Velichkina, Olga

Supplement to the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet and Eurasian

FOLK MUSIC, RUSSIAN.

The traditional oral music of the Russian people.

Russian folk music in its most typical ethnic manifestation, tends to reflect the outlook of the
Russian peasant. Russian folk music is diverse, chronologically and geographically. During its
long development alongside professional music, it accumulated elements and influences from
various historical times. The presence of folk music is already documented in certain chronicles
of the early middle ages, although interest in collecting folk songs started only at the end of the
eighteenth century. As is typical of oral traditions, early elements coexist with later forms of
musical expression. The presence of both strands, sometimes within the same song, can make the
dating of a specific piece difficult. Yet, thanks to documentary sources and historical data, some
general trends in the development of Russian folk music can be identified.
The great regional diversity of Russian folk music was caused by the enormous territorial
spread of the Russian people by the end of the period of colonization in the seventeenth century,
which brought Russians into contact with a variety of natural environments, types of agriculture,
and neighboring ethnic groups. In areas long dominated by ethnic Russians, specialists identify
specific traditions of the European north, and of western, central, and southern Russia, including
Cossack territory, as the most significant musical dialects. Music of the Russians of the lower
Volga, the Ural Mountains, and Siberian regions, which were colonized later, generally have
characteristics traceable to the tradition of the regions of origin of these traditions, although
mixed with influences of indigenous people.
In addition to the styles of these broad geographic zones, one may distinguish musical
styles particular to small groups, including religious sects–various groups of Old Believers, and
schismatics such as the dukhobors and the molokans–and professional trades, including barge
haulers, wood cutters and raftsmen, soldiers, coachmen, and, later, urban workers and students.
These traditions differ in their genres, musical stylistic features–such as the structural elements of
the songs–rhythmic patterns, or the types of polyphony, and the styles of interpretation.
Because peasants had limited mobility and a conservative way of life, the territorial
distribution of village music can still be detected in the patterns of original settlement and
historical migration. In the European north, for example, which was colonized by Russians from
Novgorod starting in the twelve century, water was for centuries the most important means of
transportation and trade. Today we can still distinguish particular musical dialects formed along
the rivers, the coasts of the White Sea, and Lake Onega. The colonization of the south-east by
Muscovite Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represents a different pattern. To
protect the colonizers against nomads, lines of defence and military settlements gradually moved
outwards into the steppes. Accordingly, in the musical styles of the traditions of Riazan,
Belgorod, and Voronezh, dissemination of certain songs and genres follow these defensive lines.
Similar patterns of geographical distribution are evident in other cultural elements, such as
rituals, dialects, types of traditional costumes, and agricultural tools.
In peasant culture music is an integral part of life rather than a specifically artistic activity.
In Russian folk terminology there is no general term for what we would call music; the word
“music” indicates a musical instrument. Many genres, especially laments and certain seasonal
children songs, are not considered songs, and they are not sung, but cried out, shouted, or played.
Russian folk music can be divided into vocal and instrumental spheres, rarely mixed
together, and into ritual and non-ritual genres. While vocal ritual music is predominantly female,
most instrumental music is reserved to males. Non-ritual songs can be sung both by men and
women, often in mixed choruses. The Cossack tradition, with its military roots, is known for the
predominance of the male chorus.
The characteristics of ritual singing arise from an archaic understanding of sound as a
magical means for influencing nature. Sound, and the human voice in particular, was thought to
protect community living space and to assure the correct passage of seasons. While the realm of
the dead and of evil is silent, the presence of sound signifies life. The louder the sound, the more
powerful its action. Accordingly, most ritual singing is done with a tense and loud chest voice in
the open air. Women often seek out a place from which to project the singing as far as possible.
Calendar Songs mark the natural changes of season and are linked to a particular period or day of
the Orthodox Church calendar. In spite of their names the texts of these songs and the ritual
practices with which they are associated often make allusions to pagan beliefs. The main idea
behind the calendar songs is the cult of fertility, closely related to the cult of ancestors, and they
are most frequently heard in the period between the winter and the summer solstice, the time of
natural growth.
