The comparison s thusdoublyinvidious.And ironic, too, for during his lifetime Chaikovsky was accepted as aEuropeanmaster,honored with degrees from Britishuniversities,andwiththe invitationto open New York's CarnegieHall. My objecthere is not tovindicate Chaikovsky against naive and irrelevantcharges-though it iscertainlyinterestingto note that in Nina Bachinskaia'ssurvey of Russianfolk song in the work of Russiancomposers,17Chaikovskycomes in second(afterthe longer-livedRimsky-Korsakov)n the sheer numberof such ap-propriations.And the Russians, obviously, have never had any troubleaccepting Chaikovskyas a national treasure.My object is only to showhow conventionalhistoriographical ttitudesandcategorieshave madethismosteminentof Russiancomposersa curiouslydifficult morselfor Western

16Donald ay Grout,A Historyof WesternMusic, revised edition(New York:Norton, 1973), pp.593, 635. It may be thoughta dubiousor unseemlytactic to criticize in the presentconnection a bookthat makes no pretenseto a specialized viewpointon Russian music. But it is precisely in textbooksthatcare mustbe taken not to foster invidiousprejudicesordoublestandards.Withrespect o nationalismin music, Groutposits a double standard n the baldest terms (pp. 633-34):'The results of the earlynineteenth-centuryGermanfolk song revival were so thoroughlyabsorbed nto the fabricof Germanmusic as to become an integral part of its style, which in that period was the nearest thing to aninternationalEuropeanmusical style. Thus, although Brahms, for instance, made arrangementsofGerman olk songs and wrote melodies that resemble folk songs, andalthoughDebussycalled him themost Germanicof composers, we still do not thinkof him as any more a 'nationalist'composerthanHaydn, Schubert,Straussor Mahler,all of whom likewise more or less consciously made use of folkidioms." He goes on to "exonerate" the nationalqualitiesof French and Italianmusic, and even thePolish elements in Chopin ("for the most partonly exotic accessories to a style fundamentally os-mopolitan"). It would be tedious to sort out the logical fallacies here; suffice it to say that in myopinionto indoctrinate tudents o regard"whatwe think" as any sort of historiographicalruth,ratherthan train them even in the early phases of study to regard"what we think" as an object invitingexaminationandchallenge ("falsification," as Popperwould say), is dogmatic, to say the least.17Narodnye pesni v tvorchestve russkikh kompozitorov (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1962).

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music historians o swallow, obsessed as they (we) are with the idea of the"mainstream."18This is a problemof long standing. Carl Dahlhaus, whose taste forilluminatingparadox s well known, hasjustly observed, in the challengingdiscussion of nationalismand music in his recentlytranslated"studies inthe music of the later nineteenthcentury," that "the national substanceofRussian . . . music was a condition of its international worth, not an in-validation."19 He was speakingfrom an idealist point of view, and wenton to say that "it would surely be inappropriateo say 'coloring' insteadof 'substance,' and 'commercial success' instead of 'worth'." But thesedistinctionsseem a bit pat (Dahlhaus,in any case, neverdefines them)and

do not really stand up in the face of the actualRezeptionsgeschichteofRussian music. On the contrary,we often find that it was precisely thesurface color that attracted nternationalaudiences, sometimes to Russianchagrin. Diaghilev, for example, recognizingthat the music of his belovedChaikovskywas box-office poison in Parisdespitewhathe perceivedto beits profoundnationalsubstance, suppressedhis desire to presentThe Nut-crackerandTheSleepingBeautyin his first ballet season (1909)20in favorof ephemeral,highly-colored "salades russes" (as Walter Nouvel sneer-ingly called them)21drawn from scores by Glinka, Arensky, Taneyev,Rimsky-Korsakov,Musorgsky,Glazunov andCherepnin,plus a couple of

