Folk Music

FOLK MUSIC

Russian folk music is the indigenous vocal (accompanied and unaccompanied) and instrumental music of the Russian peasantry, consisting of songs and dances for work, entertainment, and religious and ritual occasions. Its origins lie in customary practice; until the industrial era it was an oral tradition, performed and learned without written notation. Common instruments include the domra (three-or four-stringed round-bodied lute), balalaika (three-stringed triangular-bodied lute), gusli (psaltery), bayan (accordion), svirel (pennywhistle), and zhaleyka (hornpipe). Russian folk music includes songs marking seasonal and ritual events, and music for figure or circle dances (korovody ) and the faster chastye or plyasovye dances. A related form, chastushki (bright tunes accompanying humorous or satirical four-line verses), gained rural and urban popularity during the late nineteenth century. The sung epic bylina declined during the nineteenth century, but protyazhnye —protracted lyric songs, slow in tempo and frequently sorrowful in content and tone—remain popular. Significant stylistic and repertoire differences exist among various regions of Russia.

Russian educated society's interest in folk music began during the late eighteenth century. Numerous collections of Russian folk songs were published over the next two centuries (notably N. L. Lvov and J. B. Práč, Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes, St. Petersburg, 1790). From the nineteenth century onward, Russian composers used these as an important source of musical material.

During the nineteenth century, German philosopher Johann Herder's ideas of romantic nationalism and the importance of the folk in determining national culture inspired interest in and appreciation of native Russian musical sources, especially as they reflected notions of national pride. Mikhail Glinka, for his purposeful use of Russian folk themes in his 1836 opera A Life for the Tsar, is considered the founder of the "national" school of Russian music composition, most famously embraced by Mili Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. This designation had more political than musical significance, as composers not associated with the national school, such as Peter Tchaikovsky and Igor Stravinsky, also made use of folk music in their compositions.

Russian ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made efforts to record native folk music in the face of increasing urbanization. In 1896 Vasily Andreyev (1861–1918) organized an orchestra of folk instruments, and in 1911 Mitrofan Piatnitsky (1864–1927) founded a Russian folk choir. Originally consisting of peasant and amateur performers, both became well-known professional ensembles, providing folk music as entertainment for urban audiences.

During the Soviet era folk music had important symbolic importance as a form genuinely "of the people." During the 1930s, state support for socialist realism encouraged study and performance of folk music. Composers and amateur performers developed a new "Soviet folk song" that wedded traditional forms and styles with lyrics praising socialism and the Soviet state. Official support was demonstrated in the establishment of the Pyatnitsky choir and the Russian folk orchestra directed by Nikolai Osipov (1901–1945) as State ensembles. Russian folk music became a state-sanctioned performance genre characterized by organized amateur activities, notated music, academic study, and large professional performing ensembles that toured internationally. During the 1970s, Dmitry Pokrovsky(d. 1996) began a new effort to collect and perform Russian folk songs and tunes in authentic peasant village style, with local variations. This revival of Russian folk music received international attention as part of the world music movement.

See also: balalaika; folklore; glinka, mikhail; music; rimsky-korsakov, nikolai andreyevich

bibliography

Brown, Malcolm Hamrick. (1983). "Native Song and National Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music." In Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. Theofanis George Stavrou. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Miller, Frank J. (1990). Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore in the Stalin Era. Armonk, NY:M.E. Sharpe.

Rothstein, Robert A. (1994). "Death of the Folk Song?" In Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Taruskin, Richard. (1997). Defining Russia Musically. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Susannah Lockwood Smith