Russia Gets the Blues

Russia Gets the Blues PDF Author: Michael Urban
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717200
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Michael Urban chronicles the advent of blues music in Russia and explores the significance of the genre in the turbulent, postcommunist society. Russians, he explains, have taken a music originating in the "low" culture of the American South and transformed it into an object of "high" culture, fashioning a social identity that distinguishes blues adherents from both the discredited Soviet past and the vulgar consumerism associated with the country's Westernization. While adapting the idiom to their own conditions, Russia's bliuzmeny (bluesmen) have absorbed the blues ethos encoded in the music by their American forebears, using it to invert their social world, thus deriving dignity and satisfaction from those very things that give one the blues.Based on more than forty interviews with blues musicians and fans, nightclub managers, and others, Russia Gets the Blues reveals the fascinating history of blues in Russia, from the initial mimicry of British blues-rock to the recent emergence of a specifically "Russian blues." The gradual mastering of the idiom in Russia has been conditioned by the culture of the country's intelligentsia, a fact explaining why, on one hand, bliuzmeny feel compelled to proselytize on behalf of the music, to share with others this treasure of "world culture," while, on the other, they perform blues almost exclusively in English—which almost no one understands—and condemn any and all efforts to make the music commercially successful.

Russia Gets the Blues

Russia Gets the Blues PDF Author: Michael Urban
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717200
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Michael Urban chronicles the advent of blues music in Russia and explores the significance of the genre in the turbulent, postcommunist society. Russians, he explains, have taken a music originating in the "low" culture of the American South and transformed it into an object of "high" culture, fashioning a social identity that distinguishes blues adherents from both the discredited Soviet past and the vulgar consumerism associated with the country's Westernization. While adapting the idiom to their own conditions, Russia's bliuzmeny (bluesmen) have absorbed the blues ethos encoded in the music by their American forebears, using it to invert their social world, thus deriving dignity and satisfaction from those very things that give one the blues.Based on more than forty interviews with blues musicians and fans, nightclub managers, and others, Russia Gets the Blues reveals the fascinating history of blues in Russia, from the initial mimicry of British blues-rock to the recent emergence of a specifically "Russian blues." The gradual mastering of the idiom in Russia has been conditioned by the culture of the country's intelligentsia, a fact explaining why, on one hand, bliuzmeny feel compelled to proselytize on behalf of the music, to share with others this treasure of "world culture," while, on the other, they perform blues almost exclusively in English—which almost no one understands—and condemn any and all efforts to make the music commercially successful.

Russian Blues

Russian Blues PDF Author: Domini Brown
Publisher: Bellwether Media
ISBN: 1681031914
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description
The intense gaze of a green-eyed Russian blue draws the attention of any cat admirer. Glistening, plush fur, a regal Russian history, and chosen loyalty to its owner give this cat a reputation of luxury. But the breed was not always so significant. Learn more about how the Russian blue earned a place among cat fanciers in our book for beginning readers.

Russia

Russia PDF Author:
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 9780811843225
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This catalogue of 120 photographs documenting the traces that the Soviet Union left on Russia's landscape paints a rainbow-hued portrait of a somber country.

Cultures of Power in Post-Communist Russia

Cultures of Power in Post-Communist Russia PDF Author: Michael Urban
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139490273
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In Russian politics reliable information is scarce, formal relations are of relatively little significance, and things are seldom what they seem. Applying an original theory of political language to narratives taken from interviews with 34 of Russia's leading political figures, Michael Urban explores the ways in which political actors construct themselves with words. By tracing individual narratives back to the discourses available to speakers, he identifies what can and cannot be intelligibly said within the bounds of the country's political culture, and then documents how elites rely on the personal elements of political discourse at the expense of those addressed to the political community. Urban shows that this discursive orientation is congruent with social relations prevailing in Russia and helps to account for the fact that, despite two revolutions proclaiming democracy in the last century, Russia remains an authoritarian state.

Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema

Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema PDF Author: Lilya Kaganovsky
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253011108
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This innovative volume challenges the ways we look at both cinema and cultural history by shifting the focus from the centrality of the visual and the literary toward the recognition of acoustic culture as formative of the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. Leading experts and emerging scholars from film studies, musicology, music theory, history, and cultural studies examine the importance of sound in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet cinema from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Addressing the little-known theoretical and artistic experimentation with sound in Soviet cinema, changing practices of voice delivery and translation, and issues of aesthetic ideology and music theory, this book explores the cultural and historical factors that influenced the use of voice, music, and sound on Soviet and post-Soviet screens.