Many calendar rituals and songs are common to all Slavs, and additional commonalities
are found among Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians living between the upper basins of the
Desna River on the eastern side and Pripiat River on the west, an area known as Polesie (literally,
the forest zone). This territory was a cradle for all three nations and it has best preserved the
archaic layers of peasant culture. Among Russians the most developed system of calendar songs
is found on the territory of the Russian Polesie, by the borders of Byelorussia and the Ukraine,
with centers in the provinces of Briansk and Smolensk. Other Russian territories preserved only
some parts of the calendar repertoire.
On the eve of Christmas or New Year’s different forms of koliadki (from the Latin
calenda, to call) were sung for each village house by groups of children and youth. Nikolai Gogol
describes this in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, 1831).
Before Epiphany young unmarried girls took part in various fortune telling rituals.
Singing special songs in which their destiny was symbolically foretold, they would take finger
rings, one by one, out of shawl-covered dish. The melody of one of these songs, with its refrain
of Glory and its festive and solemn character, was specially favored by nationalist Russian
composers in opera scenes in which the tsar made his appearance. Modest Mussorgsky (1839-
1881) uses it, together with church bells, in the Prologue of Boris Godunov, as did Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov (1849-1908) in The Tsar’s Bride (Tsarskaia nevesta).
The week of Shrovetide, which is festive and full of food symbolism, bade farewell to
winter. Special songs for this period accompanied the ritual burning of a straw doll representing
winter, as portrayed in Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Snow Maiden (Snegurochka, 1880).
During Lent, which followed Shrovetide, singing and dancing were banned by the church.
Nevertheless some traditions had peculiar and probably quite ancient forms of songs, called non-
songs, that were specifically performed during Lent. For example, there was a widespread custom
of calling skylarks to fly in and bring springtime with them. This call is usually a very simple
tune, intoned on three pitches stepping down a major second and then a minor third. This three-
note sequence, g-f-d, is a common modal basis for calendar songs. Children sang it on the day of
the spring equinox (22 March), while throwing cakes shaped like these birds into the air.
Spring was celebrated in music most intensely from Easter to Pentecost, when many
different types of songs, including calls, processional songs, dances, and rounds, were heard in
the village and surrounding fields and meadows. In western Russia, the gukania, or unison choral
cries in the upper register in the middle or at the end of each stanza, are typical of springtime
songs. They are also found among other Slavic peoples, such as Ukrainians, Byelorussians,
Bulgarians, Serbs, Slovaks, and Macedonians. In the Smolensk region, the church troparion,
Christ is risen from the dead, was sung on village streets during the six weeks after Easter.
Shepherds’ rituals and music play a special part in springtime rituals. May 6, the feast day
of Saint George, the patron saint of domestic animals, marked the beginning of the pasturing
season. On this day shepherds and cow owners performed magic rituals, including incantations
on a musical instrument, which were designed to protect their flocks and herds from beasts of
prey. Since most pasturing was done in forests, the ability to play a musical instrument was an
indispensable skill for a shepherd, as it allowed him to send various signals to his animals. The
instruments played by shepherds ranged, in different localities, from wooden trumpets to reed
instruments of the clarinet type to idiophones, wooden tablets with two beaters. Shepherds had
free time to practice their instrument, so they usually mastered it well and, if the technical
possibilities of the instrument allowed it, were able to play not only signals, but also dances and
slow lyric songs.
On the feast of the summer solstice, known in eastern Slavic tradition by the double name
of Ivan Kupala (Saint John’s day), rituals marking the high point of the cycle of nature included
the gathering of flowers and medicinal herbs, singing and dancing, and jumping over bonfires.
This custom is only known in the Polesie, and to a lesser degree among Russians there than
among their neighbors. The same Polesie region also preserved special harvest songs that are
unknown in other Russian territories.
