In the introduction to their impressive collection of essays published under the title Russian Music since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery, editors Patrick Zuk and Marina Frolova-Walker provide a concise but informative overview of the distinct paths Russian music took following the October Revolution. Emphasizing the significance of the post-revolutionary “division of Russian music into two streams, Soviet music and the music of the Russian diaspora” (3), the editors rightly pinpoint the dissimilar sets of problems faced by the émigré musicians, who were exposed to unfamiliar professional environments, and the problems faced by their Soviet counterparts, who were subjected to the twists and turns of Stalinist cultural policies.

A second issue raised by the editors ties closely in with the above-mentioned division and concerns the two discrete methodological currents in the study of Russian music: one developed within Soviet academic practice, the other rooted in the educational tradition of the west. As Zuk and Frolova-Walker correctly assert, in the post-Soviet discourse on Russian music, such a divide should not and cannot be allowed to remain within a shared field of study and research.

The volume consists of eighteen chapters written by prominent scholars from Russia, Great Britain, the US, and Germany. Grouped into six parts, the collection includes such diverse topics as: “Russian Music History and Historiography Today,” “Reappraising the Soviet Past,” “Soviet and Post-Soviet Musicology,” “The Newest Shostakovich,” “Russian Music Abroad,” and “1991 and After.” Though the chapters vary in caliber, style, and subject of inquiry, the book's well-balanced organization creates a consistent narrative that is easy to follow.

Marina Rakhmanova, in “Russian Musicological Scholarship of the Last Two Decades: Achievements and Lacunae,” analyzes the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries processes that took place within Russia regarding the study of Russian music: in the spheres of research, methodology, and publishing (including a proliferation of online musicological periodicals and forums). Her article is suitably followed by Patrick Zuk's review of Soviet music studies outside of Russia during the same period. Levon Hakobian, in “The Adventures of Soviet Music in the West: Historical Highlights,” focuses on the perception and reception of works created by Soviet composers from the mid-1920s to recent times. His article, rich with historical details and facts, brings to light a variety of political, cultural, and aesthetic factors that contributed to the often lopsided and schematic judgment of Soviet music in the West.

Marina Frolova-Walker's “Soviet Music in Post-Soviet Musicology: The First Twenty Years and Beyond” provides insights into a peculiar coexistence of conflicting tendencies displayed in the most recent textbooks for music colleges and conservatories, as well as in individual monographs on Soviet music. As she demonstrates, while embracing the opportunity to study the rediscovered composers and suppressed works of the Soviet era, many musicologists are firmly grounded in the old-time tradition of genre-based technical music analysis, which safely keeps their narrative away from the political and ideological context of the past. However, Frolova-Walker's advocacy for a broader, bolder, and more open-minded future of Russian musicology is directed not only at Russians, but their western colleagues as well. In her words, “it is important for all to resist easy but misleading explanations of a complex reality” (124).

The chapters in Part II re-examine the complex dynamics between the Soviet state and the artists who fostered musical life in the USSR. In “The Phenomenon of ‘Translation’ in Russian Musical Culture in the 1920s and Early 1930s: The Quest for a Soviet Musical Identity,” Marina Raku discusses the widespread practice of appropriating familiar musical material from pre-Revolutionary Russia and foreign sources for cultural consumption by a new proletarian audience. She traces the origin of many popular Soviet songs to folksongs of various peoples, recognizable urban songs, tangos, marches, and more. Her account of the early Soviet trend “to sing new words to old tunes” curiously suggests an analogy with the latest example: the “translation” of the Soviet anthem into the post-Soviet anthem.

In the next chapter, “From Enlightened to Sublime: Musical life under Stalin, 1930–1948,” Pauline Fairclough illuminates the political and “aesthetically correct” ideological reasons behind, at first glance, the surprisingly rich concert life and refined musical tastes of “ordinary Soviet citizens.” The author, however, based her studies on programs of classical music performed in Leningrad, a city arguably inhabited by not-so-ordinary citizens.

Yakaterina Vlasova, in “The Stalinist Opera Project,” exposes the fundamental inability of a totalitarian state to play the role of a successful patron of the arts. In spite of Stalin's personal supervision and the fact that enormous resources were made available for the main opera house in the USSR, the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, and the assemblage of leading artists as well, the “project of creating a repertory of Soviet operas was fated to remain unrealized” (187).

Irina Klause, in “Composers in the Gulag: A Preliminary Survey,” presents a sample of her ongoing research on a weighty subject that has not been sufficiently explored and requires much more attention from scholars of various backgrounds. Although limitations in space do not allow me to acknowledge each chapter in the book, I would like to single out a few more contributions to specific mention.

Liudmila Kovnatskaya's “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The Shostakovich-Bogdanov-Berezovsky Correspondence” examines previously unpublished letters by two musicians in the 1920s. The quoted passages from the letters along with accompanying astute commentaries make this publication a valuable addition to Shostakovich studies. In his treatment of his subject, provocatively framed with the titular question: “Is There a ‘Russia Abroad’ in Music?” Richard Taruskin brings up the 1931 survey of Russian music written by the Russian émigré composer Arthur Lourie. Taruskin uses this piece—which reflect both Lourie's personal political trajectory (from Silver Age liberal intellectual to musical commissar at Narkompros to active participant in the Eurasianist political movement) and characteristic trends in Russian political and cultural philosophy of the period—as a springboard for his own thoughts on the idea of Russianness in music. By juxtaposing the earlier debate about the identity and status of Russian music abroad with a contemporary discussion of these same issues, Richard Taruskin vividly shows that the century-long process of Russian musical emigration never produced an entity that could accurately be called “Russia abroad,” but generated instead a steady flow of outstanding Russian musicians that spread throughout the entire world.

Finally, there is the excellent account of the last All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers by Laurel E. Fay. Her first hand recap of what transpired during the Congress sessions, the recording of the scanty press coverage, and the description of general confusion among attending composers have the value of a historical document and the immediacy of journalistic reportage. Citing the words of Zuk and Frolova-Walker, “the study of Russian music touches on intellectual issues of cardinal importance in relation to the discipline of historical musicology as a whole” (16). One could say that by bringing together musicologists with such diverse academic backgrounds, Russian Music since 1917 sets an example of the modern day approach to the field of Russian music studies as a whole and, in doing so, bridges the divide between the Russian and western traditions that Zuk and Frolova-Walker identified in their introduction to this terrific volume.