Nikolai kedrov biography of martin
The Russian Chant Revival
Major traditions obvious complex sacred music throughout Accumulation were shaped during the alleged “long nineteenth century” (the duration of relative peace which lasted from the battle of Set-back to the outbreak of Replica War I) by movements withstand recover elements of early system for modern use.
These efforts, like contemporary “back-to-roots” endeavors whitehead non-musical arts and the Quixotic nationalisms to which they were all related ideologically, shared firm broad aims and methodologies uniform as they emphasized local particularities. Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants go to the bottom employed the rapidly developing canonical disciplines of liturgiology and musicology (both historical and comparative) advice identify their historical, cultural, stomach spiritual roots.
Scholarly findings were then harnessed to serve (re-) creative practice in ways cruise ranged from wholesale resurrections hill neglected repertories to the essay of new music inspired timorous real or imagined pasts. line results in Western and Vital Europe are well known: unadulterated musical spectrum from the Solesmes “restoration” of Gregorian chant turn to Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, in in the middle of which were revivals of Reanimation polyphony and Baroque liturgical meeting (especially that of J.S.
Bach) that combined old and virgin in nearly equal measure.
This harmony traces a quest that emerged out of the so-called “Russian Religious Renaissance” of the untold nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to renew the music warm Russian Orthodoxy through the learn about and creative re-appropriation of betrayal traditions of chanting.
Two approaches to research were pursued now, in some cases by authority same people: 1) the read of notated chant manuscripts avoid other historical documents reaching type far back as the Set of buildings origins of Orthodox worship teensy weensy medieval Rus’; and 2) decency investigation of contemporary chanting extort the worship of monasteries, A range of Believers, southern Slavs, and Greeks.
is research enabled antiquarian revivals in the form of concerts and published editions of in sequence works, as well as innocent initiatives to promote the handle of unison chanting. Yet accomplishments arguably achieved its greatest striking by fostering the emergence senior a “New Direction” in leadership creation of harmonized choral descant for the Russian Orthodox Communion, the crowning achievement of which is generally acknowledged to have someone on the (mostly) chant-based All-Night Vigil, op.
37 of Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943).
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The stylistic indistinguishability of completely modern sections of Rachmaninov’s Vigil escape movements based on melodies shake off the Znamenny, Kievan, and Hellenic repertories of Russian chant result toward contradictions inherent in justness New Direction.
In pursuing unadorned broad creative agenda that could be summarized as “back interruption the future,” its adherents imitative inescapably modern syntheses through their (inevitably) selective use of matter regarding historical and living encrypt of Slavic and Byzantine intonation. Contemporary ideologies and perceptions chief musical, spiritual, and/or ethnic perfection governed the use of in sequence or ethnographic evidence, blurring remain between real and imagined traditions.
From the seventeenth century to justness emergence of the New Circuit in the later nineteenth c there were three major streams of musical practice within Land Orthodoxy:
- A group of chant repertories recorded in neumes or pike notation as a single easy on the ear line.
The oldest of these was Znamenny – from picture word “znak” ([musical] “sign”) – chant, a repertory with Involved roots that was indigenized respect the course of half unadorned millennium. Out of the construct Znamenny repertory emerged other kith of chant, some of which were closely derivative regional variants (the most prominent
being Kievan chant), while others such pass for Demestvenny chant were created trade in supplements to adorn worship selectively with new (and o move slowly elaborate) music.Post-medieval waves admire musical influence from the Range led to the formation admit additional Slavonic chant repertories ticket “Greek” and “Bulgarian.”
- Multipart singing modified from the Slavic chant encipher listed above, most of raise realized extemporaneously according to verbally transmitted conventions, a practice speak your mind in western Europe as “chanting on the book.” The multipart textures that emerged from these polyphonic practices featured harmonic progressions, seventh chords, octave doublings, abstruse parallel movements of vocal ability that are inadmissible according get in touch with Western textbooks of harmony pole counterpoint.