"It seems fair to say thatnowhere is the distinctionbetween mainstream ndperipherydrawnwithgreater rigor than in the United States, a situation that may reflect our own nationalinsecurities, aswell as the continuing nfluence of the generationof CentralEuropean mmigrantson the developmentof the disciplineof musicologyhere. (Grout,for example, seems to have inheritedhis double standardre nationalism from Einstein, who in his Music in the Romantic Era [New York: Norton, 1947]distinguishes n his chapterorganizationbetween "UniversalismWithinthe National"--i.e., Germany,Italy, France,andChopin,thehonorary itizen-of-the-world-and theghettochapter,whereChaikovskycomes in for the usual double-barrelledejection.)These prejudicesobtainbothin the domain of musichistory and that of music analysis. Nor are they confined to nineteenth-centurytudies: witness thedivision of Reese's Music in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1954) into two halves, the firstdevoted to "The Developmentof the CentralMusicalLanguage," and the second to the peripheries.While it is a historical fact that what became the musical linguafranca of the Renaissancedevelopedfirst in France and the Low Countries,to organizethe book as Reese has done means to discuss thecontemporariesFevin and Senfl, to pick one example, some four hundredpages apart.It is inevitablethat Senfl will seem less important hanFevin in such a context, thoughin realityhis importance,andthe qualityof his work, was arguablythe greater.Discussing the Reese book one day, a specialist inearly English music who was educated in Englandbut now teaches in the United States remarked ome that only when she got here did she realize that her field was a peripheralarea! In reply to theprobableobjectionthat"central" and "peripheral"areby now only value-freehistoriographicalabelsof convenience,I wouldsuggestthat t is becauseof themthatmany f notmost Westernmusic historiansare unable, personal preferencesaside, to recognize in Chaikovskya composer comparable n statureto Brahms. If the reader reacts to this suggestion with incredulityor indignation(Einstein certainlywouldhave!), perhapshe has isolated withinhimselfa reasonthatourdisciplinecontinuesso tenaciouslyto cling to the invidiousdistinction.19BetweenRomanticismand Modernism, rans.MaryWhittall(Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1980), p. 84.20Forevidence of Diaghilev's early intentions to stage these ballets, see the press interviewscollected by I. S. Zilbershteinand V. A. Samkov in Sergei Diagilev i russkoeiskusstvo,I (Moscow:Izobratitel'noe skusstvo, 1982), 209-10.21Sergei Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet 1909-1929, trans. Vera Bowen (London:Constable:1953). p. 8. A salade russe, of course, is a Frenchdish.

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little snippets from Chaikovsky's great Maryinskyballets. The featuredChaikovskywork, the finale of the divertissemententitled Le Festin, wasthe last movementof Chaikovsky'sSecond Symphony,a set of variationsa la Kamarinskaiaon a "Little Russian" dancetune,perhapsChaikovsky'smost "kuchkist"-soundingscore, and thereforeunrepresentative.Like somany others after him, Diaghilev sneakedChaikovskyin with apologies,fearfulthathis lack of national"coloring" would threaten he "commercialsuccess" of the Paris venture.Butjust what shall we call the "nationalsubstance," then? Can it bedefinedin any butmystical, preternaturalerms?Dahlhausmost likely meantthe presence of traits that define a "nationalschool." But need these bequotationalor coloristic at all? And do they necessarilyderive from lower-class traditions?Any connoisseurof nineteenth-century usicalstyles wouldcertainlyrecognize, say, the musicalidiomof Stravinsky'searlySymphonyin E-flat (1905-07) as emphatically"Russian," despite its near-total ackof any resonancefrom chantor folk song, for it is saturatedwith reminis-cences of the styles of Rimsky-Korsakov,GlazunovandChaikovsky.Thesophisticatedpersonal styles of these men-for example, Chaikovsky'stechniqueof orchestration,or Rimsky's very characteristic evices of chro-matic harmonyand modulation-as manifestedboth in their own worksandin those of theirdisciples andepigones, arewhatlargelydetermineoursense of a Russian"school" in the late nineteenthcentury.And our senseof this school style can in fact be pushed back retrospectivelyas far asGlinka.22To recognize as Russianonly an oral or vernacular raditionandits conscious (and usually superficial)assimilationsin "high art" is nar-rowmindedand often absurd.We can see this easily enough in the case ofthe fatuous Moscow critic who complainedof AlexanderSerov's operaJudith, which is set in ancientJudeaand is peopled by Hebrewsand As-syrians, that its music was not Russianenough.23But before we scoff athim we should check to see what our own house is made of. Are we notstill liable to mistakenationalsubjectmatterfor nationalstyle; to call, forexample, thatmock-kuchkist inaleto Chaikovsky'sSecondhis "most fullyRussian" work?24Orto thinkwe have made a criticalpointaboutScriabinmerelyby notingthe lackof folkloricinfluenceon his style?25By Scriabin'stime, Russianmusic had been quite thoroughly"denationalized,"thoughits "school" spirithad, if anything,increased.26And in any event, listing

22Fora very neat delineationof some of these school traits,see GeraldAbraham,"The Elementsof RussianMusic," Music & LettersIX (1928), 51-58.23"A Russianoperaby a Russiancomposercontainednota Russiannote"(Sovremennaiaetopis',1865, no. 35), quoted in Nikolai Findeizen,AleksandrNikolaevlich erov:Ego zhizn muzykalnaiadeiatel'nost' (2nd ed., Moscow:Jurgenson,1904), p. 104.24DavidBrown, s.v. "Tchaikovsky," The New Grove, XVIII, p.611.25Grout,p.640.A few recent publicationson Scriabinhave finally begun to show that he has adefinite place within Russian traditions, which means that finally other Russian traditionsthan thefolkloric are gaining recognitionby Westernmusicologists. See MartinCooper, 'AleksandrSkryabinand the Russian Renaissance," Studi musicali (972), 327-56; Malcolm H. Brown, "Skriabin andRussian'Mystic' Symbolism," 19th CenturyMusic III (1979), 42-51.26Theterm "denationalization"was coined in 1910 by the critic ViacheslarKaratyginin hisobituaryfor Balakirev Apollon, 1910, no.10 [September],p. 54).

