Defining Russia musically : historical and hermeneutical essays

In this text, musicologist Richard 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 Russia's national character can best be understood.The book 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.

It 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 of the book, expanded from a series of Christian Gauss seminars presented at Princeton in 1993, 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.