Folk Revival - Soviet Union

Topic: Folk Music Revival
Peter the Great was the first Russian monarch to recognize his empire needed a distinct identity. [1] Marina Ritzarev said, when historians researched the origins of Rus’ leaders, they discovered the early princes were Varangians, and suppressed the facts. In place of Vikings, the people, especially those in the vicinity of Moscow, were accorded the status of progenitors. [2]

These were the folk whose music was used by Mikhail Glinka [3] a few years after Nicholas I implemented his policy of Official Nationality. [4] Collections, like one made by Nikolai Lvov in 1790, [5] were intended to emphasize "kindred, rather than alien characteristics." [6] The music reflected the aesthetics of an audience no more than one generation removed from rural villages. [7]

The nature of the urban population began to change with the introduction of textile manufacturing. Old Believers, who had been banished in 1667 during the reign of Alexis I, [8] were operating cotton, silk, and woolen mills in Moscow in 1832. [9] The Bremen-born Ludwig Knoop opened his first mill in Moscow in 1840. His operations expanded after the United Kingdom lifted its ban on the export of tools used by textile factories in 1842. [10]

Rural society changed when Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861. They still were forced to stay on the land and operate through commune leaders, but they no longer were subject to arbitrary demands by estate owners who took the profits from their initiatives [11] to finance lifestyles that proved the nobles’ loyalty to the tsar by imitating his court. [12]

Even before 1861, Mily Balakirev was changing the definition of national music from that of the peasants to that which made Russia different from Prussia, England, and France. [13] In 1862, the disciple of Glinka went to the Caucasus to collection folk music. [14] One work song from his home province of Nizhny Novgorod became famous in 1902 when it was recorded by Feodor Chaliapin [15] as the "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." [16]

The interest in music from remote areas of the Empire increased in 1884 when the Russian Geographic Society organized a Folk Song Commission. It sent its first collecting expedition to the Archangel area in 1886. [17] Balakirev was on the organization’s board. [18]

Just a few years before, Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated, and his son Alexander III condoned anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland and Ukraine. [19] He demanded everyone speak Russian and convert to the Russian Orthodox church. [20] Anyone who was a little bit liberal became suspect.

Evgenia Lineva and her husband fled to London in 1890, then resettled in New York. The student of Glinka organized Ukrainian and Russian immigrants in a choir that performed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 in peasant costumes. They were accompanied by an orchestra and featured male dancers. [21]

Alexander III died in 1894, and his son, Nicholas II, allowed the Linevas to return in 1896. [22] She spent some time with the Musico-Ethnographic Commission that had been organized at the University of Moscow in 1901. [23] Chaliapin took Mitrofan Pyatnitsky to a meeting, and the latter began collecting in his home province of Voronezh. He eventually brought singers from the village to perform for the commission. [24]

World War I ended folk song collecting. Members of Pyatnitsky’s group were drafted, and, after the Revolution, disagreed with one another and dispersed. He formed a new choir with people who had moved to Moscow from "remote villages." [25] This coincided with the formation of "thousands of choruses" by workers’ clubs who sang political words to "old popular tunes and folk songs." [26]

In 1928, Josef Stalin implemented his First Five-Year Plan to industrialize the country. To free individuals to work in factories, he appropriated farm land, destroyed the largest landowners, and settled the rest on collective farms. [27]

The same year, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians was formed to weed out "the anti-proletarian and the counter-revolutionary elements" in contemporary music. [28] In 1930, the All-Russian Choir Conference "voted to liquidate peasant choruses, deeming them ‘alien, harmful, corrupting to the class consciousness of participants and listeners.’" [29] Peasant music programming on radio stopped in 1929, and traditional music was banned in 1930. [30]

Pyatnitsky had died in 1927 and bequeathed his choir to his nephew. [31] The choir survived the general purge because it was too popular. Still, the choir modified its repertoire to fit Soviet requirements after a member of the Proletarian Musicians association [32] joined the group in 1931. [33]

At the end of five years, the Central Committee of the Communist Party abolished the existing artistic organizations, and replaced them with creative unions. [34] The new musicians’ group was dominated by conservatory-trained men who decreed any professional musician must be able to read music notation and be familiar with the classics. [35]

Two years later, in 1934, Maxim Gorky exhorted attendees of the First Congress of Soviet Writers to use folklore motifs to create socialist realism. [36] Choirs again were encouraged, [37] and amateurs were expected "involve themselves in the creation of art, thus demonstrating that each individual was fully self-actualized and active in the work of building the ideal society." [38] Textual content was controlled by bringing the best singers and writers to Moscow for indoctrination. [39]

The Pyatnitsky peasant chorus became the Pyatnitsky Russian Folk or Popular Choir in 1936. [40] Singers were trained to read music, and the improvisational element that Pyatnitsky had encouraged was restricted to a few soloists. [41] An orchestra and dance troop was added in 1938. [42] In seeking to reach the mass audience defined by the Communist Party, it recapitulated Lineova’s evolution in the Unites States in 1893.