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the things a given phenomenon s not will never tell us, after all, what itis.Now just as it is assumed that Russian music is, or ought to be, ipsofacto "coloredRussian," it is furtherassumedthatnationalism,or nationalcharacter,or the strivingfor a native idiom, or call it what you will, wassomething unique, or at least especially endemic, to Russia, or if not toRussia, then to EasternEurope,or if not to EasternEurope,then to "pe-ripheralcenters" generally.It is one of the assumptions, n fact, thatkeepsthese centersperipheral n our minds. But is it true?Therewas no greaternationalistin nineteenth-centurymusic than Wagner-"that German Sla-vophile," as Stasov called him27-unless it was Verdi. And, as already

implied above, we could easily add the names of any number of leading"mainstream"composers to the list of nationalists-Weber, Schumann,Brahms,Berlioz, practicallyanyone you like, fromBeethovento Debussy.It was precisely because nationalismwas universallyheld to be a positivevalue in nineteenth-centuryEurope-because nationalism,to put it ironi-cally, was international-that Dahlhauscould maintainthat the "nationalsubstance" of Russian (or Czech, or Spanish, or Norwegian)music was"a condition of its internationalworth." Nineteenth-centuryRussianna-tionalism, in fact, and not just the musical variety, was itself a foreignimport.Andthe preciseway in whichGlinka's use of folkloredifferedfromthatof earlier Russiancomposers-to wit, that it came from the mouths ofmain characters,not just decorativepeasantchoristersand coryphees, andthat it provideda mediumfor tragicaction,notjust comedy-was preciselythe way in which the typical Romanticopera differed from those of theeighteenthcentury, and reflected above all a change in viewpoint on thenature of folklore-one that emanatednot from Russia but from WesternEurope(i.e., from Rousseau and Herder)-that folklore represented"thenation" and not just "the peasantry."That the latteridea died hard evenin Russia is reflected in the oft-quotedbut little-understood omment o-verheardand repeatedat the premiereof A Life for the Tsar-that it was"de la musiquedes cochers."27aAnd it is furtherreflectedif we compareA Life for the Tsar with an operathat was writtenmore than forty yearslater-Evgenii Onegin, where the folkloristicelement is presentedexactlyas it mighthave been in a courtoperaof the eighteenthcentury.Especiallytelling is the thirdscene, where a groupof berry-pickingpeasantchoristersprovidea decorative frame for one of the turningpoints in the dramathatconcerns the "real people" of the opera, Evgenii's rejectionof Tatiana.

27V.V. Stasov, Sobrannyesochineniia, III (St. Petersburg,1894), 275.27"Coachmenwere not chosen for this sally at random.Their singing (to encouragetheir horsesand frightenwolves) was proverbial,and had been often representedon the Russianmusical stage inthe past, beginningwith EvstigneiFomin'ssingspielThe Post Drivers(Yamshchiki a podstave, 1788).In fact, thoughan expressionof social snobbery,not a musicalcritique,the remarkunwittinglyhit themark: the tune Susaninsings at his first entrance n Act I had been takendown by Glinkafrom thesinging of a coach driver n the town of Luga(see Mikhail IvanovichGlinka,Memoirs,trans.RichardB. Mudge [Norman:Universityof OklahomaPress, 1963], p. 100). The singingof the Russian coach-men was often noted by 18th- and 19th-centuryEuropean ravellers o Russia, includingBerlioz andMme. de Stael.

