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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Recent scholarship on the late Russian Empire has underscored the perspectives of non-Russian subjects and the distinct cultures of peoples living on the edges of imperial rule. This panel joins these voices by discussing the complex relationship between music, modernity, and identity formation in the diverse borderlands of the late Russian Empire. Spanning the geographical area between the Caucasus and the Russian Far East, the papers focus on the ethnically diverse regions on the fringes of Russian imperial control, shedding new light on musical developments that have often been neglected or overlooked.

The first paper delves into the shifting status and perception of Ashughs (itinerant singer-poets) in Tiflis/Tbilisi around the year 1900, revealing how ideas of the nation and progress increasingly penetrated the highly conventionalized Persianate ashugh song repertoire. Heading East, our second paper examines the role of early gramophone recordings in commemorating the Russo-Japanese War, which in turn helped to territorialize Manchuria within the Russian colonial imagination. Returning to the Caucasus, the panel’s final paper analyzes the cultural adaptations made in late-imperial Azerbaijani operas and operettas, which helped to assert Azerbaijani identity within a global and Russian imperial bourgeois culture. Taken as a whole, the panel illuminates the nuanced ways in which music both reflected and shaped the dynamics of power and identity in the late tsarist borderlands.

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Brian Fairley, U of Pittsburgh

Papers

• Bards of the Nation?: Ashugh Culture in Tiflis/Tbilisi around 1900 - Jonas Alexander Loeffler, U of Cologne (Germany)

• Territorializing Manchuria at 78 rpm: Musical Commemorations of the Russo-Japanese War - Ryan Christopher Gourley, UC Berkeley

• Creating Azerbaijani Opera: Emulation and Adaptation - Kelsey Rice, Berry College

Discussant

• Knar Abrahamyan, Columbia U