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!
