The Chant of Russian Pilgrim Singers and its Role in the Russian Folk Music Tradition

Abstract

The article characterizes the musical tradition of Russian singers-wanderers, recorded by collectors in the north-western, northern and central provinces of Russia. For the first time, a comparative study is being carried out of the variants of memorial and zazdravny chants performed by the crossing kaliks and beggars. The study summarizes various sources – auditory recordings of the XIX century, publications of the XX century, unpublished folklore materials. The author draws attention to the little-known recordings of memorial and health chants recorded in the Novgorod, Yaroslavl, Tver, Pskov regions. The objectives of the article are to conduct a comparative study of the tunes of the "poor brethren", to identify their typological properties and intonational origins. The author considers the health and memorial chants as a special phenomenon of Russian folk music culture. The core of this tradition was a chant, which served as a musical formula, to which the calics of the transition sang various texts. On the basis of the facts given in the article, it can be concluded that the main version of the tune of the kalik of the transients is characterized by a one-verse composition and a 10-time basis of small-scale construction. In Russian folklore, the existence of this musical-structural type is limited only to the health and memorial songs of Kalik, spiritual poems and the ballad "Prince Mikhailo", and is not found in other genre spheres. However, the close intonation, rhythmic, compositional relationship of the tune with a wide range of folklore genres indicates that it was formed on the basis of compositional and melodic techniques developed in the practice of peasant song culture. The intonational affinity of the chant with church hymns, especially with the forms of liturgical reading, is an indicator of the closeness of the singing culture of the Kalik of the transients and the church musical tradition as a whole, and also reveals those properties that can be attributed to the category of universals of the Old Russian musical language based on speech intonations.