About Sacred Music by the Composers of the Gnesins’ House

Abstract

The author of the article delineates as a special scholarly issue the study of sacred music by composers of the Gnesins’ House. The diverse aspects of its solution potentially include historical motives, subject matter and genres, content and form, meaning and its expression, etc. We can consider Sergei Trubachev (1919–1995), who was the head of the Conducting Department at the Gnesins’ State Musical-Pedagogical Institute, to be one of the founders of the present-day sacred musical creativity in Russia in the post-Soviet period. While examining the sacred music created rather recently by the composers from the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music — Kirill Volkov, Alexei Larin, Vladimir Dovgan, Andrei Mikita, Andrei Golovin, Valery Pyankov, and Valery Kikta, the author observes that there is a predominance of non-liturgical genres in it. The artistic approach of the composers in the sphere of the sacred musical space is characterized in the article as the interaction of the classical and non-classical, the traditional and the non-traditional elements. On the examples of sacred works by Kirill Volkov, Vladimir Dovgan, Alexei Larin and Andrei Mikita, the author highlights its concrete features: first of all, the connection of canonic and secular texts, traditional writing and contemporary intonational language.