User:BeatriceVelline/Russian traditional music

Russian traditional music encompasses the folk music styles of the ethnic Russian people. The music is rooted in the music traditions of the Early Slavs, and at the beginnings of Russia as a nation. There is a large range of melodies, subjects, and styles within the Russian folk genre, and many ways to classify the music into related categories. Some of the common ways to categorize the music are by grouping them into village songs and urban songs, identifying the music by its place of origin, and grouping them by their function into ritual songs and non-ritual songs. Common types of songs include epics (bylinas), historical songs, lyrical songs, and calendar songs.

Russian folk music is largely composed on the pentatonic and diatonic scales, with melodies that are composed of tetrachords.

Village Songs

Ritual Songs

Music was integral to daily village life, performing special functions for social and agricultural rituals. Specific songs were reserved for weddings, funerals, births, and other significant social occasions. Calendar songs, songs that are about the agricultural calendar, are some of the oldest and most important to the rural folk tradition. They are performed in accordance with seasonal events, like the winter and summer solstices, and fall and spring equinoxes.

Before the advent of Christianity in Russia, rural Russians worshipped Pagan figures, like Yarilo the sun-god, and mother earth, who were central to the agricultural folk rituals. When Christianity entered daily Russian life, these same calendar rituals remained, taking on new identifications with Christian figures. For example, The Virgin Mary began to replace the image of mother earth as the figure responsible for life and fertility.

Russian khorovod on Trinity Day, 2018.

One of the most common types of a ritual song is the khorovod, a round song accompanied by a communal dance, where participants move together in a circle. Originally, khorovods held ritual significance in pagan society as an act of worshipping the sun, and later, in Russian society as a part of agricultural celebrations.

Non-Ritual Songs

While khorovods held ritual functions, they began to take non-ritual forms and became a source for games and social entertainment. Frequently, khorovods were performed with theatrical elements, and could be humorous, satirical, or a celebration of peasant life.

Epic and historical lyric songs were dedicated to historical Russian figures, such as Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Vladimir the Great, and Alexander I. Songs could either be celebrations of Russia and Russian life, like the many songs dedicated to the Volga river, or reflections of the struggles within Russian society, like the fight for the emancipation of serfdom.

Rural Vocal Styles

Many traditional folk songs are sung with polyphonic vocal parts, where one singer begins with the main melodic theme and other voices join in with ornate harmonies. Another way to describe the multiple vocal parts in rural folk music is heterophony, as the multiple singers each add what seems to be their own improvisations to the melodic line. In southern regions, male and female voices appear sonically similar, as men tend to sing in an upper register and women in their lower registers. Meanwhile, northern regions emphasize the difference in vocal parts, with high female and low male voices performed together.

Urban Songs

Illustration of a man playing a chastushka on a balalaika.

With a growing urban population in the eighteenth century, traditional peasant songs began to transform with the influence of Western culture and new instruments into a new genre of urban folk music. Literary songs, where folk musicians put poetry to music, emerged as a popular style. Poems by prominent Russian authors like Alexander Pushkin became the basis for this new genre of Russian song. Also from the urban folk tradition, the Chastushka, a humorous, up-tempo lyric song, became the leading musical genre of the nineteenth century.

One of the first types of urban folk song to emerge was the kant, an a cappella vocal piece with a three-part harmony. By the end of the eighteenth century, solo vocal pieces with instrumental accompaniment became the predominant form of urban folk music performance.

Folk Music Revival and The Soviet Union

Pre-Soviet Revival

In the late nineteenth century, a Russian landowner Vasilii Andreev pioneered the Russian folk orchestra, using traditional folk instruments and his own creations to form ensemble performances of Russian folk songs. The growing interest in folk orchestras led to a new understanding of folk music in the professional art space. Folk songs began to be performed alongside operatic arias and Italian choral pieces.

As Enlightenment and German idealist thought reached the Russian elite, a new interest formed in the study of Russian folklore and peasant life. Nobility in nineteenth-century Russia celebrated traditional folk music, seeing it as emblematic of true Russian civilization, and new composers borrowed from and referenced folk music styles. Rakhmaninov was vocal about his great interest in the folk tradition, often working folk songs and melodies into his compositions. The nineteenth-century also saw the first published collections of Russian folk music, as prior to these publications, folk songs and dances were a primarily oral tradition.

Folk music in Soviet Russia

1917-1934

After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, folklore studies and folk music were initially treated as important resources in the construction of Soviet nationalities. However, from the beginning of the Soviet government, Lenin and the Bolshevik party were critical towards the peasant population, viewing peasant culture as backwards, and in need of advancement. Further, those engaged in studies of folklore and folk music were increasingly criticized as members of wealthy peasant families.

After the revolution, The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and the Russian Association of Proletariat Musicians were formed to enable the growth of a new proletariat culture, moving away from the culture of the bourgeoisie and the 'backward' popular culture of the lower class. Between 1925 and the early 1930s, proletariat initiatives suppressed engagement with folklore studies and inhibited the performance of folk music.

