Historical Dictionary of Russian Music: (Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts)

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, Nikolai 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 Musorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Igor Stravinsky have played their crucial role in the development of Western music, influencing the work of virtually every notable composer of the past century. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries for each of Russia’s major performing organizations and performance venues, and on specific genres such as ballet, film music, symphony and church music. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian Music.

Table of Contents:
Editor’s Foreword, by Jon Woronoff Acknowledgments Reader’s Note Acronyms and Abbreviations Chronology Introduction THE DICTIONARY Bibliography About the Author

About the Author :
Daniel Jaffé has lectured, broadcast and written extensively on Russian music, and is a regular contributor to BBC Music Magazine. He has published a biography of Sergey Prokofiev, and contributed extensively to the Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia.

Review :
Published approximately a decade after the first edition, this second edition of Jaffe´'s Historical Dictionary of Russian Music, like its predecessor, is a remarkable reference work for students, scholars, and music enthusiasts. The new edition fills gaps left by the first; includes more complete entries; expands coverage on folk music, publications, and schools of music; and updates the chronology, list of acronyms, and bibliography…. The bibliography, which begins with a four-page introduction that offers an insightful historiography on the scholarship on Russian music, is greatly expanded: the first edition featured 68 pages and approximately 500 entries; the second edition is 81 pages with about 600 entries. The bibliography is a fantastic resource for research, especially because of its topical organization and comprehensiveness. This new edition updates and replaces the first. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.