MUSIC REVIEWS AS SIGNS OF THE SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT: COMPARATIVE CASE STUDIES OF THE LATVIAN, GERMAN, AND RUSSIAN MUSIC CRITICISM IN RIGA DURING THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES BAIBA JAUNSLAVIETE
Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music baiba.jaunslaviete@jvlma.lv
The music reviews of any epoch could be considered as “signs” manifesting the critics’ belonging to a certain social or national community with an established system of values. The aim of this paper is to discover the meaning of such “signs” in the Latvian music history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: the publications of Riga’s newspapers representing three national communities – Latvian, Baltic German, and Russian – will be researched. The relationships between these communities were complicated: Germans and Russians competed for influence in the Baltic cultural space, and simultaneously the natives of the country, the Latvians, strived to manifest their national identity; the first academically educated Latvian musicians were beginning to enter concert life. How were the relationships between these three communities reflected in music critique? Searching for an answer, current research of Latvian history will be taken into account, but a new approach based on the framing theory will also be provided. The case studies will include the comparison between the reviews of significant musical events by the Latvian, Russian, and Baltic German newspapers – the performances of new works by several Latvian composers (e.g., Alfrēds Kalniņš, Jāzeps Vītols). In the course of a content analysis, special attention will be paid to critics’ judgments about the national color, patriotic ideas, individual expression, and professional skills of the composers. It will result in the typologization of notions (frames), created by critics regarding the new Latvian music and its sociocultural contexts. Thus, conclusions about common and different tendencies in the reception of Latvian music of the chosen period, as well as its potential reasons, will be formulated. In the future, this typology may serve as a tool for studying music history in other regions, where different national communities with their own cultural traditions have long coexisted. Keywords: national identity, composers, framing theory.
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