Territorializing Manchuria at 78 rpm: Musical Commemorations of the Russo-Japanese War

• In Event: Music, Modernity, and the Nation on the Fringes of Late Tsarist Russia: Perspectives from the Caucasus and Manchuria

Abstract

"You fell for Russia, perished for the Fatherland. Believe us, we shall avenge you." In the wake of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), dozens of new Russian songs such as the one quoted above lamented the Siege of Port Arthur, the destruction of the Varyag Cruiser, and other tragic events that occurred on the battlefield. Many of these songs gained popularity throughout the Russian Empire as 78 rpm gramophone recordings, promoting renewed patriotic feelings toward the relatively young and faraway Russian colony in Manchuria. This paper argues, via various rarely heard examples, that musical recordings commemorating the Russo-Japanese War helped to territorialize Manchuria within the Russian colonial imagination.

The study of commemoration as a cultural practice in Russia has often centered on the Soviet period, focused on the construction of monuments and the staging of military parades; what Serguei Oushakine has called “the affective management of history” (2011). By turning to gramophone recordings produced during the late imperial period, this paper underscores a drastically different kind of commemorative practice rooted in the Russian colonial imagination and the technical limitations of early sound reproduction. Drawing on archival gramophone recordings, advertisements, and firsthand accounts, I argue that the Russo-Japanese War triggered radical new ways of creating and listening to recorded sound. Intervening in wider debates about armed conflicts currently taking place across music studies, this paper reveals the distinctive ways in which the early gramophone industry mediated tragic events and shaped Russian public discourse about the status of colonial Manchuria.

Author

• Ryan Christopher Gourley, UC Berkeley