Русская традиция «играть песни» как феномен народного исполнительства

Abstract

Russian musical folklore reflects the rich culture of the people, for them performing a song means to reveal the soul in it. Nowadays, there is an acute problem of preserving the traditional criteria of folk performance as a national treasure. But it can be solved not by imitation of the external signs of folklore intonation, but through a deep understanding of the primordial signs of the very process of folk song creation. Many of them are rooted in the Russian tradition of “playing songs”, which was widespread in Russia until the middle of the 20th century. The purpose of this work is to study its features as a phenomenon of folk performance. The signs of the tradition of “playing songs” form a complex, multi-valued concept, which is considered in the article from different positions. The main attention is focused on understanding the artistic, aesthetic and phenomenological principles of this phenomenon. In the folk environment, the concepts of “singing” and “playing” songs are delimited. Spiritual verses were sung, and songs were played. The expression “playing songs” contains a “genetic code’, marking the signs of the Proto-Slavic culture, when the very word “game” meant “singing and dancing in honor of a pagan deity”. In ritual folklore, this concept is revealed as the art of representation. In songs with deep psychological overtones – as the art of experiencing. “Playing a song”, the singers are able to penetrate into the subtle world of poetic images and into the intonation subtext of musical images. In the process of “immersion” in the conditional reality of the song space, they can interpret the idea of the song in a new way and, in the context of certain life circumstances, create new versions of the prototype.