Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822318474 ISBN 13: 9780822318477

Verlag: Duke University Press, 1996

Inhaltsangabe

As a measure of individual and collective identity, music offers both striking metaphors and tangible data for understanding societies in transition—and nowhere is this clearer than in the recent case of the Eastern Bloc. Retuning Culture presents an extraordinary picture of this phenomenon. This pioneering set of studies traces the tumultuous and momentous shifts in the music cultures of Central and Eastern Europe from the first harbingers of change in the 1970s through the revolutionary period of 1989–90 to more recent developments.
During the period of state socialism, both the reinterpretation of the folk music heritage and the domestication of Western forms of music offered ways to resist and redefine imposed identities. With the removal of state control and support, music was free to channel and to shape emerging forms of cultural identity. Stressing both continuity and disjuncture in a period of enormous social and cultural change, this volume focuses on the importance and evolution of traditional and popular musics in peasant communities and urban environments in Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Written by longtime specialists in the region and considering both religious and secular trends, these essays examine music as a means of expressing diverse aesthetics and ideologies, participating in the formation of national identities, and strengthening ethnic affiliation.
Retuning Culture

provides a rich understanding of music’s role at a particular cultural and historical moment. Its broad range of perspectives will attract readers with interests in cultural studies, music, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Contributors. Michael Beckerman, Donna Buchanan, Anna Czekanowska, Judit Frigyesi, Barbara Rose Lange, Mirjana Lausevic, Theodore Levin, Margarita Mazo, Steluta Popa, Ljerka Vidic Rasmussen, Timothy Rice, Carol Silverman, Catherine Wanner

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Slobin is Professor of Music at Wesleyan University.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

""Retuning Culture" explores vital new ground in the way musical--as opposed to broad cultural--change has occurred recently in Eastern and Central Europe. It adds substantially to our knowledge of how musical behavior, performance, and traditions act and are acted upon in providing both continuity and adaptation to change."--James Porter, University of California, Los Angeles

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Retuning Culture

Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe

By Mark Slobin

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-1847-7

Contents

Introduction, 
Dmitri Pokrovsky and the Russian Folk Music Revival Movement, 
Kundera's Musical Joke and "Folk" Music in Czechoslovakia, 1948&ndsh;?, 
The Aesthetic of the Hungarian Revival Movement, 
Lakodalmas Rock and the Rejection of Popular Culture in Post-Socialist Hungary, 
Continuity and Change in Eastern and Central European Traditional Music, 
The Southern Wind of Change: Style and the Politics of Identity in Prewar Yugoslavia, 
The Ilahiya as a Symbol of Bosnian Muslim National Identity, 
Nationalism on Stage: Music and Change in Soviet Ukraine, 
The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 and Its Reflection in Musical Folklore, 
The Dialectic of Economics and Aesthetics in Bulgarian Music, 
Wedding Musicians, Political Transition, and National Consciousness in Bulgaria, 
Music and Marginality: Roma (Gypsies) of Bulgaria and Macedonia, 
Change as Confirmation of Continuity As Experienced by Russian Molokans, 
Works Cited, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

THEODORE LEVIN

Dmitri Pokrovsky and the Russian Folk Music Revival Movement

To a friend of the enlightenment the word and conception "the folk" has always something anachronistic and alarming about it; he knows that you need only tell a crowd they are "the folk" to stir them up to all sorts of reactionary evil. What all has not happened before our eyes — or just not quite before our eyes — in the name of "the folk" though it could never have happened in the name of God or humanity or the law! — Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus

The phone rang in the austere one-room apartment that Dmitri Pokrovsky, founder and artistic director of the Pokrovsky Ensemble, subleases on the fourteenth floor of a nondescript high-rise in central Moscow. Boris Yeltsin's office was calling. Would the Pokrovsky Ensemble be available to perform Russian folk music at a party celebrating Boris Nikolayevich's inauguration as President of Russia? And just one request: could the ensemble please be prepared to sing Boris Nikolayevich's favorite song, "Ural-skaya Ryabinushka" ("The Ural Rowan Tree," a sentimental worker's song from Yeltsin's native Ural region)?

"I'm sorry, we don't have that song in our repertory," Dmitri Pokrovsky told the caller from the Kremlin.

The caller pleaded, "But if you'll just learn it, this one time ..."