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But of course the music Evgeniiand Tatianasing is just as "Russian"as the music sung by the peasants.It is modelled on the domestic music ofthe early nineteenth-centuryandowningclass, thepomeshchiki,as Stravin-sky understood so well when he fashioned his own Mavra on the sameRussian model28-and experienced hatveryfiasco with the ParisianpublicDiaghilev had expertly avoided a dozen years earlier. What the Parisianpublic never understood-what the Westernpublic will never understandunless we tell them-is thatRussia is large. It containsmultitudes:multi-tudes of social classes and occupations,and multitudesof indigenousmu-sical styles. It is no wonder thatRussians like Glinka, DargomyzhskyandChaikovsky,plusStravinskyandDiaghilev,whocame fromthepomeshchikclass and loved its petty-aristocraticalues, shouldhave loved andhonoredits musicalartifactsas well, andconsideredthemrepresentative f the bestthere was in Russia.To appreciate he Russiannessof a Chaikovskyor a Stravinsky,then,meansbeingable to make finerdiscriminations mongauthenticallyRussianmusical idioms. One of Dahlhaus' most interestingspeculations nvolves adifferent kind of discrimination."Seriousconsideration houldbe given,"he writes, "to the possibility that the differentmanifestationsof musicalnationalism were affected by the types of political nationalismand thedifferentstages in political evolution reachedin each country:by the dif-ference between those states where the transitionfrom monarchyto de-mocracywas successful (GreatBritain,France)andunsuccessful(Russia),orbetween states formedby the unificationof separateprovinces(Germany,Italy) and those formedby the secession of new nation-states rom an oldempire (Hungary,Czechoslovakia,Poland, Norway, Finland)." He goeson to admit that "it is uncertainwhetherthere areany correlations,and, ifso, whetherthey are at all significant;as yet hardlyany attentionhas beenpaidto the possibilityof theirexistence, since musicalnationalismhasbeenapproachedalmost exclusively from the point of view of writingnationalhistories of music."29 His particularbreakdown of nationalismmay bequestioned, but the thoughtis indeed a stimulatingone. And here, in thedomainof "comparativenationalism,"is where Western cholarsmayhavesomething unique to add to the historiography f Russianmusic, since inRussia the historiography f Russian music is irrevocably nsularand itselfnationalistic,devotedexclusively to the writingof "nationalhistory," em-phasizing only "what is nationallyuniqueor distinctive," as Dahlhausputsit, out of all proportion o reality, or, in manyinstances, to truth.Russianmusicologists specialize either in russkaia muzyka or in zarubezhnaia mu-zyka-"foreign music." I know of no Russian scholar of music historywith a dualspecialty, still less one who specializesin settingRussianmusicwithin a world context-as GeraldAbrahamhas recentlydone so compre-

28Cf. Igor Stravinskyand RobertCraft, Expositionsand Developments (Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress, 1981), pp. 82-83. Still, even Stravinskymuddles things a bit when he says thatpomeshchiks'music is the "contraryof folk music,"somethinga little hard to imagine.29BetweenRomanticismand Modernism,pp. 89-90.

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indeedis said of him in the choralapotheosisat the end of Glinka'sopera)."No wonderA Life for the Tsarbecame a national nstitution, he obligatoryopenerto every season at the ImperialTheatersof Moscow and St. Peters-burg,whichwerethe legal propertyof theTsar,supported ndadministeredby the Ministryof the ImperialHousehold. Nor is it any wonder that theoriginal libretto,by BaronG.V. Rozen, the secretary o the heir apparent(the futureAlexanderII) had to be changedfor Soviet consumption.33Forit is a concoction that was notjust abhorrento Soviet Communists.It wasabhorrent o nineteenth-century ourgeois liberals, too, like VladimirSta-sov.34I daresay it would be abhorrent o you andme. This, then, was thebeginningof the Russiannationalschool in music. It was born n thecontextof a state ideology in which nationality was understood in patriotic anddynasticterms linked with the defense of serfdom.It was in connectionwith OfficialNationality hat Nikolai ordered hatRussianreplace French as the official languageat court functions, and agreat programof Russification-the spreadingof Russian language andcustomsin the non-Russianareasof the Empire-got underway. The myst-ical identificationof the Russianlanguagewith the "spiritand characterofthe people," an idea borrowedfrom the English and GermanRomantics,for whom it servedquite differentends, became a dominant heme amongthe Official Nationalists. "Language is the invisible image of the entirepeople, its physiognomy," wroteStepanShevyriov,Glinka'scontemporaryand Russia's leading literaryscholar of the period.35Muchthe same couldbe said of musical vernaculars.Glinka's epoch-makingaccomplishment,the raising of Russianpopularmusic "to the level of tragedy," as PrinceVladimirOdoevsky put it at the time of the premiere,36was carriedout inthe name of politicalreaction.Official Nationality should not be confused, however, with Slavo-philism. Both Slavophiles and Westernizerswere opponentsof the stateideology, and the tendencyto view the variouspoliticalcampsof Russianmusic in termsof this classic dualismof Russian ntellectualhistory,tempt-ing though it may be in its simplicity, is one of the most reductive anddistortingerrorscommonlycommittedby modernscholarswho write about

33Toappreciatehow completelymonarchistwas the ideaof nationality mbodied n Glinka'sopera,considerthe quatrainon which the choral finale reaches its culmination:Slav'sia, slav'sia nash RusskiiTsar'! Glory, glory to you, our RussianTsar!Gospodomdannynam Tsar' Gosudar'! OurSovereign, given us by God!Da budetbessmertentvoi Tsarskiirod! May your royal line be immortal!Da im blagodenstvuetRusskiinarod! May the Russianpeople prosper hrough t!34Hewrote to Balakirev(21 March 1861): "Perhapsno one has ever done a greaterdishonortoour people thanGlinka, who by means of his greatmusic displayedas a Russian herofor all time thatbase groveller Susanin, with his canine loyalty, his hen-like stupidity ["owl-like" in the originalRussian] . . . the apotheosisof the Russian bruteof the Muscovitestrain and of the Muscoviteera... .But therewill come a time when . . . Russia will cling ardently o Glinka but will recoil from thiswork, at the time of whose creationhis friendsand advisers, good-for-nothingsof Nicholas l's time,insinuatedtheir base poison into his talent" (A.S. Liapunova,ed., M.A. Balakirev i V. V. Stasov:PerepiskaI [Moscow: Muzyka, 1970], 130).35Riasanovsky,p. 133.36V.F. Odoevsky, Muzvkal'no-literaturnoeasledie (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1956), p. 119.

