Russian musicians in exile: the United Kingdom, 1900-1950

Abstract

The dissertation examines the contributions of Russian exiled/refugee musicians to the British Light Music industry between 1900 and 1950 and seeks to assess how displacement affected their musical activities. Focus rests on their engagement with social, political and artistic institutions within the country; their involvement with the formation of English balalaika/domra ensembles; their participation in Variety Theatre entertainment, opera performance and concerts; music-making within provincial communities; their encounters with the Musicians’ Union and Variety Artistes’ Federation; and their employment within institutions such as the BBC and ENSA. The first-wave Russian diaspora in Britain is considered as a small but distinctive community which presented challenges not encountered in other Russian diasporas but which contributed significantly to the cultural life of Britain.Research engages with music and displacement, music and social/political developments in Wales, music and gender (ladies’ orchestras), music and nationalism, Russian folk music, exoticism, nostalgia, and longing in music, theatre studies (Variety Theatre), and formal and informal concert performance. Research aims to retrieve a number of ‘lost histories’, case studies of a selected number of musicians in the Light Music industry; Edward Soermus, Vasily Andreeff, Alice Gardiner, Nikolai Medvedeff, the Wolkowsky family troupe and Vladimir Rosing. The reception of Russian performers, balalaika/domra ensembles and their repertoire (predominantly Russian folk music) in British press reporting provides perspectives on British perceptions of Russian folk music, its musicians and their instruments.Newspaper reviews and reporting; advertising and programmes; contemporary journals and reports; Hansard and government policy documents; accounts of immigrant life; BBC correspondence, contracts and listings; private letters (unpublished); memoirs; scores and music manuscripts; personal interviews; rare film footage and sound recordings provide the principal primary sources.Research findings are interpreted within the theoretical discourse of Nostalgia, Memory, Longing, Displacement and the Exotic. The outcome of the research is to affirm the positive interventions made by Russian exile musicians in British cultural life, to reach for a better understanding of how displacement affected their professional lives, to understand how nostalgia, longing and affirmations of cultural identity operated in their musical choices, and to restore these musicians to British music historiography.

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ORCID for David William Alcock: orcid.org/0009-0006-0050-2491

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