Богослужебное пение в России XVIII – начала XX столетий

Abstract

The article dwells upon such issues of the evolution of church service singing as the academization of performance practice, the perception of church singing, and the desacralization of musical compositions related to church service. Bringing in parallels with Western European art makes it possible for the author to demonstrate the similar character of the processes in Russian and European sacred music during the age of Enlightenment. The development of church service singing in the second half of the 18th and the 19th century bears witness to the inluence of the Italian and German musical cultures, which is relected on the style of the sacred compositions, which have absorbed these inluences and brought the traditions of the znamenny chant to the periphery. At the same time, since the end of the 19th century, there is a noticeable tendency of a return of the pre-reform principles of Russian church singing. Thereby, the Russian church singing tradition of the Early Modern Times is characterized by an ambivalent nature: on the one hand, it is directed at the mastery of the norms of European art, while on the other hand, it is supported by the mechanism of preservation, making it possible to actualize the stylistic features of the znamenny chant. Keywords: 17th-20th century Russian church service, secularization, Europeanisation