Conference Agenda

On the eve of the First World War, the borderlands of the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires were spaces of contested identity and ideology. Amid the rise of nation-states, a number of international movements competed for counter-influence, including Pan-Slavism, Pan-Orthodoxy, and Utopian Socialism. Bulgaria, in particular, grappled with these competing movements, from the time of its liberation from the Ottoman Empire (1878) onward. In this paper, I demonstrate the role of vocal music in establishing the horizon of possibilities toward Balkan modernity. I begin with the Russian Empire’s clientelist relationship toward the fledgling Bulgarian nation, analyzing the collaborations between Russian and Bulgarian composers and scholars on a “Bulgarian Liturgy,” which sought to affirm an ancient affinity between these two Slavic and Orthodox cultures. I then turn to the foundational works of Bulgarian folklorist-composers, such as Dobri Hristov, who picked up on the Russian idea of Bulgarian chant and developed it into a found tradition. In both cases, I argue that in order for a modern nation to be imagined, a past had to be constructed.

Finally, I turn to an alternative vision of modernity through vocal music, that represented by the workers’ songs which emerged on either side of the First World War, by composers including Svetoslav Obretenov. Though each of these trends were linked by musical style and professional channels, they carved out diverging ideas of what it meant to be Bulgarian in the twentieth century. Drawing upon Maria Todorova’s concept of “Balkanism” (1997, 2009), I argue that recentering these “peripheral” voices elucidates the agency of local actors in navigating and contributing to ethnic, religious, and imperial hegemonies. Moreover, while the often violent outcomes of these years of rapid transition in the Balkans cast long political and historiographic shadows, reconsideration of the internationalist musical projects reveals viable alternatives to both imperial and nationalist imaginaries.

“Now that hostilities have been openly commenced between Russia and Japan, we feel sure that it will be interesting to all Gramophone users to hear in their own homes the National Anthems, War Songs, and other Patriotic Music of the two countries in question.” Several record labels published advertisements for musical recordings, such as the one quoted above, in the United States and Europe in response to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904. Indeed, the covert attack launched by the Japanese Imperial Navy on the Russian Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur and the loss of the Varyag Cruiser had a direct impact on gramophone record sales. Several new recordings offered listeners creative representations of the battlefield and a number of the top recording artists from the Russian Empire traveled to Manchuria to perform for soldiers on the frontlines. This paper argues, via various rarely heard examples, that musical depictions of the Siege of Port Arthur helped to territorialize Manchuria within the Russian imperial imagination.

Research on the relationship between musical recordings and war has by and large focused on modern armed conflicts, framed in terms of phenomenological experience—what Martin Daughtry has called “the bellaphonic” (2015)—and the deleterious effects of auditory propaganda, such Susanne Cusick’s analyses of music and torture (2008). Little attention has been paid to the involvement of the gramophone industry in armed conflicts before WWI, or the consumption of early commercial recordings created specifically for wartime entertainment. This paper focuses on the role of the gramophone industry in commemorating the Siege of Port Arthur, revealing how record labels created and marketed recordings about the war. Drawing on archival recordings, advertisements, and firsthand accounts, I argue that the Russo-Japanese War triggered radical new ways of creating and listening to recorded sound, rooted in the logistical and technical constraints of the time. Intervening in wider debates about war and musical practices currently taking place across music studies, this paper reveals the distinctive ways in which early sound reproduction technologies mediated contemporary tragic events and shaped public discourse about the colonial frontier.

In December 1935, Joseph Stalin mobilized cultural forces across the USSR to prepare for the celebration of Pushkin’s death centennial in 1937. The massive celebrations that took place elevated Pushkin’s legacy into unprecedented proportions, producing paintings, monuments, plays, films, and translations of Pushkin’s works into minority languages. Pushkin’s cult was a cultural cornerstone in Stalin’s rehabilitation of Russia as the greatest, most progressive nation among the Soviet republics.

It is surprising that fifty years later, in 1987, the Armenian composer Edgar Hovhannisyan (1930–98) wrote an opera based on Pushkin’s travelogue The Journey to Arzrum. Hovhannisyan’s opera stages one of the most crucial events in Armenian-Russian geopolitics: Russia’s annexation of Eastern Armenia in the aftermath of the 1826–28 Russo-Persian War. At a first glance, the opera aligns with the Soviet historical revisionist project. First, it inflates the benevolent image of Imperial Russia as deliverer of Armenian people. Next, it portrays cooperation and friendship between Russian and Armenian people. Lastly, it creates a cross-cultural connection between the two nations through emphasizing the bond between the Armenian people and Pushkin—the most iconic Russian intellectuals. As this paper argues, Hovhannisyan’s opera goes beyond exemplifying a complacent instance of the historical revisionist project.

Basing an opera on Pushkin’s authoritative eyewitness account allowed Hovhannisyan to claim ethnographic and historiographic realism in the eyes of the Soviet censors. Stowing away behind Pushkin’s sovereignty, however, the opera offers an alternative account of Russia’s role in nineteenth-century Armenian history and a critique of contemporaneous geopolitical affairs. Placing the opera in the political climate of the late 1980s—a time during which discontent with the Soviet government was snowballing across the republics—I draw from a variety of archival sources to illustrate the fraught nature of its conception and the ambivalent political stance Hovhannisyan takes on history, patriotism, and national identity.