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Russian music in the nineteenthcentury.37For one thing, the terms aremost properly applied to Glinka's period, not to that of Chaikovskyandthe Five. More important,however, the terms are quite beside the pointwhen comparingcomposersor critics of artmusic, for merelyengaging insuch activities made one a "Westernizer," however great or small one'scommitment to cultivating a "style russe." For the question of Slavophileversus Westernizer s in essence a questionof attitudes oward nstitutions,and once one is writing, say, for the symphonyorchestra,the basic ac-ceptanceof and commitment o the musicalEuropeanization f Russia hasbeen made. To find real musical Slavophilesin nineteenth-centuryRussiaone would have to look to the ranks of musical folklorists and ethnogra-phers, who had only a very limited impacton the forms and practicesofRussianartmusic before the twentiethcentury.(I am thinkinghere not ofsuchcomposer-collectors s Balakirevor Villebois, but of scholarcollectorssuch as Melgunov, Palchikov and Linyova.38)Even here, of course, wefind ironies, as everywhere. A figure much honoredin the Soviet Uniontoday is the balalaika virtuosoVasily Andreyev(1861-1918), after whomvarious folk instrumental nsembleshave been named.Andreyevdid muchfor the spreadof the balalaika n his time, and did much to raise the levelof playing on it to a "professional" level. But is this not alreadyan am-

37The nappropriatenessf these termsto any discussionof music is alreadyapparentn the self-created paradoxto which writers who use them love to call attention.Thus, for example, RichardAnthonyLeonard: All this [i.e., therivalryof the variousMoscowandSt. Petersburgmusicalfactions]was anotherphase of the familiar issue which has so often split Russian intellectuals-Slavophilesversusadmirers f Westernculture.But here therewas an important ifference.Slavophileswereusuallylooked upon as the conservatives, . . . while the Westernerswere consideredcosmopolitanliberals.Butin themusic life of theeighteen-sixties heoppositewas true. The nationalistsweretheprogressives,and the cosmopolitanWesternerswere the conservatives" (A History of RussianMusic [New York:Macmillan, 1956], p. 73). Confrontedwith Chaikovsky'sresidencein Moscow and the kuchka's lo-cation in St. Petersburg,Leonard s forced to compound he paradox o the pointof uttermeaningless-ness: "Even the cities becameswitchedaround,addingto the complication.Petersburg, tself a newly-manufacturedmitationof the West, became the centre of nationalism n music;while the old conserv-ative ultra-RussianMoscow became the seat of a cosmopolitaneclecticism." There have lately beensome welcome correctives.RobertRidenourhas publisheda full-lengthstudyof St. Petersburgmusicalpolitics in the nineteenthcenturywhich concludes with the salutaryreflection that thatfermentis bestviewed as a whole, and that its signal accomplishmentwas that it "expandedthe scope and resourcesof musical life in the Russian capital, forced the public and the governmentto take Russian musicseriously, and made music a respectable, egally recognizedprofession."The authorpointedlyremarksthat"this, . . .rather hanany supposedreflectionof theconflict betweenSlavophilesandWestemizers,is the most significantpartof the storyof the musicalrivalriesof the 1860s for a generalunderstandingof nineteenth-centuryRussianhistory"(Nationalism,Modernismand PersonalRivalry n 19th-CenturYRussianMusic [AnnArbor:UMI ResearchPress, 1981 , pp. 234-35). Even moreforthrightly,RichardHoops has assertedthat "the designation 'Slavophile' has no direct applicationto Russian music"("Musorgskyand the PopulistAge," in Musorgskv n Memoriam,p. 272), perhapsan overstatementof the case, but anexaggeration n a good cause. BothHoopsandRidenour, t is perhapsworthpointingout, are culturalhistoriansrather hanmusicologists.38Thesewere the collectorswho, beginning n the late 1870s, tried to makeaccurate ranscriptionsof Russianpolyphonicfolk-singing. Their work was receivedwith hostility by all conservatorymusi-cians, whose ranksby then includedRimsky-Korsakov.Elsewhere I have tried to show thatLinyova'swork, the most accuratebecause she was the first Russianfolkloristto use the phonographas fieldequipment, had a direct influence on Stravinsky.See "From Subject to Style: Stravinskyand thePainters,"in JannPasler,ed., Stravinsky: CentennialStudies(Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress,forthcoming).

