Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lynn Sargeant. Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Cultural Life. The New Cultural History of Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 354 pp. $45.00, cloth.Musical creativity, like other forms of artistic expression, does not develop in a vacuum; it evolves through a complex interplay of social, political, and cultural conditions at a specific historical moment. Recognizing that music and history are mutually implicated, historians have turned with increasing frequency to the study of music as a means to explain broader social and political trends in and Soviet life.3 Building upon this approach, Lynn Sargeant offers a fresh look at the realignment of society in the final years of the Empire. By offering an institutional analysis of the Musical Society (Russkoe muzykal'noe obshchestvo, henceforth RMO) from inception to demise (1859-1918), she both highlights the central role played by voluntary organizations in transforming the social fabric of the Empire, and sheds new light on the nineteenth-century process of constructing Russian music. Over the course of seven chapters, Sargeant employs a wide array of archival documents, periodicals, and personal accounts to support her overarching claim: musical life was fundamentally shaped, not by the individual careers of a few musical luminaries, but by the institutional network created by the RMO, which was in turn instrumental in the professionalization of the musical realm.The book opens with an overview of early nineteenth-century musical life, a period defined by the activities of foreign artists, private musical practice, and serf orchestras. The low social status of local musicians and limitations on public performance by nobles restricted the development of a musical profession in the first half of the nineteenth century. The legacies of this social background plagued the RMO for much of its existence. As Sargeant convincingly demonstrates, the RMO's establishment of centres for musical education (beginning with the conservatories in Moscow and St. Petersburg and expanding throughout the Empire) played a central role in musicians' attempts to legitimate claims to the same rights and privileges enjoyed by other professions. The impact of 1905, covered in chapter 6, gives an ironic twist to the fate of the RMO. While most professions to reduce the authority of the state over professional, social, and political life, musicians struggled to reduce the authority of a voluntary association over musical life and increase the authority of the state in music and music education, in order to raise the status and security of their profession and its institutions (p. 231). Within the unique context of musical life, the RMO was generally viewed by educated society as a script of its own struggle with the tsarist regime (p. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".