End Notes
1. Marina Ritzarev. "‘A Singing Peasant’: An Historical Look at National Identity in Russian Music." Le Web Pédagogique website. 2014. 3. This article was based on "The Conflict between Nationalistic and Pluralistic Traditions in Russian Musical Narratives." International Society for the Study of European Ideas. Haifa University. August 1998.

2. Ritzarev. 4.
3. Glinka was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.
4. Peter the Great was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.

5. Ivan Pratsch. Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes. Saint Petersburg: 1790. Prach was the arranger. Lvov’s name was added on later editions.

6. Richard Taruskin. "M. I. Glinka and the State." 25–47 in Defining Russia Musically. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 16.

7. Richard Taruskin. "N. A. Lvov and the Folk." 3-24 in Defining Russia Musically. 20. Lvov and Pratsch collected "their material wherever they encountered it, chiefly in St. Petersburg and the city’s immediate vicinity — and not only from the urbanized peasants (servants and laborers) who might have been expected to retain some vestige of rural traditions, but from their own friends and acquaintances."

8. Wikipedia. "Old Believers."

9. Danila Raskov and Vadim Kufenko. "The Role of Old Believers’ Enterprises: Evidence from the Nineteenth Century Moscow Textile Industry." 7 May 2014. Carl von Ossietzky Universtät, Evangelisches Studienwerk website. 14.

10. Wikipedia. "Ludwig Knoop."

11. Andrei Markevich and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. "The Economic Effects of the Abolition of Serfdom: Evidence from the Russian Empire." 27 January 2017. Moscow’s New Economic School website.

12. Markevich. 19. For instance, Balakirev’s first exposure to music came from performances staged by Alexander Ulybyshev, a local noble who maintained a private orchestra. [43]

13. Composers like Rimsky-Korsikov and Borodin pursued Balakirev’s ideas in their own ways. Balakirev later advised Tchaikovsky. [44]

14. Wikipedia. "Mily Balakirev."
15. Chaliapin was an operatic basso.

16. Wikipedia. "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." Nizhny Novgorod was not in the Caucasus.

17. Barbara Krader. "Folk Music Archive of the Moscow Conservatory, With a Brief History of Russian Field Recording." Indiana University website. 13. Based on I. K. Sviridova. Kabinet narodnoi muzyki. Moscow: Izd-vo Muzyka, 1966.

18. Krader. 13. This was the more conservative Balakirev who returned to public life after a period of isolation and depression [45] that began after Russia was defeated lost in the Franco-Prussian War that ended in 1871. [46]

19. Wikipedia. "Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire."
20. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."

21. Norman E. Saul. The Life and Times of Charles R. Crane, 1858–1939. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 44–45.

22. Saul. 46.
23. Krader. 14.

24. Elena Prokofieva. "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky - Peasant Choirmaster." The Third Age website. John Freedman brought this to my attention in "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky Bust and Monument, Voronezh." Russian Landmarks website. 25 June 2015.

25. Prokofieva.

26. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.

27. Wikipedia. "First Five-year Plan."

28. "RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), Ideological Platform." 1929. Translated by Nicolas Slonimsky. Music since 1900. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1937). 1052–1055. Reprinted on Michigan State University, Soviet History website. Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov was more hostile to modern forms of music like jazz and compositions by Shostakovich.

29. Susannah Lockwood Smith. "Soviet Arts Policy, Folk Music, and National Identity: The Piatnitskii State Russian Folk Choir, 1927-45." Ph.D. diss. University of Minnesota, 1997. 66. Cited by Pauline Fairclough. Classics for the Masses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. No page numbers in on-line edition.

30. Smith. 129.
31. Prokofieva. The nephew was Pyotr Mikhailovich Kazmin.
32. Wikipedia. "Vladimir Grigoryevich Zakharov." It said 1932.

33. Wikipedia. "Pyatnitsky Choir." It said 1931, as did Marina Frolova-Walker. Stalin’s Music Prize. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 184.

34. Kiril Tomoff. Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 13. It was the Decree on the Reformation of Literary and Artistic Organizations. [47]

35. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. 2012. 116.

36. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" 21 September 2000. Semantic Scholar website. 3–4. Gorky’s speech is better than any of its precis. It’s available on the Marxist.org website. Its source was Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977. 25–69.

37. Olson. 3.
38. Smith. 160. Cited by Olson. 11.
39. Stites. 72.
40. Smith. 127–128. Cited by Olson. 14. The Russian word was "narodnyi."

41. Smith. 123. Cited by Olson. 14–15. he did not rehearse his peasant chorus. Instead he told them to "sing it, as you sing on your bench and in a round dance." [48]

42. Frolova-Walker. 184.
43. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
44. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
45. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
46. Wikipedia. "Franco-Prussian War."
47. Wikipedia. "Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians."
48. Prokofieva.