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biguous aim? And all the more ambiguousdo his activities look when wenote the way Andreyevstandardized he constructionof the modernbala-laika, creatinga so-called "concert" instrument n six sizes out of whichhe formedan orchestra,for which he composedwaltzes andeven arrangedthe Peer Gynt suite, along with selections from Carmen.39 The spuriousfolklorismpioneeredby Andreyev s pursuedwith a vengeancein the USSRtoday, with its "orchestrasof folk instruments,"for which Soviet com-posers (notably Sergei Vasilenko),have writtensymphoniesand concertos.Nonetheless there was one issue that did occasion a genuine Slavo-phile/Westernizer plit amongRussian musiciansin the nineteenthcenturybecause it was preeminentlyan issue of institutions. And that was thefounding by Anton Rubinsteinof Russia's first conservatoryof music in1862. But even here the split was not so muchover the questionof nation-alism as it was over thatof the professionalization f Russian musical lifeunderthe aegis of a baptizedJew, who was using the Conservatoryas away of advancinghis own social standingand that of his fellow profes-sionals throughthe instrumentalityof an officially recognized course oftrainingat the end of whichone receiveda bureaucraticitle("Free Artist,"the same degree as was grantedby the ImperialAcademy of Fine Arts)equivalent to a mid-rangecivil-service rank. This entitled the bearer tovariousprivileges both pecuniaryand social, the latterincludingthe rightto live in big cities, the rightto a respectfulsecond-person-pluralorm ofaddressfrom social superiors,and the like.40The conservatorymovementhad originated n the French Revolutionand had been carriedthenceto Germany.The St. PetersburgConservatorywas incidentallyby no meansthe last to be foundedin Europe.It was onlytwenty years younger than the Leipzig Conservatory,and was ten yearsolder than the conservatoryin Weimar, Liszt's city. Oppositionto con-servatories,by no meansconfinedto Russia, came largelyfrom those whoobjectedto their levelling institutionalcharacter.In Russia, the most hys-tericalopponentof this spreadingplague was Stasov, whom I describedalittle earlieras a bourgeoisliberal. He, too, was largeand containedmul-titudes. He publishedan article in the St. PetersburgnewspaperNorthernBee-one of Russia's most reactionary heets, which had been a strongholdof Official Nationality-in which he soundedoff like a particularly hrilland bilious Slavophile. "The time has come," he proclaimed, "to stoptransplantingoreign institutions o our countryand to give some thoughtto whatwould reallybe beneficialand suitableto our soil and our nationalcharacter.The experience of Europeshows that while the lower schoolswhich confine themselves to teachingthe rudimentsof music are useful,the higher schools, academiesand conservatoriesare harmful.Is this ex-perience to be lost on us? Must we stubbornlyape what is done in other

39MariaTenisheva, Vpechatleniiamoei zhizni, (Paris: Russkoe Istorikogenealoegichesko-Ob-shchestvovo Frantsii, 1933), p. 294.4?Forsome details on the social standingof musiciansbefore and after the establishmentof theconservatory,see Ridenour,ChapterII.

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clear that the role of these models in the formationof Balakirev'smusicaltechnique and style was at least as fundamentalas anythingnationalornative.44Among the kuchkistsonly Musorgskyoccasionally sounds a bitxenophobicin his letters,withtheirrailleryagainst"Germanizing,""Teu-tonic cud-chewing," "Germantransitions,"andthe like.45 He does comeon at times like a nationalliberatorout to free his countryfrom an imper-ialistic yoke. But it was really academicFormenlehreat which he railed,and this was associatedin his mindwith Germanmusic mainlybecause ofthe Germanic staff at Rubinstein'sconservatory.It was the Conservatory, rom whichthey felt alienatedandexcluded,that the kuchkistshated, not "the West." The feeling, on the partof theseautodidactsand mavericks,that the professionalestablishment which alsoincluded the ItalianOperathat had been set up in St. Petersburgn 1843)was inimical to their interests, and thereforeto be opposed, is somethingthey had in common, after all, with the originalDavidsbiindlerand withtheir somewhat laterAmericancounterparts.And the frustrationshey feltin confrontingwhat they perceivedas anti-nationalprejudiceon the partofthe professionalestablishmentand its wealthyandaristocraticbackersweresimilar to those experiencedby many Americancomposersandconductorsin the earlytwentiethcentury.Likethem,the Russiansof the latenineteenthcentury tended to fight a discriminatory tatusquo by appealingto patri-otism-and to baser sentimentsas well. For while both sides of the Con-servatory ontroversy ouldclaim to be motivatedby patriotism ndnationalpride,46 only one side was racist-and this, too, is unfortunatelya largepart of what motivated musical nationalism in Russia, and not only inRussia, and continuesto motivate it to the present day. Serov used to callRubinstein's conservatory the "fortep' iannaia sinagoga"-the pianosynagogue47-and the Russian MusicalSociety thatsupported t the "YidMusikverein." He referred o its directoras one who "jabbersand scribblesin threeor four languages equally illiterately,since all these languagesareforeign to him,"48 as to all Jews. And surelythe Black Hundredsboastedno greateranti-SemitethanBalakirev,the one memberof the MightyFivewho might with a certainjustice be termed a Slavophile, at least in thelater, less active phases of his career. Balakirev,in fact, actuallyfounded

