Song Traditions of the Volga-Ural Tatars in the 21St Century: Issues in the Transmission of Historic Singing Styles Nailya Almeeva
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Song Traditions of the Volga-Ural Tatars in the 21st Century: Issues in the Transmission of Historic Singing Styles Nailya Almeeva In the 20th century ethnic music attracted this has long been a phenomenon of revival great interest. With increasing ease of travel performance of folklore in live performance, not and communication, countries and continents by the bearers of folklore musical thinking and seemed to become closer, and access to original hearing but, loosely speaking, by those who folk material became ever easier. Ethnic music learned it. Understanding the value of the original could now be found not only in print but in live sound of ritual (time-bound) singing, one cannot performance, on television and on the internet. remain indiff erent to its revival, particularly once As a result, the whole spectrum of methods and one is aware of what can be lost during such types of intoning (a term introduced by Izaly revival. Zemtsovsky (1981: 87), which means types of voice Globalisation and the mass media have had a production) and sounding techniques of the oral particularly negative eff ect on ritual (time-bound) tradition could be experienced, even without genres and on the types of folklore dependent leaving home. Many of the methods bear the on a traditional way of life, on pre-industrial ways characteristics common for earlier, sometimes of production and on the natural environment. very ancient, historic epochs. In those places where these have ceased, ritual Traditional societies became urbanised, and folklore fades and eventually disappears. the all-permeating eff ects of the mass media The issues described above apply to the ritual overwhelmed the traditional ear. The result was (time-bound) folklore of the peoples of European a change in musical perception and thinking, Russia and in particular to the Tatars of the Middle ultimately aff ecting such vulnerable features as Volga region. We will consider these issues sounding techniques and timbre; in other words, through examples from the main ethnographic those features which defi ned the authenticity groups of the Tatars of Volga region: the traditional of folklore performance in pre-industrial times. A drawling Tatar melodies1 and the ritual folklore of traditional way of life gave way to technological the Kryashen Tatars. progress, and oral culture to the mass media. One of the biggest changes in traditional 20th- In the oral music tradition, by ‘authenticity’ of century Tatar culture was the marginalisation of performance we mean the unique and original the younger generation in terms of their traditional ‘trueness of sound’ which is characteristic of a way of life. This was historically determined by historic layer of folk music. However, it should be cultural/economic factors and, of course, it was understood that the ‘sound’ of any music from further infl uenced by religious traditions: Islam for the oral tradition, even, and especially, an archaic Kazan and Mishar Tatars; Orthodox Christianity for one, can only nominally be called authentic when Kryashens. The principal reasons for change were we remember the probable, though insignifi cant, the social upheavals at the beginning of the 20th evolution of melodies over the centuries. Musical century: the October revolution of 1917, the World material performed by the last members of the Wars and Civil Wars. Soviet ideology, as well as ritual singing tradition, recorded during the industrialisation and globalisation in the course 20th century, has a range of consistent features, of the century, had the eff ect of marginalising according to circumstances of performance. new generations in respect of the old way of Firstly, timbre and articulation. Both have been life. Folklore expeditions between the 1960s and described in research papers; see, for example, the fi rst decade of the 21st century revealed that Zemtsovsky 1989a, 1991. Another reason to raise musical traditions survived in the memory of the question of authenticity of sound is that the older generation. With the rejection of the 1 ‘Drawling song’ is a specifi c genre of the Tatar song folklore, which is characterized of sustained notes, melismas and long verse. 117 Song Traditions of the Volga-Ural Tatars in the 21st Century: Issues in the Transmission of Historic Singing Styles traditional way of life, ethnic components partly songs. However, programmes lacked the less disappeared from working life, but not from popular drawling epic songs and thus did not cultural life. This is shown by the ethnic character refl ect the complete diversity of the folk tradition. of the Tatar musical mentality. The ritual singing of the Kryashen Tatars, virtually Musical ethnicity lies in the deep in the unknown to the wider audience, was represented subconscious and is vividly manifested. In everyday by a rather superfi cial collection of wide-known life Russian Tatars employ their mother tongue tunes, owing to a lack of awareness of Tatar folklore (Tatar) less and less. Even city-dwelling Tatars who