FOLK MUSIC ARCHIVE of the MOSCOW CONSERVATORY, with a BRIEF HISTORY of RUSSIAN FIELD RECORDING Barbara Krader
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FOLK MUSIC ARCHIVE OF THE MOSCOW CONSERVATORY, WITH A BRIEF HISTORY OF RUSSIAN FIELD RECORDING Barbara Krader This account of the Folk Music Bureau (Kabinet Narodnoi Muzyki) of the Moscow Conservatory is based chiefly on a brochure by I.K. Sviridova, published in 1966. This and other references are listed at the end. The writer had the good fortune to meet Dr. Anna Rudneva and Professor Evgenii Gippius in 1964 at the Seventh World Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, which was held in Moscow, and is grateful for what she learned from them about Soviet folk music research. The material has been organized under six headings: I. Russian Ethno- musicology before 1917 and until 1936; 11. K.V. Kvitka; 111. The Folk Music Bureau, 1937-1953; IV. The Folk Music Bureau since 1953; V. Field Work; VI. Dates of Persons Mentioned. List of Folk Song Collections Issued or Prepared by the Bureau. Table of Statistics of Expeditions and Recordings. References. I Russian Ethnornusicology before 191 7 and until 1936 Before the Revolution and even today in discussing Russian scholarly re- search one has had to refer to activity in both Moscow and St. Petersburg- Leningrad. So it is with folk music study. To speak only of organized research within a society, the first group specifically devoted to this subject was the Song Commission (Pesennaia Komissiia) of the Russian Geographic Society, organized in 1884 in St. Petersburg. It was formed for the collection, study and propaganda of Russian folk song, and its members included Balakirev, Lyadov and others. The Commission enjoyed the advantage of a government subsidy of 1000 rubles annually, which made it possible to organize expeditions and publish collections. Two important collections were carried out by members of this group and pub- lished in 1894 and 1899. The first expedition, in 1886, traveled northward to the Olonets gubernia (to the far side of Lake Onega) and the western part of the Archangel gubernia. It was led by F. M. Istomin, ethnographer and linguist, and the music was notated by ear by G. 0. Diutsh (Deutsch). The second expedition in 1893 worked in the Vologda and Vyatka gubernias and near the Volga River in the Kostroma and Yaroslavl gubernias. Istomin was the leader again and S. M. Liapunov wrote down melodies by ear. The titles and dates of these volumes are given in the bibliography below. Both books have introductions describing the expeditions and the places where the traditions flourished. The Song Commission, according to Popova (vol. 2, 1964, pp. 154-5), con- tinued to work thereafter, but its publications became more and more popular: arrangements for piano and voice, choral arrangements and the like. Band of Peasant Horn Players of Vladimir in 1890's. Meanwhile, in Moscow, an Ethnomusicological Commission (Muzykal 'no-Etnograficheskaia Komissiia, abbreviated MEK) was organized in 1901, as a subsection of Moscow University's Society for Amateurs of Natural Sciences, Physical Anthropology and Ethnography. One of the first acts of the Commis- sion was to issue a guide on how to collect folk songs and other ethnomusi- cological materials (This was later published in its Transactions (Trudy Muzykal 'no-Etnografcheskoi Komissii), Vol. I, 1906). The MEK had at most some sixty members, includingRirnskii-Korsakov, Taneyev, Ippolitov-Ivanov, Grechan- inov, even Chaliapin. There were several professional musicians who sang folk songs or conducted choruses, several administrators and perhaps eight or nine excellent ethnomusicologists. The focus of their work was to make mechanical recordings and tran- scribe them in as scientific and precise a manner as possible, and to investigate and analyze not only Russian folk songs but also traditional music of other nationalities. Thus, for example, Arakishvili made cylinder recordings in the field in Georgia and has three long articles on Georgian traditional music in the first two volumes of the Transactions of the MEK. Other fundamental collec- tions and studies appearing there were Russian heroic songs (byliny) recorded on the shores of the White Sea in 1901, Don Cossack songs (choral, in several parts), collected by Listopadov in 1902 and 1903, largely notated by ear, and a classic analysis of the Russian bylina, its rhythmic and musical structure, by A.L. Maslov. Evgeniia Lineva (pronounced Linybva), who was the first Russian to make field recordings with a phonograph, was active for a time in the MEK, and her account of field recording in the Ukraine (recently published in English translation) appeared in volume one of the Commission's Transactions. After the Revolution, the two organizations managed to pick up again, more or less. We read in the journal Etnografiia, vol. 2, 1927, that the Com- mission for the Study of Folk