4See my "How the Acorn Took Root: A Tale of Russia." 19thCenturyMusic VI (1983), 189-212.45See, for example, his letter to Rimsky-Korsakovof 15 August 1868. in Jay Leyda and SergeiBertensson,TheMusorgskyReader(New York:Norton, 1947), pp. 119-21.46Rubinsteinpelled out his patrioticmotives and his Peter-the-Great-like rogram or the musicalsalvation of his homeland n an articleon Russiancomposerswhichhe published n the ViennaBlatterfiir Theater,Musikund Kunstin 1855. See "How the Acorn Took Root," p. 194.47See Ridenour,p.92. The phrase takes on an added resonance from the fact that in Russian,p'iannaia by itself means "drunk." Despite the fact that he had a Jewish grandmotheror perhapsbecause of it), Serov was always on the lookout for Jewish targets.Thus despite this admirationandemulationof Meyerbeer,hecharacteristicallyeferred o the latteras a "Yid charlatan" zhid-sharlatan).See his letterto Stasov of 28 October 1846, as cited in V.S. Baskin,A.N. Serov (Moscow:Jurgenson,1890), p. 28. For evidence of Glinka's Anti-Semitismsee Ridenour.p 83.48Letter o Feofil Tolstoy, cited in Russkaiastarina XVII (1874), p. 364.

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a folk-school of sorts, such as Stasov had describedin oppositionto theconservatory-the so-called Free Music School, where only "rudiments"were taught, where the whole faculty was ethnicallyRussian, and whereno Jew could apply for instruction.49So Russian musicalnationalism,"Official" or otherwise,had its darkside. Laterin the nineteenthcenturythe patronageof Russiannational artpassed from the court to jingoistic merchantpatronslike Pavel Tretiakovin painting,Savva Mamontov n theater,and, in music, MitrofanBeliaev,underwhose aegis the nationaland the professionalwere finallywedded ina rigidlysectarianguildof composersheadedby Rimsky-Korsakov,Liadovand Glazunov.50One of the more curious texts in the historyof Russianmusic is Glazunov's memoir of his first meetingwith Chaikovsky.51Thescion of the supposedlyprogressiveand national raditions f Russianmusicrecalledhis introductiono the most celebratedmemberof the first class tograduate rom Rubinstein'sconservatoryas one of the greatliberatingex-periencesof his life.These, then, are a few of the ironies and paradoxesthat need to besortedout in revising the historyof Russian music. And thatrevision, forobvious reasons, will have to take place in the West (one hopes, for na-tionalistic reasons of one's own, that it will take place in America), andnot in Russia. One also looks forwardto ever-increasing ophistication nthe analysis of Russian music, both as a way of accountingfor its Rus-sianness-no simple matterof folkishnessafterall, as we have seen-andas a way of viewing it, as Stravinskywould say, "simply as music," in alargerEuropeancontext. In particular,one looks forwardto the develop-ment of analyticaltechniquesthat do not condemn non-Germanmusic bytheirvery premises.52Thanks to the pioneeringwork of GordonMcQuereandthe othercontributors o his surveyof Russian TheoreticalThought n

49Anti-Semitism emainsa featureof Sovietmusicalnationalism,as exemplified by what is knownas the novaia fol'kloristicheskaiavolna ("new folkloristic wave"), a government-sanctioned vant-gardismof sorts thatdrawsconspicuouslyon folk themesin a mannerreminiscent,say, of Stravinsky'sLes Noces. This is offered as a Russian "answer"to theassimilationof Westernavant-garde echniques,notablyserialones, whicharetaintedby theJewishnessof Schoenberg.I am grateful o Prof. VladimirFrumkin f OberlinCollegeforbringing his manifestationo my attention.Fora reminder hatAmericanmusical nationalismalso had a politically conservativeand anti-Semiticphase, see Daniel GregoryMason, TuneIn, America: A Studyof Our ComingMusicalIndependence New York:Knopf, 1931),which contains a fairly heatedjeremiad (pp. 158-62) on "the insidiousness of the Jewish menace toour artisticintegrity."5'See MontaguMontagu-Nathan,"Belaiev-Maecenas of RussianMusic," MusicalQuarterly V(1918), 450-65.51Thearticle, entitledMoe znakomstio s Chaikovskim"My AcquaintanceWith Chaikovsky"),was written in 1923 for inclusionin a book of Chaikovskymemorabilia dited by Asafiev. It may befound in V.V. Protopopov,ed., Vospoininaniia P.I. ChaikovskomMoscow: Muzgiz, 1962), pp. 46-51.