In addition to the calendar songs, ritual vocal music includes wedding songs and wedding
and funeral laments.
 In Russian peasant tradition a wedding was a very complex and developed community
ritual focused on the themes of the continuity of life and the new status acquired by the young
couple. The symbolic rite of passage was made especially evident in the bride’s ritual expression
of grief at leaving behind her free life as a girl in her parents’ house and entering “a foreign
country and an unknown family, subject to the orders of her mother-in-law.” Peasant marriages
were often arranged in olden times, but even into the mid-twentieth century a bride was expected
to weep and to know how to lament in accordance with traditional rules.
Laments or semi-improvised poetic verses set to short melodic formulas accompanied
every step taken in preparation for a wedding ritual. The bride could lament solo, together with
her female relatives, or with her girlfriends, unmarried girls. In the north of Russia the bride’s
laments, stretching over the span of a few weeks, were often accompanied by more elaborated
and developed choral laments by the girlfriends. In southern and central Russia only the most
important ritual events–the gathering of the girl’s female friends the evening before the wedding
day, or the rite of dressing the bride the next morning and waiting for the groom to come–allowed
for laments. These were often accompanied by quite energetic wedding songs that depicted the
wedding as a war scene. In the Riazan region of central Russia these songs were said to provoke
the bride to weep.
From a musical standpoint the combination of lament and song represents a curious type
of polyphony with two absolutely autonomous layers, different in their form, tempo, rhythm,
tonality, and vocal range, that sound quite fresh and unusual to the ear of a music lover. Sound
recordings of wedding laments with accompanying songs were made in significant numbers by
Russian folklorists from the 1960s to the 1980s, when this tradition was still well remembered
and could be reproduced by village singers on request. In modern village life, under the influence
of urban culture, wedding ritual has become increasingly simplified and focused on the festive
and playful aspects, leaving no place for the expression of grief.
If wedding laments have now completely died out, funeral laments are still part of a living
tradition and can be heard in different regions of the country, as well as in the Ukraine and
Belarus. They can also be sung at the graveside, not at funerals but on the days for
commemorating the dead, or on sad occasions in solitary places. In the Pskov region in north-
west Russia a particular form of lament is called the lament with the cuckoo, a bird believed to
represent the soul of the dead. Women claim that they spontaneously start lamenting upon
hearing the bird’s call.
Laments in general belong to the tradition of women, male laments being extremely rare.
The genre of lament is probably of very ancient origin. One of the earliest documented examples
is found in the anonymous twelfth-century poem, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, in which the
young princess Yaroslavna laments her beloved on the town wall.
Wedding songs are very numerous and constitute a major part of every local tradition.
Most wedding tunes are poly-textual, that is, one melody can be sung to several poetic texts
depending on the place in the ritual.
The traditional wedding was organized as a complex musical drama, based on several
different principles. In many places wedding songs fall into two large categories, songs of
farewell, which were sung before the bride left her parents’ house, and joyous songs sung at the
festive table at the groom’s home. The first group was slow and stylistically close to laments,
especially if the bride was an orphan, while the festive songs of the second group were faster and
similar to dance and movement songs.
At the wedding feast a specially invited group of girls or women honored the newlyweds
and all the guests with their songs. The guests had to pay for the song. If the singers did not
receive the expected payment, they might reproach a greedy guest with satirical verses. The
second day, after the wedding night, is a time for all sorts of jokes, masquerades, and theatrical
scenes. Often, the songs sung at this final day have an erotic content. The rituals of the second
day are retained in the modern tradition, while the role of the traditional wedding songs is
reduced, if not completely forgotten.
In some parts of northern Russia, for example on the Sukhona River, wedding music was
not divided into songs of farewell and songs of festivity, but was based instead on a dialogue
between the family of the bride and the family of the groom, which were represented musically
by different melodies. In the regions of Smolensk and Pskov and in neighboring parts of Belarus
the musical structure of the wedding ritual included a dialogue between male and female groups.
