Music has always been profoundly transnational, transcending language barriers and crossing borders in ways that few other cultural artifacts can. In Unpredictable Encounters, leading scholars from around the world examine how Russia's musical culture has undergone this process, interrogating its engagement with other cultures from the nineteenth century to the present.

Dedicated to the memory of the late Richard Taruskin, a leading scholar of Russian and Eastern European music, Unpredictable Encounters considers how individuals, organizations, and cultural artifacts crossed seemingly immutable and impenetrable borders. Its contributors ask fundamental questions about music as an activity operating along complex transnational networks, including what roles composers, performers, critics, and others played in the exchange of musical information; what a study of this scope can reveal about Russia's ongoing sociocultural and sociopolitical development; and, most broadly, what Russia's transnational musical engagement with the world can offer as a case study for thinking about the global landscape, both musical and otherwise.

Written against the backdrop of Vladimir Putin's return to the Russian presidency in 2012 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine ten years later, the essays in Unpredictable Encounters aim to confront Russia's colonial power and assess the effects of these events on the creation, performance, and reception of Russian music and musicians today.