Pro Musica Hebraica is pleased to announce that Research Director James Loeffler’s book, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, has recently won two awards: The 2011 ASCAP Deems-Taylor Béla Bartók Award for Outstanding Ethnomusicology Book, and the 2011 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies sponsored by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
Drawing on a mass of unpublished writings and archival sources from prerevolutionary Russian conservatories, this book offers an insightful account of the Jewish search for a modern identity in Russia through music, rather than politics or religion. To preview the book, click here. To purchase the book from Amazon, click here.