A specially invited musician with his instrument–traditionally a violinist but more recently an
accordionist–played a ritual role. He could, for example, substitute for the bride’s father. He
initiated songs, followed the bride with her laments, and, naturally, played marches at the church
entry and dance music at the feast. In other places instrumental music was involved in the ritual
to a lesser extent, but it still was and is important. There is practically no village wedding without
an accordionist.
Among non-ritual songs an important place in peasant tradition belongs to epics, or byliny
(pl.). These are sung poems devoted to the heroic endeavors of the defenders of Kievan Rus, or to
the travel of the musician and merchant, Sadko of Novgorod.
In earlier times byliny were probably disseminated more broadly, but by the second half
of the nineteenth century they were concentrated in the European North, where a flourishing epic
tradition was discovered by P.N. Rybnikov and A.F. Gilferding in the 1870s. In this region the
singing of byliny was mostly a solo male occupation. The melodies of northern byliny are short,
usually the length of one line in a long poetic text. They were sung in a rhythmically measured
manner, at a moderate tempo, and in solemn recitation style.
As the art of bylina singing demanded a natural gift and training, it was mostly handed
down within families, from father to son or less commonly to a daughter. One of the well known
dynasties of epic singers was the Riabinins, of whom four generations are known to researchers.
Their tunes are frequently found in Russian classical music and they can also be heard on the first
phonograph records devoted to epics, dating from 1890s and re-edited on LP in 1980s. Another
bylina that was very important for Russian composers is from an eighteenth-century manuscript,
the earliest bylina collection by Kirsha Danilov. This tune served as a musical kernel for Sadko,
Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera on the bylina story.
 Fragments of bylina songs were also found on the periphery of the Russian state among
the Cossacks and some groups of Old Believers, where the favorite bylina theme, defence against
the enemy, kept its strong appeal. In these areas, in contrast to the northern tradition, the songs
were choral, sung polyphonically, in the musical style of lyric stretched (slow) songs.
In addition to epics there existed other narrative genres, such as historical songs, ballads
and spiritual verses on philosophical and religious subjects. The latter genre was performed by
groups of blind pilgrims travelling from village to village and also by peasants during Lent. The
melodies of spiritual verses often show influences from church music. All these genres, ranging
from early tradition to quite recent specimens, are diverse, both poetically and musically.
Lyrical poetic texts (expressing the feelings of the individual include diverse musical
settings, from slow songs to dance tunes. Most highly developed among the genres of peasant
folklore are the so-called slow, or, in folk terminology, stretched, songs. This genre developed in
about the seventeenth century, when the Russian nation acquired a certain unity. Not surprisingly,
one and the same lyric, stretched song can be found in very different local traditions, although
they often take on local musical features. The esthetical enjoyment clearly dominates in this
genre. Unlike ritual songs, they have no clear functional purpose and can be sung any time—at
the table, on village streets, in the fields or while at work, for the pleasure and amusement of the
singers themselves. Stretched songs were usually sung in small unisex or mixed ensembles, in
polyphonic settings, with a prominent role for two soloists, one beginning every stanza, and
another using an upper voice, sung with a high chest tone, tense, and emerging above the rest of
the chorus because of its intensity. The tonal range of these songs is much broader than that of
calendar or wedding songs, encompassing more than an octave. The text of stretched songs is
completely subservient to the melodic development; the words become stretched. hence the
name, repeated, or interrupted by melodic turns and by meaningless syllables and reprised later.
Their complex rhythmic structure is characterised by phrases with free and irregular meters–
expressed in notation as a succession of measures with constantly changing meter, which gives
the impression that the song flows like a slow, mighty river defying all temporal limits (to use
Boris Pasternak’s (1890-1960) description from his novel Doctor Zhivago, of 1956).
