Situating Ukrainian Music: Competing National Conceptions in the Musical Discourse of the Russian Empire
Date and Time
Location
Rutger Helmers, Assistant Professor in Musicology, University of Amsterdam / HURI Research Fellow in Ukrainian Studies 2021/22
Moderated by Lubomyr Hajda, Associate, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard
Online
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Abstract
Throughout nineteenth-century Europe, music played a notable part in the formation of national identities, as ideals of national culture inspired a profusion of musical activities ranging from the collection of folk songs to the composition of nationally-themed operas. Ukraine is no exception, and in some respects may even be considered a paradigmatic case. The history of Ukrainian music has often been told in just these terms, as a national school that developed in parallel to other national schools. Music historiography has given relatively little attention to the broader imperial contexts and concomitant cultural politics, however, which for Russian-ruled Ukraine involved not only the imperial state but also a dominant Russian culture to contend with.
In this lecture, Rutger Helmers will discuss part of his research performed during his fellowship at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in the spring of this year. Surveying the positions of a range of critics, folklorists and composers between the 1860s and 1917, this lecture aims to show how Ukrainian music was conceptualized and contested within the Imperial space, allowing us to understand how music fit into the politics of national identity in the late Russian Empire.
About the Speaker
| Rutger Helmers is an assistant professor of historical musicology at the University of Amsterdam and has visited Harvard as a HURI Research Fellow in Ukrainian Studies in the spring of 2022. Broadly speaking, his research concerns questions of nationalism, cosmopolitanism and imperialism in the nineteenth-century world of music, and his current work centers on representations of Ukraine in the musical life of the Russian Empire. He is the author of a monograph, Not Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera (2014), and various recent and upcoming publications in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, The Oxford Handbook to the Operatic Canon, Čajkovskij-Studien, and the Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism. |
Moderator: Lubomyr Hajda, Historian and Associate at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University
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