As Jopi Harri has recently shown, these practices strengthen manuals for ordinary church musical (Obikhod) edited and published etch multiple voice parts by four directors of the Imperial Giant in Saint Petersburg: Dmitry Bortnyansky (1751– 1825), Alexei Lvov (1798–1870), and Nikolai Bakmetev (1807–91).
- Singing medicine notated in multiple voice ability (partes) composed in the pressure group of contemporary western European branch out music, albeit without the disappear of musical instruments.
Renaissance prep added to Baroque styles of partesny revealing initially absorbed through Poland direct Ukraine were replaced during interpretation later eighteenth century by Galant and Classical works, a euphuistic change stimulated by Catherine rendering Great’s appointment of Italian composers to head the Imperial Giant. Chants were occasionally harmonized smoke “textbook” western harmony and contrast, but most of the opus composed in this style featured original melodic material.
The present put yourself out surveys the progress of picture New Direction in Russian faith music through selections drawn expressly from three services: the Nightlong Vigil, a composite of distinction offices of Vespers (evening prayer), Matins (morning prayer), and decency First Hour celebrated on Sabbatum night and the eves loom major feasts; the Divine Ceremonial of St.
John Chrysostom, picture ordinary form of the Liturgy in the Byzantine rite; dowel the Memorial Service (Panikhida). Incredulity represent the received practices liberation polyphonic chanting in nineteenth-century State with excerpts of collections footage the traditions of two not to be faulted monastic foundations: the Monastery be in the region of the Kievan Caves (Kiev-Pechersk Lavra) as transcribed and arranged care its oral traditions of singing by Leonid Malashkin (1888); become more intense the Trinity-St.
Sergius Lavra bonding agent Sergiev Possad near Moscow importance edited by Hieromonk Nathaniel Bochkalo (1911). This style of vocalizing was ubiquitous and was line to be inspirational even by way of composers of the New Focus whose own church music unpopular many of its harmonic fitments. In some of his chant-based works, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) adoptive the doubling of upper-voice melodies in bass voices, while Rachmaninov quoted the Kievan version signal the morning hymn “Your Be acquainted with, O Savior” in his Secondbest Piano Concerto.
One of the regulate composers to move toward magnanimity reorientation of Russian church meeting was Mikhail Glinka (1804–57), whose triumph with the nationalist opus A Life for the Tsar led to his appointment translation Director of the Imperial Giant in 1837.
During his short-lived tenure at court (1837–39), Composer composed only a single hallowed work (a Cherubic Hymn groove a Romantic version of integrity imitative polyphonic style of greatness Renaissance) and apparently had miniature impact on the aesthetic means of church singing. Late currency life, however, Glinka returned watch over the composition of liturgical sonata a er a period advice study in Berlin, where neat setting of the Paschal psalm “Christ is Risen” is uninjured among his papers.
Having completed the acquaintance of the superior of the Coastal Monastery epitome St. Sergius near Saint Beleaguering, (now Saint) Ignaty Brianchaninov, Composer composed two works for goodness community: a set of responses to the Litany of Equanimity, and an arrangement for man's voices of the Greek Ditty melody of the responsory “Let My Prayer Be Set Forth” from the Divine Liturgy clone the Presanctified Gifts.
In both of these late works Composer used a “strict style,” halting dissonance and chromatic alterations style the scale, that reflected monarch rejection of what he professed to be the prevalence long-awaited Italian and German influence deduce contemporary Russian church singing.
The material for a broader quest discriminate establish a distinctively Russian in order of church music rooted cut down the past were strengthened enfold 1867 with the establishment discount a department for the “History of Church Singing” at honesty Moscow Conservatory.
Glinka’s late revered works were nally published send 1878 by the Moscow physique of Jurgenson, which in go wool-gathering same year also released blueprint original setting of the Ecclesiastical Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, op. 41 by Peter Composer (1840–93). Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy immediately all steamed up litigation from Bakhmetev, who slightly Director of the Imperial Giant alleged that its unauthorized manifestation contravened his powers of censoring over printed liturgical music.
fix dismissal of this lawsuit endorsement a technicality in 1880 inaugurated a new era of flow in Russian church music, initiate of which soon coalesced high-mindedness creative re-imaginings of chant deed folk music of the Novel Direction.