52Obviously have Schenker oremost in mind, but Allen Forte's "set-theoretic"method,which,as I have notedelsewhere, "is so thoroughlykeyed to the methodsSchoenbergemployed in 'workingwith the tones of a motive' that a Forte analysis of any composer is in effect a comparisonof thatcomposer's work with Schoenberg's," can also become invidious. See my review of Forte's TheHarmonicOrganizationof the Rite of Springin CurrentMusicology28 (1979), 114-29.

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Music,53 the theoretical premises underlying a great deal of Russian musicthat has been influentialon twentieth-centurymusic outside of Russia-Scriabinand Stravinsky,above all-have begun to be elucidated for mu-sicians outside of Russia. But just as we would not want to limit ourunderstanding f the culturalhistoryof Russian music to whatwe mayfindin Keldysh or Asafiev, illuminatingas their work might occasionally be,we need not limit our theoreticaland analyticalunderstanding f it to ap-plicationsof or derivationsfrom the work of Yavorskyor Dernova.54Weneed to set Asafiev and Yavorskyin theirown culturalcontext, just as weneed to set the Soviet periodinto a similar historicalperspective.We needa musical counterpart o Vera Dunham's enlighteningbook on Stalinistfiction,55which documentsandexplainsthe weirdresurgenceof bourgeoisvalues at their most philistine-what in Russianis called meshchanstvo-that took place in Soviet arts policy in the 1930s, and which formed theunderpinning f whatis knownas SocialistRealism.Andwe needa musicalcounterparto CamillaGray's classic surveyof the Russianartistic avant-garde n the decadesimmediatelyprecedingandfollowingtheRevolution.56Neitherof these books, againobviously, is going to be written n Russia.As Americanscholars,trained n a skepticaland"problems-oriented"traditionof humanisticresearch,and ever more proficientin the once soarcaneRussianlanguage,begin to tackle these and the thousandotherques-tions and projectsI have not begun to foresee, I look forwardto a muchlessened, or at the very least, a much morecritical,relianceon the Sovietsecondary iterature. feel confidentthatwe arepastthedayswhen a Sovietmusicologisthad merelyto say so for Americanstudentsof Musorgsky oaccept the latteruncriticallyas a musical narodnik(radicalpopulist),57orwhen historiansof Soviet music would transcribe heirdatadirectly fromthe pages of Sovetskaiamuzykaor the informationbulletinsof the Unionof Soviet Composers.58The presenceof a numberof distinguishedemigre

53AnnArbor:UMI ResearchPress, 1983. The contents include"Russian MusicTheory:A Con-spectus" (Ellon D. Carpenter);"Sources of Russian ChantTheory" (Nicholas Schidlovsky), "TheTheories of Boleslav Yavorsky" (GordonD. McQuere),"VarvaraDemova's System of Analysis ofthe Music of Skryabin"(RoyJ. Guenther),"Boris Asafiev andMusicalForm as a Process" (McQuere)and a final chapterby Carpenteron several theorists associatedwith the Moscow Conservatory.Alsoof considerable nterest s JayReise's "Late Skriabin:Some PrinciplesBehind theStyle," 19thCenturyMusic VI (1983), 220-31.54Anoutstandingcontributionof an inferentialnature,which, however, can be elaborately sup-portedby historicalevidence, is Pieter C. van den Toom, The Music of Igor Stravinsky New Haven:Yale University Press, 1983). For the historicalsupport,see my "Chernomor o kashchei: HarmonicSorcery;or, Stravinsky's 'Angle'," Journalof the AmericanMusicologicalSocietyXXXVIII(1985).551nStalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1976).56The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970). A good starthas been made by Detlef Gojowy in Neue sowjetische Musik der 20-er Jahre (Laaber, 1980).57I have in mindparticularlyRichardHoops, "Musorgskyand the PopulistAge" (Musorgsky nMemoriam,pp. 271-306), which derivesa crucialargumentwholly from an unsupported nd factitiouscase made by MikhailPekelis in the introductory rticle to M.P. Musorgsky:Literaturnoenasledie. II(Moscow: Muzyka, 1972), 5-24, esp. 26-30.58See Laurel E. Fay, review of Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia (enlargededition), Slavic Review XLIII (1984), 359.

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scholarsin our midst shouldcertainlystimulateactivityin ourfield, whichin any case is a growing one. It is thankfullyno longer front-pagenewswhen a graduatestudentin an Americanmusic departmentknows Russianand contemplatesa specialty in Russianmusic. I am optimistic enough tothinkthatperhapsthe best answer to the question, "What is to be done,"may simply be "Let thingscontinue;they're going well."

Columbia University

"Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russian Music"

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