Borislava Efimenkova’s Research of Northern Russian Lamentations as the Beginning of the Ethnomusicological Science of the Gnesins’ Institute

Abstract

The article is devoted to the research work by the famous Russian ethnomusicologist Borislava Borisovna Efimenkova (1933–1996) Severnorusskaya prichet' [Northern Russian Lamentations], which was published in 1980. The book has become a milestone in the scholarly work of the author herself, who has demonstrated herself as a mature and extraordinary researcher of Russian folk music. The fundamental nature of the research, the radical novelty of the methodology and the credibility of the scholarly results have provided this work with a groundbreaking character. It has become a reference study for music scholars, who have pursued structural and typological methods of research for many years, and has maintained this status to the present day. The book includes a compilation of almost 180 examples of vocal lamentations from the Vologda region pertaining to funerals, recruitments and weddings (solo cries of the brides and cries sung by choral ensembles of girls). At the core of the monograph lies a detailed study of this phenomenon. Its goal is to present the local tradition of vocal lamentations as a holistic phenomenon endowed with a systematic organization. The structural-typological method has been chosen as the main research tool; its chief theorist and proponent in Soviet ethnomusicology of the second half of the 20th century was Eugeny Gippius, who had everted an immense influence on the formation of Efimenkova as a musicologist. In Severnorusskaya prichet' [Northern Russian Lamentations] Gippius’s ideas of structural-systematic approach to the study of folk music have found its practical manifestation for the first time. A significant role in the study of the East Vologda region is assigned to the arealogical method. As the result of this, six published geographical maps have provided the first example of geographical mapping of Russian folk vocal lamentations.