Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World

Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia

Poems to Open Palms: Praise Performance and the State in the Sultanate of Oman by Bradford J. Garvey Advisor: Jane C. Sugarman This dissertation traces the musical constitution of moral, economic, material, and social relations between rural communities and the state in the Sultanate of Oman. I argue that communities embedded within the authoritarian state hegemony of the Sultanate form and affirm social relations with the state through its embodied proxy, Sultan Qābūs bin Ṣa‘īd Āl Bū Ṣa‘īd, via the reciprocal exchange of state-directed giving and praise poetry responses. The circuit of exchange catalyzes the social production of political legitimacy and ensures continued generous distribution by mythopoetically presenting such cyclicity as resulting from elite and non-elite mutuality. This praise poetry is rendered within two song and dance complexes: al-razḥa, a collective war dance with drumming and antiphonal choral singing, and al-‘āzī, a choral ode with a solo singer, tight poetic structure, and a chorus of responders. Through a close analysis of the content and context of praise poems sung by Arab men’s performance troupes experienced over a year of participant observation fieldwork, I argue that praise poetry is an overlooked site for the construction and negotiation of state political legitimacy. Drawing on heterodox and Gramscian political economy, I show how musical performance operates within broader circuits of exchange by functioning as a site wherein non-market economic logics are fused with moral, performative, and political norms. Instead of simply tracing a circuit of utilitarian exchange (praise for gifts for praise), I focus on the how gifts and their responses reciprocally negotiate social relations between state elites and non-elites. By focusing on the words and actions of nonelites as they integrate the various proffered benefits of a distributive state into their own

Poems to Open Palms: Praise Performance and the State in the Sultanate of Oman

En decembre 2000, le President Vladimir Putin signa une loi, changeant pour la deuxieme fois, a l'epoque post-sovietique, l'hymne national de la Federation russe. Ce nouvel hymne conservait la melodie de l'hymne national sovietique d'apres-guerre, mais avec de nouvelles paroles. Un deferlement de reactions publiques et mediatiques allait accompagner ce changement, certaines insistant sur la reconnaissance symbolique des accomplissements positifs de l'ere sovietiques, d'autres voyant dans cette rehabilitation un affront aux victimes de l'Etat sovietique et un retour de l'autoritarisme politique. L'A. retrace ce conflit et tente de le situer : 1. dans l'histoire des hymnes nationaux de la Russie du 20 eme siecle ; 2. dans le contexte des luttes contemporaines pour determiner l'identite nationale russe. L'analyse musicologique, mais egalement ethnographique - qui met en lumiere l'opposition entre l'intelligentsia culturelle et la majorite politique -, montrent que l'hymne national russe n'est pas un reflet statique de l'identite nationale, mais un texte fluide et polysemique, sujet a des lectures multiples et conflictuelles. Ces lectures fondent le processus de negociation de l'identite nationale russe contemporaine.

Russia's New Anthem and the Negotiation of National Identity

Since Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia in 2000, the rhetorical use of the past has increasingly become a defining characteristic of Russian politics. Through a new national holiday, references to history in official statements, the erection of monuments and other forms of state symbolism the regime has sought to mobilise cultural memory in support of its legitimacy. The recent and distant past alike were drawn upon to create a historical foundation for the regime’s emphasis on a strong state and centralised leadership, as well as for stepping up the restrictions on political opposition. Yet the Russian government is not the only one who has used history to spread its ideas about how the Russian state “traditionally” should be governed. Various societal, cultural and religious groups and organisations, have put forward their own historically framed visions on Russian statehood. This dissertation examines this societal dynamics of memory politics in contemporary Russia in the period 2000-2012. It analyses a wide range of actors, from the central government and the Russian Orthodox Church, to cultural heavyweight Nikita Mikhalkov and radical thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin. In addition, in view of the steady decline in media freedom since 2000, it critically examines role of cinema and television in shaping and spreading these historical narratives. This makes it possible to, on the one hand, gain a better understanding of the various means through which the Russian government practices its memory politics (e.g., the role of state media) and, on the other hand, to sufficiently value the existence of alternative and critical voices and criticism that tend to be missed.

https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/36864133/Complete_thesis.pdf

Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia: Television, Cinema and the State

The present article examines the Soviet project of developing national musical cultures within the Caucasian and Central Asian republics of the USSR. This undertaking effectively required the transplanting of the Russian nineteenth-century model of musical nationalism to the republics, under the guidance of composers sent from Moscow and Leningrad. The article investigates the relationship between this model and its imitations, using examples from Caucasian and Asian operas, and touching upon the connected discourses of orientalism and socialist realism.