Give My Poor Heart Ease

Give My Poor Heart Ease PDF Author: William Ferris
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807898529
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues. Now, Give My Poor Heart Ease puts front and center a searing selection of the artistically and emotionally rich voices from this invaluable documentary record. Illustrated with Ferris's photographs of the musicians and their communities and including a CD of original music, the book features more than twenty interviews relating frank, dramatic, and engaging narratives about black life and blues music in the heart of the American South. Here are the stories of artists who have long memories and speak eloquently about their lives, blues musicians who represent a wide range of musical traditions--from one-strand instruments, bottle-blowing, and banjo to spirituals, hymns, and prison work chants. Celebrities such as B. B. King and Willie Dixon, along with performers known best in their neighborhoods, express the full range of human and artistic experience--joyful and gritty, raw and painful. In an autobiographical introduction, Ferris reflects on how he fell in love with the vibrant musical culture that was all around him but was considered off limits to a white Mississippian during a troubled era. This magnificent volume illuminates blues music, the broader African American experience, and indeed the history and culture of America itself.

Give My Poor Heart Ease, Enhanced Ebook

Give My Poor Heart Ease, Enhanced Ebook PDF Author: William Ferris
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807899720
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues. Now, Give My Poor Heart Ease puts front and center a searing selection of the artistically and emotionally rich voices from this invaluable documentary record. Illustrated with Ferris's photographs of the musicians and their communities and including a CD of original music and a DVD of original film, the book features more than twenty interviews relating frank, dramatic, and engaging narratives about black life and blues music in the heart of the American South. Here are the stories of artists who have long memories and speak eloquently about their lives, blues musicians who represent a wide range of musical traditions--from one-strand instruments, bottle-blowing, and banjo to spirituals, hymns, and prison work chants. Celebrities such as B. B. King and Willie Dixon, along with performers known best in their neighborhoods, express the full range of human and artistic experience--joyful and gritty, raw and painful. In an autobiographical introduction, Ferris reflects on how he fell in love with the vibrant musical culture that was all around him but was considered off limits to a white Mississippian during a troubled era. This magnificent volume illuminates blues music, the broader African American experience, and indeed the history and culture of America itself. The enhanced ebook edition includes: * Almost 2 hours of video clips and interviews scattered throughout the text * An hour of original music, also imbedded throughout the text * Concludes with the full DVD of original film and full CD of original music Watch the video below to see a demonstration of the the features of this enhanced ebook:

Russia blues...

Russia blues... PDF Author: Renata Lesnik
Publisher: Ginkgo Editeur
ISBN: 2846792011
Category : Political corruption
Languages : fr
Pages : 432

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Book Description


The Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw

The Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw PDF Author: Stephen V. Bittner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801446061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Bittner explores how the neighborhood changed during the period of ideological relaxation under Khrushchev that came to be known as the thaw.

Red Square Blues

Red Square Blues PDF Author: Kim Traill
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
ISBN: 0730450007
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
A beginner's guide to the decline and fall of the Soviet Union In 1990, Kim traill set off for the former Soviet Union with a smattering of vocabulary, a lust for wild adventure and a swag of youthful idealism about the great Communist experiment. It would take some time for the scales to fall from her eyes. Over the next 17 years Kim discovered a Russia few tourists see. She ate some of the world's worst food, went to places few of us would venture, made good friends and met a lot of seriously dodgy people. On collective farms and on 40-hour train journeys, at red carpet parties and in marriage agencies, on nuclear bases and in the frozen wastes of Siberia, she navigated the country's changing fortunes, bearing witness to the horrific events of war, nuclear accidents, drug and alcohol addiction and ethnic rivalries. She even tried to make herself into a good Russian woman, abandoning her uniform of jeans, boots and Russian prison coat for heels and a skin-tight dress. RED SQUARE BLUES a full-blooded charge through a crumbling empire as it lurches from dark power to open society and back again. It is an eye-opening portrait of an eternally surprising country, leavened with the kind of bone-dry humour only life in a repressive police state can produce.