Making music offers enormous possibilities--and faces significant limitations--in its power to generate belonging and advance social justice. Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol edit essays focused on the forms of interplay between music-making and community-making as mutually creative processes. Contributors in the first section look at cases where music arrived in settings with little or no sense of community and formed social bonds that lasted beyond its departure. In the sections that follow, the essayists turn to stable communities that used musical forms to address social needs and both forged new social groups and, in some cases, splintered established communities. By centering the value of difference in productive feedback dynamics of music and community while asserting the need for mutual moral indebtedness, they foreground music’s potential to transform community for the better.

Contributors: Stephen Blum, Joanna Bosse, Sylvia Bruinders, Donna A. Buchanan, Rick Deja, Veit Erlmann, Stefan Fiol, Eduardo Herrera, David A. McDonald, Tony Perman, Thomas Solomon, and Ioannis Tsekouras

Contributors: Alba Alexander, Megan Houston, Dennis R. Judd, Cynthia Klein-Banai, William C. Kling, Howard A. Learner, David A. McDonald, David C. Perry, Emily Stiehl, Anthony Townsend, Natalia Villamizar-Duarte, and Moira Zellner.

In 1904 a small, distant war brought Russia to the brink of internal collapse—and yet within ten years the country embroiled itself in an incomparably larger conflict close to home. How the war with Japan and its aftermath actually steered Russia toward such an unlikely, fateful decision is the subject of David McDonald’s book, a remarkable analysis of Russian foreign policy on the eve of World War I.

The revolutions that followed the Russo-Japanese War confirmed for Russian statesmen their belief that complications abroad threatened the domestic order. McDonald shows how this perceived connection prompted the institutional measures intended to minimize the risks of foreign entanglements, principally the reform of Council of Ministers as a “United Government” that would share the emperor’s role in forming foreign policy. These measures, as McDonald demonstrates, had a decisive effect on Russia’s restrained response to trouble in the Balkans, and consequently, on the course of world history.

McDonald’s analysis integrates the history of Russian foreign policy at this critical juncture with accounts of the “crisis of autocracy” that marked the early twentieth century. Depicting Nicholas II’s struggle with his ministers over the direction of foreign policy, the book offers insight into the evolution of the bureaucratic state and its relation to domestic society in late imperial Russia.