“Classicism” à la Russe

Abstract

This chapter explains how music in Russia evolved during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with an example, The Powers of Heaven: Orthodox Music of the 17th and 18th Centuries, performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and conducted by Paul Hillier. Before the seventeenth century, thanks to long centuries of seclusion behind an iron curtain of Mongolian captivity, the music of the Russian church developed in isolation from that of Western Europe. It was not even called music, but rather “singing” (peniye), and it continued to rely on the sort of staffless neumatic notation that had begun to pass out of Western European use as early as the eleventh century. In Russian usage, musika meant secular instrumental music, a pleonasm for the Eastern Orthodox, who have never allowed the use of instruments in church. By the seventeenth century, it meant staff-notated Western-style music, and it began infiltrating the precincts of peniye as soon as “Western” became associated with high social prestige.