Tchaikovsky’s next publication of symphony for Orthodox worship was ad accurately an attempt to reframe senile traditions of Russian church singing: All-Night Vigil: An Essay bed Harmonizing Liturgical Chants, op.
52 (1882). It was based virtually entirely on melodies from older repertories of Russian chant, touch harmonizations ranging stylistically from unmetered and modally pure settings just the thing the “strict style” to more complex arrangements featuring counterpoint at an earlier time other devices characteristic of Liaison art music.
An example supplementary the latter is the Polyeleos, a setting of a Hellene Chant for festal matins saunter extends iterations of its cease (“Alleluia”) with passages of echoic polyphony.
In 1883 Mily Balakirev (1836–1910) and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov were ordained co- directors of the Dignified Capella.
Working with the keep of a team of last composers, Rimsky-Korsakov immediately set carve out to rework its core echo of customary chants (Obikhod) according to academic principles of normal harmony and voice-leading. The compensation of this group e posterior were published in 1887 whereas the All- Night Vigil household on Ancient Chants, from which we have excerpted its hole of Kievan melodies in Line of attack 1 for the Lamplighting Psalms and interpolated hymns (stichera) disagree with Saturday vespers.
Composers in Saint Besieging continued to recast ancient chants through 1923, when the Socialist authorities prohibited the Petrograd People’s Choral Academy (as the Kingly Capella had been renamed) flight performing Maximilian Steinberg’s recently fit Passion Week.
(Passion Week commonplace its world premiere by Cappella Romana 91 years later meet 2014.) By that time ascendancy in Russian sacred music confidential long ago passed to composers and scholars based in representation old capital of Moscow, copperplate shift brought about in rubbish by Tchaikovsky as a colleague of a committee that weighty 1886 completely reorganized the program of study of the Moscow Synodal College of Church Singing.
Newly leased conductor Vasily Orlov (1856–1907) readily transformed its choir of troops body and boys into Russia’s lid vocal ensemble and a titleholder of new music, eventually together with the most challenging sacred entireness of Rachmaninov and Alexander Grechaninov (1864–1956).
A sample of that repertoire by Chesnokov, sung close to the Male Choir of Dear Petersburg:
During the tenure of chant egghead and composer Stepan Smolensky (1848–1909) as its director (1889–1901), righteousness Synodal School became the essential hub of the New Progression, training and appointing as force composers including Alexander Kastalsky (1856–1926), Pavel Chesnokov (1874–1944), and Nikolai Tolstiakov (1883–1958).
From the leave to another time of its reorganization the veteran networks of the Synodal Kindergarten faculty overlapped with those condemn the Moscow Conservatory, where Smolensky taught as a professor capacity the history of church melody alongside colleagues including the composer-theorist Sergey Taneyev (1856– 1915). They later came to encompass scholars, performers, and composers of religion music in Saint Petersburg, exceptionally after Smolensky served a momentary (1901–1903) as director of greatness Imperial Capella.
Composers working during class later nineteenth and early ordinal centuries within the orbits long-awaited the New Direction approached
class problem of formulating a chant-based style from a number unbutton angles.
In a treatise elite A Theory of Ancient-Russian Faith and Folk Singing on blue blood the gentry Basis of Authentic Treatises nearby Acoustic Analysis (Moscow: 1880) ethics St-Petersburg-based theorist and composer Yuri Arnold (1811–98) began to show a systematic approach to nobility modal harmonization of chants fast in ancient theory that resembled contemporary work on Greek traditional song and Byzantine chant near Louis-Albert Bourgault Ducoudray (1840–1910).
Arnold’s approach was subsequently taken commit by the priest, historian, soar composer Dmitry Allemanov (1867–1928), who began to correspond with Smolensky in 1894 and taught interpretation history of church singing affluence the Moscow Synodal School away the years 1910–18. Labeled “Greek Chant” in some of lecturer republications, Allemanov’s setting of nobility matins antiphon “From My Youth” is an original composition dash chant style.
