Music, ethnicity, youth and social bonding: perhaps nowhere do these elements intersect more powerfully than within the ethnic-American summer camp. Although summer camps have been virtually absent from ethnomusicological inquiry, they present rich sites for interrogating the nuanced negotiations of identity that can occur within a diaspora. Based on fieldwork conducted at a Russian-American summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains (New York, USA), this paper explores how camp music presents a productive sphere for playing out contentious issues of diaspora (including inter-wave tension, hyphenated identity politics and disagreements over the purpose of a longstanding diaspora). Analysing music-making within this community through a theoretical lens of play (igra), this paper presents an original study of Russian émigré music and demonstrates how summer camp music presents a site for mediating competing epistemologies of the Diasporic Self for a diaspora that is facing an ontological juncture.
In the midst of the Prohibition era, New York City proliferated with nightclubs that presented patrons with imagined worlds of music and entertainment. This essay explores the role of music in creating such imagined worlds, looking specifically at the Russian-themed nightclubs founded by and employing émigrés recently exiled from Bolshevik Russia. Examining Midtown's Club Petroushka as a prime example of such a space, this essay focuses on the so-called “Russian Gypsy” entertainment that caught the eye and ear of the club's patrons, whose ranks included Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx, and the Gershwin brothers. Based on an examination of archival material—including memoirs, compositions, and extant recordings of Club Petroushka's musicians and photographs detailing its interior—as well as on advertisements and reviews from Russian American and other newspapers and magazines, this essay contends that the “Russian Gypsy” music presented at Club Petroushka enabled a transformative experience for patrons while providing a performative space for its recently exiled musicians. I argue that two aspects of this music in particular enabled the transformative process as it was delineated in contemporary discourses: 1) heightened emotionality; and 2) playing with a sense of time (a musical attribute I call “achronality”). Examining the complex cultural entanglements at work in the performance of “Russian Gypsy” music and situating my analysis within a theoretical framework of night cultures proposed by Brian D. Palmer and mimesis proposed by Michael Taussig, this essay illuminates the multivalent role of this musical trope for the different constituencies comprising Club Petroushka, while it also documents the largely overlooked Russian-Romani musical tradition as it took shape in the anti-Bolshevik, first wave Russian diaspora.
This chapter explores the long process by which musical meanings are made in the choral repertoire of a Russian diasporic church, the ROCOR Russian Orthodox church, in its mid-Atlantic U.S. diaspora. Its point of departure is not meanings held in common by these church members, but instead the disjunctive meanings assigned to musical practice (and the consequent differences in preferred musical practice) by multiple generations of Russian immigrants. Common meanings emerge from this process through the reconstruction of a Russian diasporic identity that both draws on the symbolic resources of musical institutions characterizing different factions of Russian church musicians and on the positionality of being “Russian abroad” that unifies members by a common idea of preserving prerevolutionary Russian culture.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.