Sounding Russian Manchuria: Musical Circulation and Imperial Imagination

Dissertation in Ethnomusicology, UC Berkeley

Sounding Russian Manchuria: Musical Circulation and Imperial Imagination is a history of music and politics in the Russian colonial dependency in northern China, or Russian Manchuria, concentrating on the quarter-century from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) through the Sino-Soviet War of 1929. It investigates how Manchuria came to be characterized in Russian musical compositions and the ways that various musical agents expressed Imperial Russian and Soviet power in the region amid near-constant social turmoil and armed conflict. It provides a broad overview of musical life in the region by exploring opera, jazz, and commemorative war songs, performed live and recorded on gramophone discs. At its core, the dissertation demonstrates how music has functioned as a potent political force, shaping and reshaping the Russian imperial imagination of the greater Far Eastern border region and the various peoples who inhabited it.

The dissertation argues that musical circulation was an unusually powerful engine of Russian imperialism in Manchuria, fueled by extended musical tours, the migration of thousands of people, and the widespread distribution of popular Russian songs about the region. It tracks how political upheaval on the easternmost edge of Russian rule sent tremors throughout the Russian musical world, and how the question of Manchuria helped define the culture of the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union at large. It is informed by a wide range of archival materials, including memoirs, letters, magazine and newspaper articles, photographs, and 78 rpm recordings digitized for the first time, alongside ethnographic interviews and informal conversations with former residents of the region. In critical dialogue with scholarship in music studies, history, anthropology, new media studies, and other fields across the humanities, the dissertation suggests a distinctly musical revision of prevailing theories of imperial and post-imperial subjectivity, cultural mobility, and militarized territoriality.

To be published on ProQuest soon!