Music of the Russian Geographic Society, in Leningrad, held meetings in 1926 at which papers were read by N. Findeizen, V.M. Beliaev and others, and that the number of members of the Commission had increased to twenty-five (p. 217). In the first volume of Etnografiia (1926), V.V. Paskhalov surveys the activity of Moscow ethnomusicologists for 19 17-1925. Paskhalov, who had been an officer of the MEK, was then the Pres- ident of the Ethnographic Section of the State Institute of Musical Sciences 1 (Gosudarstvennyi Institut Muzykal 'nykh Nauk, abbreviated GIMN). He wrote that part of the old Ethnomusicological Commission entered GIMN in I 1921, as its Ethnographic Section. Basically, however, his survey is a plaintive account of trying to carry on scholarly work with no funds. They continued to 1 record cylinders, in situ, in Moscow, and some 99 had been recorded, some of which included chanting of Russian heroic songs and songs of Far Eastern peoples of the USSR who came to Moscow for an All-Union Exhibition in 1923. Two expeditions were financed by the Institute, one to a township of the Mos- cow region, and the other to the Crimea. He noted that there were then three recording archives (phonoteks) in Moscow, that-of Evgeniia Lineva's collection with 432 cylinders, that of the Piatnitskii Museum with 400 cylinders (Russian folk songs from the Voronezh and Riazan' gubernias), and the one at his Institute. Reference is also made to private collections by the ethnographers N.F. Yakovlev (Caucasian songs), O.V. Kovaleva (Russian songs from the Saratov gubernia) E.D. Denisova (Russian songs from the Altai Mountains), and O.E. Ozarovskaia (songs from the Arch- angel gubernia). In addition to recording, members of the section made analyses of various types of music. Paskhalov, for example, was working on Oriental music of the Crimea, while N.N. Mironov and Zataevich (both of whom later published books on these subjects) were working on Uzbek and Kirghiz music. The thread is picked up again in an article by Professor Gippius in Sovetskii Fol 'klor 415 (1936), describing his Recording Archive at the Institute of Physical Anthropology, Ethnography and Archeology of the Soviet Academy in Leningrad. The Archive was founded in 1931. Gippius first reviews early Russian sound recording. He dates the first sound recordings from 1895 (the stationary recording of the great bylina chan- ter Ivan T. Riabinin), but I believe these took place in 1894, or even 1893 (cf. Liatskii, E. "I.T. Riabinin i ego byliny" (I.T. Riabinin and his Byliny), Etno- graficheskoe Onozrenie, Book XXIII, 1894, No. 4. See also Tmdy MEK, Protokoly, p. 27). Lineva began to collect in the field in 1897. In 1901, A.D. Grigor'ev took a phonograph on his third expedition to col- lect byliny in the Archangel gubernia. Also in 1901, Markov, Maslov and Bogo- slovskii made phonograph recordings of byliny along the White Sea, and Arakishvili did field recordings in his native Georgia. In 1902 the first attempt was made to record folklore of the peoples of Siberia on the phonograph. By 1905 the total number of recordings by Russian collectors reached about one thousand cylinders, according to Gippius, and by 1914 it was over 2500. Of these about 60 per cent were recordings of Russian folk music of the central regions and folklore of the Don Cossacks. The leading collectors of these were Lineva, Listopadov (Don Cossacks) and Piatnitskii (founder in 191 1 of the well- known folk chorus). Much of the remainder was recorded in Siberia by such great ethnographers as B. Ya. Vladimirtsov, V.I. Jochelson, L. Ya. Sternberg, or in Georgia by Arakishvili and others. Unfortunately the Russians had no central depository before the Revolu- tion, and many recordings were lost during the first World War and after. The basis for the Academy Archive in Leningrad was formed in 1926 by the fifty cylinders brought back by Gippius and his gifted wife and collaborator, Zinaida Eval'd, from an expedition in the north to study Russian peasant arts. By 1930 they had recorded more than five hundred cylinders, collecting systematically, with detailed information about the item, performer, date, place, also character- ization of the social function of the item and of the personality of the performer. They made field trips along the Pinega, the Mezen' and the Pechora Rivers. By 1931 they had amassed about 1500 newly recorded cylinders (made from 1926-1930). After the new Archive was founded, concentrated efforts were made to bring together all the recording collections of Leningrad and of Moscow. No doubt, still more of the pre-revolutionary cylinders were lost in transit from Moscow to Leningrad at this time. Gippius was able to get the copying machinery he wanted by 1934, so that study and transcription could be made from copies, and the originals could be preserved properly. Three major studies and collections were in progress or in press when Gippius wrote this article.