Stravinsky and contemporary research in Russian folk song Bartók was not the only one to argue that folk music must be studied “on location.” In Russia, too, more and more folk music scholars from the late nineteenth century onwards took long field trips to collect folk songs directly from the rural population and to study their style of performance in great detail. The American musicologist Richard Taruskin, in his fascinating book Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, argues that this new school of Russian folk song research prepared the ground for Stravinsky’s innovative treatment of folk music. With few exceptions, compilers of earlier folk song collections, such as Rimsky-Korsakov, made their transcriptions from isolated singers who sang the melodies to them. At a second stage, they provided the written-down melodies with their own accompaniments in a “folk song style.” In contrast, the new folk song researchers were intent on learning the songs in undistorted form wherever possible and they tried to write them down exactly as sung in their original location, which was often far away from urban civilization. On their journeys, these researchers discovered a fascinating style of multi-voice singing that until then had been virtually unknown. Here, for example, is the amateur ethnologist Nikolai Yevgrafovich Palchikov describing his experiences in a small village in the Ural Mountains during the 1880s: “From my conversations during transcription sessions it became clear to me that the Nikolayevka singers made no distinction between single-voiced singing (that is, a song sung by one singer) and choral singing. […] A fully realized performance of a song in Nikolayevka can be given only by a chorus, and individual singers can sing only elements or parts, so to speak, of the song – the tunes out of which the whole song is assembled by the chorus. In the course of further work it came to me that the chorus of Nikolayevka peasants had its own peculiarities, namely, that none of the voices merely accompanies a given motive. Each voice reproduces the tune (melody) in its own way, and it is the sum of these tunes that constitutes that which can fairly be called ‘the song.’” 3
The study of heterophonic
singing, as this style is called, was considerably simplified around the turn of the century by the introduction of the phonograph. Earlier researchers had to rely entirely on their ear and their musical memory, but now it was possible to record an accurate musical image of complex multi-voice songs. Here is one of the earliest scholars to work systematically with the new recording device, Yevgeniya Eduardovna Linyova (1853-1919), explaining its importance: “I look upon the phonograph as an astonishingly useful notebook, which, of course, is understood best by the one who has taken the notes. I personally could never notate all the voices during performance: I notate too slowly. A song successfully recorded on the phonograph retains all aspects of its rhythmic and harmonic character.” 4
Beginning in 1905, Linyova published several influential folk song collections on the basis of her recordings. Like Bartók, she was firmly convinced that the discoveries of new folk song research could open up new directions in art music: “It is probable that in spite of many unfavorable conditions, folk song, in the process of disappearing in the countryside, will be reborn, transformed, in the works of our composers. It will be reborn not only in the sense of borrowing melodies from the folk – that is the easiest and least gratifying means of using it; no, it will be reborn in the sense of style: free, broad, and lyric; in the sense of bold and complex voice leadings, the voices interlacing and separating, at times fused with the main melody, at times departing radically from it. A rebirth of this kind… we await in bold and interesting compositions by musical innovators, both at home and abroad.” 5
A short while later, Linyova’s vision became a reality in Stravinsky’s score for Petrushka. There are many indications that his original way of handling folk song material and his experiments with rhythm and meter were inspired by the new research into Russian folk song. |