New books about music – Weekend
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Oleg Karavaichuk. Three degrees of freedom»
publishing house Word order
The second volume of the Three Degrees of Freedom project, created by the leader of the Megapolis group Oleg Nesterov, is a series of books about Soviet film composers. The first issue was dedicated to Alfred Schnittka, the second to Oleg Karavaichuk, probably the most enigmatic figure in all of Russian film music. According to its structure, this is a montage of voices – memoirs, articles, interviews (many were taken specifically for the book). Colleagues, friends, historians, and – most importantly – the composer himself, who had a much greater propensity for intelligible and even manifest statements than is commonly thought, speak. A child prodigy who entered a school at the conservatory at the age of ten, wrote symphonies performed by adult musicians at ten, was recognized by Shostakovich, Ulanova, Richter and other stars, received a piano from Stalin and, according to legend, played music together with the generalissimo, at thirty something too intractable and the eccentric Karavaychuk is expelled from academic music and at the same time ends up in the cinema. In the following decades, he writes music for the masterpieces of Muratova, Averbakh, Melnikov and a bunch of semi-random paintings, but even in them his outlandish manner is manifested. A legend is gradually taking shape: a genius who does not fit into any framework, an urban madman in unchanging berets, a brawler and a provocateur, a violator of all conceivable rules – composition, film production, etiquette – a virtuoso capable of composing music for an entire film in five minutes, an experimenter who forced performers play on cow carcasses and condoms, and – quite in accordance with the name – a rare figure of absolute inner freedom in Soviet culture.
Natalie Zelensky “How Tsarist Russia was played in New York”
publishing house Academic Studies Press
Translation Dmitry Galtsin
The book by musicologist Natalie Zelensky is a history of the Russian émigré music scene in America in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is a curious archival search, full of bizarre details and wild characters: countesses performing gypsy romances in restaurants, White Guard Cossack choirs, Broadway musicals a la russe popular in the late 1920s, Cold War propaganda songs written by émigré singers almost after commissioned directly by the CIA, Russian balls in contemporary Harlem, and so on. Zelensky herself grew up among the Washington descendants of the first wave of emigrants, and all this material, all the kokoshniks and squatting dances, “Black Eyes” and “Two Guitars under the Window”, for her is not exotic kitsch, but things dear and dearly loved. This optics explains the main plot of the study. Zelensky writes primarily about how music serves to construct and restore identity, long-term support of an imaginary connection with a long-lost homeland.
Daria Zhurkova “Songs about nothing?”
publishing house New Literary Review
A monograph by culturologist Daria Zhurkova is a brief history of Soviet and Russian pop music from the turn of the 1970s and 1980s to today, or rather, yesterday; that is, from Pesnyary and Pugacheva to the Mushrooms group, Loboda and Yegor Creed – through Valery Leontiev, Tender May, Combination, Bravo and other notable stops in this forty-year trajectory. Despite the cheerful subject, this book is written in an extremely serious, academic tone – with a review of the bibliography, research methods and objectives, and other signs of a good dissertation. Sometimes this contrast produces an almost comical impression. Nevertheless, Zhurkova’s research is innovative in its comprehensiveness. Zhurkova analyzes all the main components of the history of pop: various transformations of the medium (the birth of Soviet clips, changes in the genre of the concert film from “Blue Lights” to “Old Songs about the Essentials”), the play of gender models and erotic clichés, the ways the light genre reacted to social catastrophes and etc.
Christina Feldman-Barrett “Women’s History of the Beatles”
publishing house New Literary Review
Translation Olga Novitskaya
The study by the American sociologist Christina Feldman-Barrett in terms of intonation is almost the opposite of Zhurkova’s book. Feldman-Barrett positions himself as an “aka-fan”, that is, an academic fan – an author who works on the thin border of a seriously detached study of subcultural phenomena and sincere involvement in them, close self-description and sincere empathy for each character. She herself had been a devoted fan of The Beatles since childhood and, having already become a sociologist, decided that this phenomenon was worth studying. The book is the story of the Liverpool Four from their first steps to posthumous fame, told through the eyes of women – mothers, wives and lovers, devoted first fans from the Cavern club, girls from all over the world for whom meeting the Beatles was a life-changing experience, workers of the Beatles infrastructure (magazine publishers, fan club chairpersons), members of Beatles-inspired girl bands. With a clearly stated feminist optic, one would expect criticism of the maniacal adoration of four British men by millions of women, but for Feldman-Barrett, Beatlemania is an exceptionally bright phenomenon. She turns out to be a means of subjectification and emancipation, one of the stages in the formation of a modern free woman.
Nina Kraus “The Brain Listens”
publishing house corpus
Translation Tatyana Mosolova
Popular science book by American neuroscientist Nina Kraus is not only about music. It is also about language learning, human perception of birdsong and city noises, experiments on chinchillas and much more, but it is music that is in the spotlight here. Kraus comes from a musical family and is an amateur musician herself, but instead of producing sounds professionally, she decided to devote herself to researching them. According to Kraus, the role of sound in the life of man and mankind is radically underestimated in relation to the role of vision. There are a lot of amazing secrets in the relationship between the individual and the sound space. Kraus calls the subject of his interest “sound mind”. This is a complex organization, associated not only with the perception of information and enjoyment, but also with much more subtle things. In particular, Kraus, an active promoter of music education, analyzes, using a mass of experimental data, how music affects the brain, compensates for various problems (including those of a social nature), develops learning skills, strengthens memory, prevents aging, and in many ways makes a person human.
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