In the second half of the nineteenth century urban culture actively influenced peasant
folklore and led to the development of a new genre, chastushki, or short quips of two to four
poetic lines. These are sung solo or in chorus, usually to the accompaniment of a musical
instrument, at informal gatherings. Two singers often dance facing each other and alternating
their semi-improvised couplets, while others listen and judge this singing competition.
Ethnographers lamented the rapid growth in popularity of the chastushki, believing that they
represented the death of traditional folklore. Today it is still a favorite genre that has lost neither
its popularity nor its creativity; it still provides a humorous and lyrical commentary on present-
day realities, as in chastushki about perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union. A musically
innovative and convincing example of interpreting this genre in art music can be found in the
First Concerto for Orchestra, Naughty Chastushki (Ozornye chastushki), by Rodion Shchedrin
(1963).
 Vocal music clearly dominates the Russian folk tradition; the sphere of instrumental
music is more restricted. Wind instruments are the best represented group, with kygikly
(panpipes), dudki (wooden flutes and grass whistles without finger holes) and a reed instrument
known by various names. String instruments include the gusli (zither), fiddle, balalaika, and
guitar. The percussion instruments include the tambour, especially in southern and western
Russia, and treshchotka rattles, known only locally in the upper basin of the Oka River. All of
these instruments except the panpipes and rattle were played by men.
Except for the shepherd’s solitary music-making, ensemble instrumental performance was
preferred, almost always accompanied by singing and dancing. Favorite instruments were often
combined to form spontaneous ensembles, to which anyone possessing an instrument could join
in. The favorite and most stable combinations included balalaika, guitar, and accordion (Belgorod
province), fiddle and balalaika or gusli (Pskov region), two fiddles with tambour (Smolensk), and
wooden flutes with scythe, the harvesting tool, taken out of handle (along the border between the
provinces of Belgorod and Kursk).
Today, village folk music in Russia is in rapid decline, with most of the traditional genres
dying out but still remembered by the oldest generation of villagers. If it is still possible to record
samples, it is done only at the request of a collector. It remains a primary task of folklorists to
record the greatest possible number of traditional songs.
Racing against the clock of decline and partly in reaction to so-called fakelore propaganda
of Soviet times, authentic folk music is gaining popularity among the young urban population.
Russia at the end of twentieth century, in search of a national identity and values, experienced a
revival of folk singing. This movement, started in 1970s by the Folk Ensemble led by Dmitry
Pokrovsky (1944-1996), has enjoyed tremendous success among the intelligentsia with its
performances of non-arranged versions of folk music. Today the Union of Folk Ensembles counts
several hundred groups in all parts of the country. Folk music also provides significant inspiration
for different currents of national jazz, rock, and pop music, including such groups as Ivan Kupala,
which uses the name of the traditional peasant feast day and builds compositions around
authentic field recordings (inspired by Deep Forest recordings).
Traditional folk music is an important part of the nation’s musical heritage and has been
held in high esteem by professional musicians. Russian composers from Mikhail Glinka (1804-
1857) to Rodion Schedrin and Valery Gavrilin (1939-1999) always acknowledged folklore as a
powerful source of their inspiration. The twentieth century witnessed later waves of interest in the
novelty and freshness of folklore, which nourished the creativity of Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
and many other composers.

Bibliography:
Boleslava Efimenkova, Ritm v proizvedeniiakh russkogo vokal’nogo folklora, (M., 2001);
Margarita Mazo, “We don’t summon Spring in the Summer,” Christianity and the Arts in Russia
(Cambridge, 1991), and “Russia, the USSR and the Baltic States” in Ethnomusicology. Historical
and regional studies (New York, 1993); JVC Video Anthology of the World Music and Dance,
tape 23 (Newbury, Mass., 1990); Elizabeth Warner and Evgenii Kustovskii, Russian Traditional
Folk Song (Hull, 1990); Izaly Zemtsovsky, “Russia” in The Garland Encyclopedia of World
Music, Vol. 8, (New York, 2000),

Olga Velichkina
Many thanks to Dr. Thomas Heck and Anne Heck for help in editing.