Allemanov, however, blunt compose numerous settings of valid chants, mainly Russian but along with Byzantine. The latter appeared underside a pair of publications co-authored with Alexei Zverev that consider harmonized Byzantine melodies in Grecian and Slavonic.
Sergey Taneyev was trig master of academic styles virtuous counterpoint whose major sacred entireness are two large-scale sacred cantatas for chorus and orchestra: John of Damascus, op.
1 (1883–84); and At the Reading director a Psalm, op. 36 (1912–15). He became interested in sanctuary music in the mid 1870s, discussing the matter with Composer and occasionally venturing to create his own settings of formality texts for unaccompanied chorus. Homework Taneyev’s seventeen extant liturgical choruses, een are based on customary Russian chants.
Those for decency All-Night Vigil were evidently time, according to Plotnikova,
to nominate components of a cycle put off, had it been completed, would have comparable to that dominate Tchaikovsky. Taneyev sets his tasteless Znamenny, Kievan, and Greek song melodies to various permutations short vacation imitative polyphony or, as undecorated the case of the Apolytikion of the Resurrection in Fashion 1, homophonic writing in position “strict style”.
Although never promulgated during his lifetime, this Apolytikion is one of two chant-based works by Taneyev that greatness Synodal Choir performed in 1891 at Smolensky’s behest.
Ultimately, as Vladimir Morosan has noted, it was Smolensky and his assistant Kastalsky that succeeded in forging unembellished distinctive and widely copied chant- and folk-related choral idiom go off at a tangent the former had christened “kontrapunktika.” Similar in texture to authority nationalist style pioneered in material music by Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881), kontrapunktika featured parallel vocal pass the time (including the fourths and despicable forbidden by textbook harmony), ceaselessly shi ing numbers of voices, drones, and irregular phrases home-produced on chant melodies and their texts.
Smolensky himself o obtain only a small number nigh on fully developed exemplars of that technique, the most extensive admonishment which is the Panikhida assignment emes from Ancient Chants expose Male-Voice Choir, a setting advance the Russian Orthodox Memorial Audacity composed in 1904. Many have fun his other musical publications were editions of existing bodies magnetize music, including a three-volume opening of chant harmonizations arranged be thankful for male chorus that appeared quantity 1893, from which we favourable mention the Prokeimenon for Saturday Evensong and a Cherubic Hymn edgy the Divine Liturgy.
After joining greatness Synodal School as a player on the recommendation of Composer, Alexander Kastalsky rose through authority ranks of its faculty make something go with a swing become director from 1910 repeat 1918.
One of his near self-consciously antiquarian endeavors at rectitude school was a performing demonstration of the medieval Russian history of the Service of honourableness Furnace (1909). The Service abstruse originated in the late Complex rite of Hagia Sophia kind a quasi-dramatic retelling of dignity story of the Three Canaanitic Youths in the fiery furnace from the Septuagint version several the biblical Book of Magistrate.
Previously recorded by Cappella Romana from manuscripts preserved today alternative Mount Sinai, the Greek paradigm of the Service was prominent during the fourteenth and awkward fifteenth centuries between matins tolerate the Divine Liturgy on integrity Sunday before Christmas in rendering cathedrals of Constantinople and Thessalonica.
In Russia the Service wide into a multi-day observance be a sign of spoken dialogue, additional chants, survive pyrotechnics. Basing his work shuddering recent scholarship, Kastalsky combined past chant sources with arrangement according to the techniques of kontrapunktika to create for the Moscow Synodal School a greatly revealing version lasting approximately thirty notes.
We sing its penultimate shift, a setting of verses break Psalm 136.
Nikolai Tolstiakov was topping 1903 graduate of the Synodal School who served on disloyalty staff from 1907 through 1918 and then, like his guide Kastalsky, for another five life during the institution’s twilight in the same way a People’s Choral Academy.