"National in Form, Socialist in Content": Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics

Challenging what is widely regarded as the distinguishing feature of Russian music--its ineffable "Russianness"--Marina Frolova-Walker examines the history of Russian music from the premiere of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar in 1836 to the death of Stalin in 1953, the years in which musical nationalism was encouraged and endorsed by the Russian state and its Soviet successor. The author identifies and discusses two central myths that dominated Russian culture during this period--that art revealed the Russian soul, and that this nationalist artistic tradition was founded by Glinka and Pushkin. The author also offers a critical account of how the imperatives of nationalist thought affected individual composers. In this way Frolova-Walker provides a new perspective on the brilliant creativity, innovation, and eventual stagnation within the tradition of Russian nationalist music.

Russian Music and Nationalism: from Glinka to Stalin

Socialist Realist ceremonial art has generally been viewed in the West as a form of high art, because of its air of monumentality and references to classics. Judged by high-art standards, such works are invariably failures, and Western commentators have accordingly treated Socialist Realism as something exotic or inexplicable. This approach is inadequate: firstly, because it does not examine Stalin-era art on its own terms, and secondly, because it refuses to acknowledge any similarities in Western culture.Socialist Realism was a discipline placed upon artists to provide a suitably dignified backdrop to state ritual. In this sense, it was a species of religious art, in which blandness, anonymity and tedium were by no means vices. This article compares the relatively smooth passage of Myaskovsky into Socialist Realism with the troubled homecoming of Prokofiev, who only mastered the discipline just before the end of his life.

Stalin and the Art of Boredom

The subject of this article is the failure of the Stalinist Soviet opera project. Although similar proposals had appeared years before, the project was inaugurated in 1936, and its realisation was placed in the hands of the State Committee for Artistic Affairs. The archival materials discussed in the article (including transcripts of the Committee's meetings) demonstrate that even publicly acclaimed productions were seen as failures by these senior bureaucrats. On the one hand, there were demands for realism and contemporary topics, and on the other, for monumentality and elevated musical language; these demands proved to be in deep conflict with each other. In addition to this crippling problem, it soon became apparent that any treatment of a contemporary topic was bound to become unacceptable before long, given the ever-shifting political landscape. While novels and films were certainly under close scrutiny, many operas were subjected to so many demands for revision that they never saw production at all. The article's central claim is that the 1939 Soviet reworking of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar as Ivan Susanin fulfilled the state's needs much better than any newly created Soviet opera could have, resulting in the effective curtailment of the project by 1946.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0954586706002163

The Soviet opera project: Ivan Dzerzhinsky vs. Ivan Susanin

And so yet again we are to consider the Russianness of Russian music. Is there some peculiar shortcoming afflicting Russian music that prevents us from discussing it except in terms of nationality? Although Richard Taruskin has asked why we cannot simply take Russian music out of the surrounding nationalist discourse in order to examine it per se, such an approach may require, even as a precondition, a radically revisionary account of the music's highly mythologised history. So much critical' writing, so many articles, monographs and textbooks of the last 150 years cannot blithely be set aside: they continue to feed programme and liner notes, encouraging and reinforcing audiences' fond belief in an intrinsic Russianness that mysteriously subsists beneath every note of this perennially popular repertoire.

Marina Frolova-Walker

Papers

"National in Form, Socialist in Content": Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics

Russian Music and Nationalism: from Glinka to Stalin

Stalin and the Art of Boredom

The Soviet opera project: Ivan Dzerzhinsky vs. Ivan Susanin

On Ruslan and Russianness