"I'm sorry," Pokrovsky repeated. "You don't understand. We don't sing such songs."

Pokrovsky chuckled as he recounted the story in a conversation that took place in June 1994. "They found some other musicians who agreed to perform "The Ural Rowan Tree." Everyone sang along, and Yeltsin played the spoons. It was all fine, but I'm glad I didn't agree to do it. I don't want to be a court musician to the czar of the new Russian empire. And after refusing to sing Yeltsin's favorite song, I'm sure they won't invite me back again soon."

The imperial culture from which Pokrovsky felt estranged had been amply displayed on Moscow television the evening prior to our conversation. The occasion was Russian Independence Day, 12 June (1994), and a gala celebration had been organized in the Rossiya Concert Hall, with President Yeltsin in attendance. "It was a performance that conformed to the norms of Stalin's time, not to mention czarist times," Pokrovsky commented. "It used to be that they would hang a portrait of Stalin in the background. But in the Rossiya Hall, instead of Stalin, they had Don Cossacks carrying an icon of St. George, and everyone had to stand and sing Glinka's "Slava!" ["Glory"] chorus from [the opera] A Life for the Czar. In the opening part of the concert, there was grandiose classical music: the Alexandrov Russian Army Choir, a symphony orchestra, opera arias performed by singers from the Bolshoi Theater. After that, there was a transition to national folk culture: the Krasnoyarsk Dance group, the Kuban Cossack Choir, Nadya Babkina — all with a lot of military pomp on stage. Those sorts of imperial ensembles are the only kind of folk or national cultural group that can be successful now. Our ensemble wouldn't fit in. We wouldn't be successful. We wouldn't be invited, and I wouldn't go. Artists are going to have to make a choice: to be part of the imperial system, or to say 'no' to it."

Pokrovsky's acerbic antiestablishment sentiments might have come as a surprise to some of his Russian critics — and these days there is no shortage of them. "Pokrovsky has become too slick; he's lost touch with his roots," is one commonly heard jab. "He's responsible for a lot of the ugly nationalism that's crept into performances of traditional folk and sacred music" is another. "He's sold out and become a rich capitalist by spending all his time touring in the West," goes a third. Pokrovsky is alternately annoyed and amused by the criticism. "My ensemble and I are doing very much the same thing now that we were doing twenty years ago," he retorts. "We're just doing it more professionally and more seriously. We're not the ones who have changed; what has changed is people's interpretation of what we do."

How and why have those public interpretations changed? Why has Dmitri Pokrovsky, the leader of a small Moscow-based music ensemble, become such a celebrated and controversial public figure in Russia? Why does folk music, and the hermeneutics of folk music performance, matter so much in Russia? Why has folk music so often been forced to be more than itself, to assume a purpose beyond the aesthetic, as an art engagé, in which artists become, or are beheld as, the victim, handmaiden, or shill (or some of each) of politicians and bureaucrats?

I sought answers to these questions in a series of conversations with Dmitri Pokrovsky, whom I have known since early 1986, the dawn of the glasnost age, when Pokrovsky was just beginning to emerge from a lengthy period of official disfavor. The vicissitudes of Pokrovsky's career and his changing relationship to the vlast ' — the "power," as all levels of government are so often collectively referred to in the former Soviet Union — are instructive for what they reveal about the to and fro of cultural politics, and about how Russians continue to redefine and reimagine their sense of nation, national past, and perhaps, national future.

Pokrovsky's experiences as a cultural activist and folk music revivalist challenge the chaste image of traditional folk song, still common in the West, as music filled with an unambiguous moral power rooted in an authentic "spirit of the people" and accepted at face value by listeners. In fact, Pokrovsky's career demonstrates, to the contrary, that meanings and associations attributed to folk music in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia have been eminently protean. And if a conventional representation of Soviet cultural politics has it that abstract and expressionist art and music were held at bay while folk art, folk music, and artistic production derived from folk sources were made to flourish, then the roller-coaster saga of Pokrovsky's artistic life must again serve as a caveat against such easy generalizations. During most of the Soviet era, authentic Russian village music, with its weird dissonances, bawdy textual innuendos, and fervent religious undertones, was considered as ill-suited for the aesthetic and ethical...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1996
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822318474
• ISBN 13: 9780822318477
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 318
• Herausgeber: Slobin
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland