Russian Folk Traditions in Contemporary Musical
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RUSSIAN FOLK TRADITIONS IN CONTEMPORARY MUSICAL LITERATURE FOR WINDS: ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION IN THE MUSICAL LANGUAGES OF RUSSIAN VOCAL FOLK POLYPHONY (AS DESCRIBED BY ALEKSANDR KASTALSKIY), RUSSIAN VILLAGE ACCORDION REPERTOIRE AND SOVIET TOURIST/TRAVELLER BARD SONGS EUGENE BELIANSKI A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS GRADUATE PROGRAM IN MUSIC YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO APRIL, 2015 © EUGENE BELIANSKI, 2015 Abstract This dissertation performs analyses of and compositions in three musical traditions that have received little attention in the English-speaking literature: Russian vocal folk polyphony (as described by theorist Aleksandr Kastalskiy in the 1920s), Russian village accordion repertoire and Soviet tourist/traveller bard songs. Each musical tradition is taken through five steps. First, a historical overview of the development of each tradition is provided. Second, a sizeable number of representative pieces or examples from each tradition are analyzed with the use of special methodologies tailor-made to show the most prominent apparent organizational principles in the music (including modes and chord progressions, melodic contour, musical form, poetic form and meter). Third, these analyses, performed upon dozens or hundreds of examples, are compared in order to discover the most typical traits of each musical language or dialect. Fourth, a composition is written in each musical tradition explicitly using these most typical traits: Three Swans (Russian vocal folk polyphony), Torontovka (Russian village accordion repertoire) and Song To Our Children (Soviet tourist/traveller bard song). Fifth, the aforementioned three compositions are arranged and expanded to varying degrees in order to allow them to be performed by contemporary Western small chamber wind groups – the brass quintet and the woodwind ensemble – in pedagogical and other contexts. ii To all those who find themselves torn between two worlds. iii Acknowledgements Besides the author, a great number of people have been involved in helping this work to completion. I thank my supervisor, Bill Thomas, for consistently finding the time in his busy schedule to have unhurried conversations about my work, and for recommending valuable literature for wind instruments and letting me borrow books from his personal library for extended periods. Thank you, too, for all the good times in the York University Wind Symphony; it was the experience of playing in the wind symphony (and in Claude Watson's school wind bands before it) that nurtured my love of playing and writing for wind instruments. I thank Irene Markoff, my second supervisor, for her numerous detailed comments and corrections, and for constantly encouraging me to be as reader-friendly as possible by being very clear about what I mean (given how complicated the analysis is in places, the thesis has certainly benefited from this advice – no matter how frustrating it may have been at times!). Irene has been the only person whom I could regularly meet with who has some degree of familiarity with each of the traditions I study here and an ability to read Russian (though her specialty is in the folk music of the southern Slavic regions). I thank Robert Sterling Beckwith for his kind encouragement during the earlier stages of this work, and for writing a fantastic study on Kastalskiy for his PhD thesis in 1969 that immeasurably helped my understanding of Kastalskiy's place in history, as well as helping me clarify a number of philosophical issues that I had been grappling with for months towards the end of this process. Any reader whose interest is aroused by the figure of Kastalskiy and the musical and social milieu of his time would do well to read R. S. Beckwith's A. D. Kastal'skii (1856-1926) and the Quest for a Native Russian Choral Style, as it is not only scholastically thorough but engagingly written. I wish to give a particularly heartfelt special thanks to James MacDonald, the director of the York University Brass Ensemble, who has allowed me to play in, compose for and arrange for his brass group since 2007. My time with him has been an invaluable experience and is responsible for many of the fondest memories I have of York University. Naturally, the pieces Torontovka and The Oceans We Traversed Together included in this thesis were also played (and field-tested) by his brass ensemble. I thank Barbara Ackerman, director of the York University Woodwind Ensemble, for enthusiastically welcoming my idea of composing a piece for woodwinds, and for letting me rehearse Three Swans with her group (I have also learned a valuable lesson in conducting from watching her: if the players are iv having difficulty, don't be embarrassed to count the beats out loud in the early rehearsal stages, for it can make a huge difference!). I would like to thank Tere Tilban-Rios from the York music graduate department for her very useful ability to make the most complicated bureaucratic process very simple. I thank Brian Katz, director of the York University Klezmer Ensemble, for teaching me about the modes of Klezmer music during the year that I played on tuba, euphonium and bayan in his ensemble and for lending me his copy of The Compleat Klezmer (this was a great help in figuring out the identity of the "unnamed mode" in Kastalskiy's book). I thank Daniel Schlombs, a long-time member of Irene Markoff's York University Balkan Ensemble, for graciously donating his time by playing the guitar and allowing me to record Song To Our Children . I thank the people from the York University Library's Resource Sharing (interlibrary loans) Department, without whose diligent work at finding dozens of rare books in libraries around the world this thesis could never have been completed. I would also like to thank those Russian enthusiasts who upload scanned copies of obscure books online, particularly at http://ethnomusicolog.livejournal.com/ and the music theory sub-forum at RuTracker.org (which is perhaps the greatest online public library in the world today). The scans of out- of-copyright works at Google Books have also been very useful. On the other side of the ocean, I wish to thank the late Rufina Grigoryevna Arefeyva for her inspiring leadership of the Vertical-Alaudin base camp, and Emina Rifatovna of the State Republican Centre for Russian Folklore ( Gosudarstvennyy republikantskiy tsentr russkogo folklora ) for helping my grandfather, Vladimir Borisovich Belyanskiy, find a copy of A. A. Banin's book. I thank Darren Wilson, the creator of the Clear Sans font, a custom-modified version of which is used in this paper. Most of all, I would like to thank my mother and grandmother (Nataly Belianski and Elena E. Tsedilina). Nothing would have been possible without them. v Table of contents Abstract.................................................................................................................................................. ii Dedication ............................................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgements............................................................................................................................... iv Table of contents .................................................................................................................................. vi List of figures ......................................................................................................................................... x 1. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................1 1.1. Overview of the chapters................................................................................................................... 3 1.2. A few words concerning terminology................................................................................................ 5 1.3. A note concerning transliteration ..................................................................................................... 9 1.4. A few words about copyright ..........................................................................................................10 2. RUSSIAN VOCAL FOLK POLYPHONY 2.1. Analysis of Aleksandr Kastalskiy's Properties of the Russian Folk Music System ........................13 2.1.1. Pitch sets .....................................................................................................................................17 2.1.1.1. Regular major........................................................................................................................18 2.1.1.2. Natural minor ........................................................................................................................19 2.1.1.3. Mixolydian ............................................................................................................................19 2.1.1.4. Lydian ...................................................................................................................................20 2.1.1.5. Phrygian ................................................................................................................................20 2.1.1.6. Dorian ...................................................................................................................................21 2.1.1.7. Obihod pitch set ....................................................................................................................21