The Mainsprings of Russian Music: Folk Song and Religious Chant

Abstract

and his famous friend Glinka (ca. 1850) a realization of the close relationship between the secular and ecclesiastical traditions of Russian national music has been in the offing. The slightly older Odoevsky, an ardent student of folklore and, as his recently published archives1 show, likewise a collector of church books with the old musical notations, exerted a lasting influence on the composer and was responsible for Glinka's ever greater preoccupation with the old Russian heritage. But while spectacular things were done for the preservation of folk songs in the latter years of the Russian Empire, as also in Soviet times, the study of the old religious chant (the znamenny) proceeded but haltingly and the bulk of it is even now a terra incognita. However, in the last two or three decades a good deal of clarification has been undertaken, as well as some far-reaching discoveries made, and we are now in a much better position to take a combined view of the two mainsprings of Russian music. The collection and affixing on paper of Russian folk songs began in the pre-Romantic era, when the whole literary world became aware of the treasures of folklore. What Bishop Percy revealed in his Reliques of English Poetry and Herder in his Stimmen der Volker in Liedern was done in