The Russian choral tradition is one of the musical treasures of the world. In the form closest to us--the Romantic choruses of the Orthodox liturgy--it conveys tremendous emotional power, boasts soaring tenors and booming basses, and ebbs and flows in great waves of sound. But there are earlier, medieval traditions, stately and elevated, preeminently suited to the vast spaces of the cathedrals of Kiev and Novgorod, and to the enormous monastery complexes like those of Vladimir and Pskov. And these traditions, which date back a thousand years to the introduction of Christianity into Russia, bring together even more ancient elements--folk music and the Byzantine liturgy of Constantinople (itself nearly a thousand years old at the time). Thus the Russian tradition as a whole is an amalgam, uniting several thousand years of musical experience, enshrining at its core remnants of music from the very beginnings of Western civilization.
The Beginnings: Medieval Kiev
Shortly after the conversion of Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich to Christianity in 988 and his marriage to one of the sisters of the Byzantine emperor, a vast stream of musicians, artists, builders, and architects flowed into the state of Kiev. They entered into the rich cultural life of the largest state in Europe, which stretched from the Volga to the Danube and from the Black Sea to the Baltic. At the height of its power in the tenth and eleventh centuries, it was one of the most flourishing and culturally advanced territories on the continent. Medieval Kiev enjoyed especially close commercial ties with Byzantium, and Russian honey, tar, wax, and furs were traded for Byzantine silks, wine, spices, and gold.
The Greek and Bulgarian musicians who came to Kiev brought with them Byzantine chant, a blend of Hellenistic and Oriental elements. The melodies of this tradition were constructed according to a principle common in Eastern music but quite different from Western ideas. The units of structure were not a series of notes organized in a scale, but rather a group of given short motives; from these, the singer was expected to choose certain motives and combine them to form his melody. Some of the motives were designated for use at the beginning of a melody, some for the middle, and some for the end, while others were connecting links. The singer's skill and originality were shown in the way in which he combined motives and varied them with ornamentation.
The motives of such a collection have different names in different Eastern systems--raga in Hindu music, magma in Arabian, echos in Byzantine, mode in Hebrew; but the basic principle is the same in all. An echos is a collection of melodic motives; all are unified in that they express the same quality of feeling, are congruous in melody and rhythm, and are derivable from the same musical scale. Byzantine music had eight such groups of motives--the eight echoi--and had probably taken the idea over from an even older Syrian tradition.
Using the eight echoi, melodies were composed for the Byzantine liturgy according to the nature of the text, the liturgical occasion, and so on. The most important forms of Byzantine music were the hymns, which originated as short responses between verses of the Psalms sung during worship. These insertions developed into independent works with an elaborate eight-part
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