Unpredictable Encounters Reconsidering Russian Music

Music has always been profoundly transnational, transcending language barriers and crossing borders in ways that few other cultural artifacts can. In Unpredictable Encounters, leading scholars from around the world examine how Russia's musical culture has undergone this process, interrogating its engagement with other cultures from the nineteenth century to the present.

Dedicated to the memory of the late Richard Taruskin, a leading scholar of Russian and Eastern European music, Unpredictable Encounters considers how individuals, organizations, and cultural artifacts crossed seemingly immutable and impenetrable borders. Its contributors address several fundamental questions: about music as an activity operating along complex transnational networks, including what roles composers, performers, critics, and others played in the exchange of musical information; about music's roles in Russia's ongoing sociocultural and sociopolitical development; and, most broadly, about the methodological implications of studying Russia's engagement with the world—and vice versa—both musical and otherwise.

Written against the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the essays in Unpredictable Encounters aim to confront Russia's colonial power and assess the effects of these events on the creation, performance, and reception of Russian music and musicians today.