1934-1950's

Soviet postage stamp depicting traditional Russian musical instruments.

Under Stalin, Russian folk traditions were revived as part of the increased importance of a Russian national identity. While folk music was banned for entertainment between 1928-1934, it became a part of popular culture once again in the mid 1930s. However, many have criticized the folk songs from the Stalin era as being 'fakelore,' constructed for the advancement of his political agenda, instead of songs reflective of the common people. The debate over the authenticity of Stalin-era folk music was in part due to the move to professionalize performers, regardless of their musical genre. Thus, all folk singers were obliged to both learn Western-style classical notation, and earn to perform the classical repertoire. Groups like the Red Army Song and Dance Ensemble, born in Soviet Russia and still active today, performed stylized arrangements of folk music material in the manner formulated by Vasily Andreyev and subsequently refined under Stalin's regime, yet widely accepted as 'authentically Russian' by Western audiences. A widespread practice was the performance of so-called Cossack prisiadki (low-squatting dances) in perfect synchronization; as Professor Laura J. Olson observes, 'this situation did not reflect actual Cossack traditions so much as it borrowed from the traditions of Russian ballet that dated to the late nineteenth century'.

Post-Stalin Soviet Union

In reaction to the end of the Stalin Era, Russian intellectuals began a search for an authentic Russian culture, turning to the rural traditions. A folk music revival, accompanied by the creation of the village prose literary genre, honed in on the nostalgia of pre-Revolutionary Russia. In the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet ethnographers began reviving folk music concerts that brought performers from rural villages to perform for the urban population, rather than the professionalized folk ensembles that had dominated the sphere.

Folk Music in Post-Soviet Russia

Russian folk singers in Istobensk, Kirov region, Russia

Festivals, competitions, and the work of ethnomusicologists have made attempts at preserving the surviving Russian folk traditions and aiming towards a folk music revival. In the late 1990s in post-Soviet Russia, one to three million people were actively participating in the folklore revival movement. Folk music scholars today continue to debate the authenticity of the current revival movements, arguing that the folk music upheld today largely descends from nineteenth-century reconstructions of folk music, and from Soviet-era professional ensembles, instead of the rural village traditions. Songs like Kalinka, written in the late nineteenth-century and popularized by the Red Army Chorus, are still seen as primary representations of folk music, while traditional songs are often performed with modern arrangements.

The rise of the World Music genre has opened space for new interest in traditional Russian music from other Western countries.

Increasingly, Russian musicians are working elements of traditional folk music into modern compositions. Artists like the musical group Ivan Kupala weave elements of Russian folk music with modern synthetic and electronic music.

Traditional Instruments

While many traditional Russian folk songs are performed a cappella, some songs, particularly in southern regions, are accompanied by instruments. In the Middle Ages, the Russian Orthodox Church prohibited folk instruments, and in one instance, burned five carriages filled with instruments in an attempt to eliminate instruments from musical performance. However, traditional instruments have remained an important part of the folk tradition.

Balalaika

Traditional Russian folk instruments can be broken into four categories: aerophones, chordophones, membranophones, and idiophones. One of the most popular folk instruments is the balalaika, which rose to prominence in the eighteenth-century as a descendent of the domra, a lute-like instrument. The domra was associated with seventeenth-century revolutionaries, causing Czar Alexis to issue a ban and leading to the development of the balalaika in response to his decree.

Aerophones: Wind Instruments

• Horns: Bone horns have been played in Russia since ancient times, with the oldest horn found in Russia dating back to the Iron Age. Horns are largely used in pastoral cultures, with shepherds playing them to control cattle, or to communicate over long stretches of land.
• Svistul'ka: an ancient Russian ocarina.
• Kuvlika: a panpipe usually played by all-women ensembles.
• Dudka, pyzhatka, and sipovka: flute-like instruments with 5-6 fingerholes. Often played with calendar and khorovod songs.
• Zhaleika: A reed instrument with 3-6 fingerholes, usually played solo.
• Rozhok: Wooden wind instrument with 6 fingerholes that ranges in in size up to 3 feet.
• Garmoshka: An instrument similar to the Concertina.

Chordophones: String Instruments

• Balalaika: A triangular lute-like instrument with three strings. Balalaika's come in six sizes, the smallest being the piccolo, and largest being the double bass.
• Gusli: An ancient psaltery instrument, often mentioned in lyric folk songs and depicted in folk art.
• Gudock: A three-stringed instrument played with a bow.
• Skripka: A three to four stringed fiddle instrument.
• Russian Guitar: A seven string acoustic guitar.

Gudok

Membranophones and Idiophones: Percussion Instruments

• Baraban: A drum.
• Lozhkas: Castanets.
• Buben: A Tambourine.
• Vargan, an equivalent of the jew's harp.

See also

• Sergey Nikolaevich Starostin
• Ivan Kupala (band)
• Pelageya
• Zhanna Bichevskaya
• Olga Glazova
• Music of Russia
• Russian folk dance