among concert organisers. Nevertheless, it is very speak no Tatar at all are able to experience their signifi cant that such folklore concerts took place. national music in a profound way. Evidence of However, it should be noted that complex song this is the way in which Tatar Diasporas away from forms, lyric drawling songs were performed less. Tatarstan enthusiastically embrace concerts of This is even truer of ritual folklore, which lost its national music, be it symphonic music, light music social basis and relevance. The stage became, or popular music. along with audio archives and sheet music, the Tatar folk songs began to be performed main ‘ecological niche’ for folklore. in concert towards the end of 19th century, The role of folklore in modern culture and its at ‘Philharmonic Nights’, held for the Tatar genres both of performance and in everyday life intelligentsia of Kazan. There are individual have long been studied by ethnomusicologists for examples of popular lyrical songs performed in another reason. Its disappearance from its natural concert by untrained singers, accompanied by the setting causes anxiety and provokes a desire to bayan, mandolin or small instrumental ensemble. preserve its place and its subtle specifi city in the In Soviet times, the tradition of singing lyrical complexities of modern life. songs to the garmon, and later to the bayan, was Folklore displaced from its natural setting, supported by the state philharmonic organization. and from its traditional context, then brought This became an essential part of musical life. into workshops or onto the performing stage, Performers of this repertoire came from rural is termed ‘folklorism’.2 Folklorism may exist in areas, some with untrained voices, and some with various forms.3 Diff erent authors suggest partially vocal training from music colleges or from the coinciding typological sequences of folklore Kazan Conservatoire. At that time, every radio or derivates. It also should be noted that cultural TV concert featured these singers (in some form). dominants in folklore interpretation on stage This performance style still exists, but professional may diff er in diff erent cultures and in diff erent singers, singing as the voice of the people, have historical periods. supplemented the repertoire with Tatar pop. Three means of adaptation of Tatar folk songs In 1937 the State Song and Dance Ensemble of for stage performance can be seen: Tatarstan was founded; similar ensembles were • the folk song arrangements by composers formed in all Republics of the former USSR. This (from 1937) ensemble performed folk songs and dances in • popular pseudo-folklore (since the 1970s) choral and orchestral arrangements. • performance with a tendency towards authen- In the 1980s, with the beginning of perestroika, ticity (from the early 21st century). a new phenomenon appeared in the musical life of Tatarstan. Concerts and festivals took place which From the vast are of so-called Tatar folk featured authentic performers, some of whom song (in concert performance or recorded), have never before left their villages. Typically the I would like to discuss the latter category of programmes of such annual concerts, announced folklore interpretation, that is, the experience as concerts of diff erent ethnic groups of Tatars, of performing Tatar song folklore on stage. I were compiled independently of each other, will examine the way it should look and sound, consisting of the most popular lyric and dance remaining as close as possible to the authentic 2 In Russian-language ethnomusicology the term ‘folklorism’ appears fi rst in Asafyev 1987. 3 The place of folklore in modern culture and the directions of its development are discussed by ethnomusicologists (Livingston 1999; Alekseyev 1988; Zemtsovsky 1984, 1989b). 118 Nailya Almeeva historic form. I will try to suggest a possible future küye is a fi eld for reproducing traditional melos direction for Tatar folklore in the form of folklorism, using the feeling of the unwritten rules to which rather than analyse the existing performing Tatar melodics unfolds, as well as the knowledge experience which is as yet rather unsatisfactory. of the culture of Tatar melismas. A singer may In the song folklore of Tatars living in Volga have it heritably or borrow it from traditional song region and in the Urals (taken as a whole), two environment. musical realms exist, in terms of which the Solo lyric song is a genre with great potential adequacy of reproducing song tradition on stage for a singer’s self-expression. It demands a well- may be discussed: (1) lyrical singing not connected developed voice with a capacity for solo-singing with rituals and (2) ritual (time-bound) folklore.4 even if it is diff erent from the trained way of This dichotomy is rooted in the existence of two singing. For this reason, Tatar lyric songs were respective historic layers of music of oral tradition, often sung by singers with a trained background two diff erent musical languages, two diff erent such as Ilham Shakirov, Alfi ya Avzalova, Gabdulla cultural historic contexts, and two diff erent Rakhimkulov, Tagir Yakupov, and Albert Asadullin,7 approaches to the problem of authenticity.