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Vasilii Titov and the ‘Moscow’ Baroque

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Olga Dolskaya-Ackerly
Olga Dolskaya-Ackerly*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri-Kansas City
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Extract

The Baroque, which manifested itself in Muscovy during the course of the seventeenth century, has been recognized as one of the most dynamic and influential eras of Russian musical and artistic creativity. When looking at the history of Russian music one has a tendency to equate the new stylistic trends of the second half of the seventeenth century with those of the highly westernized eighteenth, and to dismiss both merely as periods of Western imitation. In reality music manuscripts reveal otherwise, and now that compositions are finally becoming available in transcription we realize that an entire era remains to be recognized and re-evaluated. In art and architecture, that era, known as the ‘Moscow’ or the ‘Naryshkin’ Baroque, is distinguished by a blend of Italian, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian and Bielorussian features in a style that, although influenced by foreign elements, was none the less distinct from any in existence at the time. The Moscow Baroque embraced many aspects of the arts, from iconography, architecture and the applied arts to literature and music. Endorsed by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1645–76), foreign influence began to penetrate Muscovy, ushering in a cognizance of Western concepts that began to clash with the rich and long-established spiritual and cultural traditions. In fact Muscovy was just emerging from an aesthetic explosion known as the Golden Age of national artistic expression. Familiar are the magnificent onion-dome churches that were created during the sixteenth century and the flourishing musical centres in Novgorod and Moscow, where composers and singers developed an intrinsically Russian musical style. This was also the age of indigenous Russian polyphony (e.g. strochnoe moskovskoe, strochnoe novgorodskoe, znamennoe and demestvennoe mnogogolosie) which preceded the wave of Western infiltration that inadvertently led to an untimely halt of the evolutionary process of national awakening. Prior to that halt, the Moscow Baroque stands as a brief but unique chapter in the development of the Russian choral tradition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 118 , Issue 2 , 1993 , pp. 203 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 Royal Musical Association

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References

1 Research for this article was supported by a travel grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the US Department of State. I am grateful to IREX and the following individuals for their expert advice on seventeenth-century Russian manuscripts: Nina Gerasimova-Persidskaia (Kiev Conservatory), Tatiana Vladyshevskaia and Vladimir Protopopov (Moscow Conservatory) and Irina Lozovaia (Glinka Museum); and to Irina Medvedeva (head of the Manuscript Division of the Glinka Museum, Moscow) and Lubov Dubrovina (head of the Manuscript Division of the Central Library, Kiev) for allowing me to consult the necessary manuscripts.Google Scholar

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32 Nina Gerasimova-Persidskaia, Kharakternye komposisionnye cherli mnogogolosiia partesnykh konisertov XVII-XVIII st. (‘Characteristic Compositional Flements in the Polyphonic Kontserty of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries‘). Musica antiqua Europae orientalis (1969). 369–95 (p. 394).Google Scholar

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36 Kto ny razluchit has been published as a five-voice anonymous work in Nikolai Uspensky, Russhii khorovoi kontsert kontsa XVII-XVIII vekov (The Russian Choral Kontsert of the Late-Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) (St Petersburg, 1976). It was also located by Nina Gerasimova-Persidskaia in the Manuscript Division of the Kiev Central Library as an eight-voice anonymous work (see Gerasimova-Persidskaia, Partesnyi kontsert, 252). I discovered the present 12-voice setting, identified in the manuscript as Titov's, in MS 283 of the Manuscript Division of the Glinka Museum in Moscow.Google Scholar

37 Very little is known about the performance practices of the time. The number of voices per part must have differed from one choir to another. For further discussion, see Gerasimova-Persidskaia, Partesnyi kontiert, 73.Google Scholar

38 See Razumovsky, Dimitri, ‘Gosudarevy pevchie diaki XVII veka’ (‘The Tsar's Singers in the Seventeenth Century‘), Sbornik Obshchestva drevnerusskogo iskusstva (Moscow, 1873), 153–81, and Protopopov, Muzyka na Poltavskuiu pobedu, 228.Google Scholar

39 Vladyshevskaia, ‘Partesnyi khorovoi kontsert’, 85.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., 95.Google Scholar

41 Major/minor fluctuation was discussed in Diletskii's seventeenth-century treatise Idea grommatila' musikiiskoi. See Protopopov, Nikolai Diletskii, 587.Google Scholar

42 The term peremennyi lad was introduced by B. Iavorskii in a letter of 17 April 1906 to S. Taneev. Ibid., 587.Google Scholar

43 Keldysh, ‘K voprosu ob istokakh russkogo partesnogo peniia’, 272.Google Scholar

44 See Kastalsky, Aleksandr, Osobennosti narodno-russkoi muzykal'noi sistemy (Characteristics of the Russian Folk-Music System) (Moscow, 1923), 78–85.Google Scholar

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47 Contrary to the eighteenth-century practice of going West for additional musical training, seventeenth-century musicians are believed not to have received any training outside Russia.Google Scholar