{"id":255,"date":"2016-10-20T19:13:39","date_gmt":"2016-10-20T23:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/?p=255"},"modified":"2016-10-20T19:13:39","modified_gmt":"2016-10-20T23:13:39","slug":"the-mighty-handful-themes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/russian-culture\/the-mighty-handful-themes\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mighty Handful: Themes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mighty Handful set before themselves the goal of producing a <\/span>Russian <\/span><\/i>classical music, a tradition liberated from the mimetic anxiety of European influence. I am not qualified to comment on the music itself: it all sounds <\/span>\u2018good\u2019<\/span><\/i>, but the minutiae of tone and movement are topics best left to others. I would, however, like to examine some of the themes chosen by the Handful for their music, themes that, when considered together, outline the Handful\u2019s Romantic conception of \u2018Russianness\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u2018Russia\u2019 for which the Mighty Handful aim to forge a classical tradition is at once geographically expansive and culturally consistent. Alexander Borodin\u2019s \u2018Russia\u2019 can encompass the steppes of (recently acquired) Central Asia, thus reifying \u2018the Orient\u2019 into an object for Russian cultural production. Meanwhile, Mussogorsky\u2019s \u2018Russia\u2019 stretches west into a distant and mythologized past: the Great (Golden) Gate of Kiev is suspended between the new Romantic language of the present and the romanticized mists of the Kievan Rus past. \u00a0Between these geographical extremes, Russian culture and a \u2018Russian tradition\u2019 is expressed almost wholly through the lense of <\/span>folk <\/span><\/i>culture, or variants upon it. The folktale-uncanny is a source of wonder and inspiration, as shown by Mussogorsky\u2019s \u2018Baba Yaga\u2019 and \u2018Night on Bald Mountain\u2019 (a narrative of the darkly fantastic, as discussed by John in his post.) Religion is a source of material as well, both in its \u2018public\u2019 forms (through Rimsky-Korsakov\u2019s Easter Overture) and in its \u2018folk\u2019 forms (through Liadov\u2019s Religious Chant and Carol). In Liadov and Glinka, folk motifs abound, while Balakirev\u2019s choice of theme brings all the strands together: Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n

In creating a new musical language for the Russian tradition, these composers operate upon a diverse and malleable symbolic language. The \u2018Russia\u2019 they evoke can be Oriental or ancient-European, folk-occult or overtly religious. For these composers, Romanticism offers a palette both stylized in content and opaque in meaning. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mighty Handful set before themselves the goal of producing a Russian classical music, a tradition liberated from the mimetic anxiety of European influence. I am not qualified to comment on the music itself: it all sounds \u2018good\u2019, but the minutiae of tone and movement are topics best left to others. I would, however, like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":372,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103,102,101],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-russian-culture","tag-folk-motifs","tag-russianess","tag-the-mighty-handful"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/372"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}