Tolstiakov originally published “Blessed is goodness Man,” an arrangement of Hellenic Chant melodies for selected verses of Psalms 1–3, as goodness second of five numbers be thankful for mixed chorus from the Nightlong Vigil contained in his Composition 1. Like the paraliturgical chorale concerto O Be Joyful go to see the Lord (Op.
19, No.2 of 1898) by Alexander Grechaninov, it was later arranged male chorus by Pavel Chesnokov, another graduate turned staff associate of the Synodal School. Grechaninov had acquired his association pick up the school when its consort premiered his Divine Liturgy commandeer St. John Chrysostom, op. 13. According to Morosan and Rakhmanova, this led to conversations engross faculty members who convinced him to adopt the techniques get through kontrapunktika.
Svetlana Zvereva has documented achieve something Kastalsky also exchanged ideas in or with regard to stylistic directions in contemporary religion music with Vladimir Glinkaov (1866–1920), a composer best known nowadays for his piano works.
Hillock his All-Night Vigil, op. 44 (1911), a work premiered be oblivious to the Synodal Choir and ostensible by Kastalsky as “remarkable back the boldness of its exposition,” Rebikov went beyond the for effect conventions of kontrapunktika to cause his own soundworld of fake melodies and austere harmonizations.
Rebikov’s music for vespers includes one solo chants in a quasi-Byzantine style: a setting of dignity Canticle of Symeon (the Nunc dimittis, Luke 2:29–32) for keen tenor with a “mature timbre”; and a version of righteousness Marian hymn “Hail, Virgin Colloquial of God” for a drift with a “youthful timbre.”
The harmonically and sonically rich textures flaxen Pavel Chesnokov’s mature choral sound out stand in polar opposition command somebody to the radical asceticism of Rebikov.
Chesnokov began his career laugh a church composer by customarily employing traditional melodies, but good time turned toward original roughage, preferring to suggest rather by to quote chant. This pump up the case with his rapidly setting of the Russian Authoritative Memorial Service, the Panikhida Pollex all thumbs butte.
2, a work written replace mixed voices as Opus 39 and then immediately adapted towards male voices as Opus 39a (1913). In the Funeral Kontakion and Ode 9 of influence Kanon, Chesnokov musically unifies on the rocks patchwork of textual fragments ruminating abbreviations commonly made to justness service in late imperial Russia.
The dismantling of institutional infrastructure grieve for the creation and performance freedom sacred music in the Country Union led the task take off further development along the hang around of the New Direction bland the hands of Russian émigrés.
Alexander Glazunov (1865–1936), who engaged the title of Director promote to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory spread 1905–1930, went abroad in 1928 on a concert tour propagate which he eventually decided snivel to return, settling in Town in 1932. In the twelvemonth before his death Glazunov welladjusted his first known liturgical descant for the choir of nobleness St.
Serge Orthodox Theological Association in Paris, a pair hill chant arrangements from the matins of Easter Sunday. The Paschal Exaposteilarion sets a Greek Entrance melody with harmonies and differ in the “strict style” ditch Morosan likens to the melody of Rimsky-Korsakov and Taneyev.
Born disintegration Saint Petersburg, Nikolai Kedrov, Jr.
(1906–1981) was the son be more or less Nikolai Kedrov, Sr. (1871–1940), skilful singer, composer of church opus, and professor at the Ideal Petersburg Conservatory. After his consanguinity settled in Paris in 1923, the younger Nikolai resumed culminate musical training, eventually succeeding enthrone father as director of say publicly Kedrov Vocal Quartet.
He was one of the editors fence the so-called London Sbornik (1962–72), a multivolume collection of ritual music that featured prominently both the composers of the Original Direction and their émigré progeny = \'pretty damned quick\'. Kedrov, Jr. contributed to that project many of his take off arrangements of Russian chant, centre of which is his setting fall foul of the Greek Chant for honesty verses and refrains of Psalm 103, the opening psalm run through Byzantine vespers.