Saturday, May 10, 2014

Surge Music

What kind of friends do I have? For the last fifty years or so, they’ve probably all been running around, listening to Pavel Chesnokov, and sniggering to each other that, “hah, Marc still hasn’t caught on yet!” Damn it, guys, have I ever held back on you?
All right, let’s be charitable: you could be just as ignorant as my computer, but if so, you’d seriously be missing out on some beautiful music especially if, like me, you have a taste for Russian liturgical music.
At least, that’s what it turns out it’s called; I knew it only as all that gorgeous, mystical, complicated yet lulling music that—usually—all-male choirs sing. What I didn’t know was how complicated the whole affair is.
I am presuming, Dear Reader, that you had something else to do in your college days other than to pursue advanced studies in music theory, but me? Well, I hung out in conservatories a fair amount, and while it’s true that I spent more time in the practice rooms than the classrooms, I’m still unable to tell you what this, stolen from Wikipedia, really means:
Znamenny Chants are not written with notes (the so-called linear notation), but with special signs, called Znamëna (Russian for "marks", "banners") or Kryuki ("hooks"), as some shapes of these signs resemble hooks. Each sign may include the following components: a large black hook or a black stroke, several smaller black 'points' and 'commas' and lines near the hook or crossing the hook. Some signs may mean only one note, some 2 to 4 notes, and some a whole melody of more than 10 notes with a complicated rhythmic structure.
The stolp notation was developed in Kievan Rus' as an East Slavic refinement of the Byzantine neumatic musical notation.
The most notable feature of this notation system is that it records transitions of the melody, rather than notes. The signs also represent a mood and a gradation of how this part of melody is to be sung (tempo, strength, devotion, meekness, etc.) Every sign has its own name and also features as a spiritual symbol. For example, there is a specific sign, called "little dove" (Russian: голубчик (golubchik)), which represents two rising sounds, but which is also a symbol of the Holy Ghost.
Here is my best—and it’s not very good—translation. Think of a language, such as English, which works with letters. By combining three letters—c-a-t—we can create in everyone’s mind the animal now sleeping (wouldn’t he just?) on a pile of mail in the chair in front of me. And that’s also how Western music works, with notes arranged on a page. These notes tell you the speed and the pitch; other instructions tell you the overall speed of the piece (fast or slow) and how loudly or softly to sing.
There’s another—not very good, but who am I to say—way to do language, and that is to assign an image, a picture, that will represent a cat. That seems to me to be the equivalent of what the Russian chants use. Am I right? Sorry, but it’s my best guess. My second guess, by the way, is that this music has been handed down for centuries, and that the Znamëna are serving as general aids to the memory.
What I do know is that this music—and very frequently music spun off from it, think Arvo Pärt—is both mesmerizing and lulling. You want it to go on forever, and in a sense it does, for even when a piece ends, some part of it is still rolling out into the expanding heavens.
And when I say, “music spun off from the tradition,” I go straight back to Chesnokov, the professor of choral composition at the Conservatory of Moscow, and the director of the choir at the Cathedral of the Divine Savior, also in Moscow. And here is where the story darkens, since Chesnokov, after having written over 400 sacred compositions, was barred from writing church music after the Communist Revolution. That was bad, but he switched to secular music.
The final blow, however, came when the Russians decided in 1931 to tear down the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, of which Chesnokov was choir director. Chesnokov was desolate, and stopped composing music for the rest of his life. He died in 1944, in what was probably the darkest part of World War II.    
The story has a semi-happy ending: the cathedral was rebuilt and closely resembles the original. Here it is!




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