Unpredictable Encounters – Reconsidering Russian Music

Music has always been profoundly transnational, transcending language barriers and crossing borders in ways that few other cultural artifacts can. In Unpredictable Encounters, leading scholars from around the world examine how Russia's musical culture has undergone this process, interrogating its engagement with other cultures from the 19th century to the present.

Dedicated to the memory of the late Richard Taruskin, a leading scholar of Russian and East European music, Unpredictable Encounters considers how individuals, organizations, and cultural artifacts crossed seemingly immutable and impenetrable borders. Its contributors address several fundamental questions: about music as an activity operating along complex transnational networks, including what roles composers, performers, critics, and others played in the exchange of musical information; about music's roles in Russia's ongoing sociocultural and sociopolitical development; and, most broadly, about the methodological and ethical implications of studying Russia's engagement with the world―and vice versa―both musical and otherwise.

Written against the backdrop of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the essays in Unpredictable Encounters aim to confront Russia's colonial power and assess the effects of these events on the creation, performance, and reception of Russian music and musicians today.

Pauline Fairclough is Professor of Music at the University of Bristol.Peter J. Schmelz is Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University and an affiliated faculty member at the Peabody Institute.