Historical dictionary of Russian music / Daniel Jaffé.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Russian music today has a firm hold around the world in the repertoire of opera houses, ballet companies, and orchestras. The music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergey Rachmaninov, Sergey Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich is very much today's lingua franca both in the concert hall and on the soundtracks of international blockbusters from Hollywood. Meanwhile the innovations of Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Igor Stravinsky have played their crucial role in the development of Western music in the last century, influencing the work of virtually every notable composer of the last century.



The Historical Dictionary of Russian Music covers the history of Russian music starting from the earliest archaeological discoveries to the present, including folk music, sacred music, and secular art music. The book contains a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries on every major composer in Russia's history, as well as several leading composers of today, such as Sofia Gubaidulina, Rodion Shchedrin, Leonid Desyatnikov, Elena Firsova, and Pavel Karmanov. It also includes the patrons and institutions that commissioned works by those composers and the choreographers and dancers who helped shape the great ballet masterpieces. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian music.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Jaffe (Sergey Prokofiev) opens this comprehensive subject guide with a chronology listing salient musical and political events from 5500 B.C.E., when instruments were discovered in Karelia, to 2011, with the centenary concert of Pyatnitsky's Choir. Following this is an engaging 31-page historical overview, easily navigated by helpful period-specific subheadings. More than 500 concise entries then profile historical and contemporary composers, movements, performance venues, operas, instruments, and other terms relevant to or significantly shaping Russian musical history. A fabulous 68-page, thematically organized bibliography rounds out this fundamental reference. VERDICT A wonderful complement to the 36 essays comprising Richard Taruskin's On Russian Music (Univ. of California Pr., 2010). (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

As an up-to-date, English-language encapsulation of its subject, this well-constructed dictionary fills an important niche. Its coverage is strongly oriented toward the biographical, with the main focus on classical composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The 500 articles are rich with cross-references, and Jaffe, the former reviews editor of BBC Music Magazine, provides capable guidance through the thickets of competing systems of Cyrillic-to-English transliteration. A fine bibliography offers added value. Although obviously selective by design, the topical choices are occasionally difficult to fathom; e.g., Robert Schumann is included as a formative influence on Russian composers, but Franz Schubert is not. With the understanding that the scope of Jaffe's Russian Music is limited almost exclusively to Russian classical music, libraries and readers across the spectrum will welcome this book. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. K. D. Underwood New York University