The Fifth International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony ...

Polyphonic Forms in 17th century Russian Liturgical Music
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medieval Orthodox Church also regulated aspects of Church culture such as the chant traditions. <strong>The</strong>refore, looking
for similarities between the diverse Orthodox chant traditions is not without precedent. This perspective is shared
by Professor Rusudan Tsurdsumia of the Tbilisi Conservatoire, who notes that “this issue calls for urgent research”
(Tsurtsumia, 2005: 75).
Several points can be established in order to set up the basis for the current study.
1) Russian liturgical chanting occupies an important place in Christian Orthodox culture;
2) Russian liturgical chant originated in Byzantine monophonic tradition and represents the forms and canons
of ecclesiastical chant common to the Byzantine and Slav traditions in the tenth century;
3) <strong>The</strong> texts of Russian hymns are written in Church Slavonic, and can therefore be identified with the poetic
texts of other Orthodox hymns.
A comparative study between Georgian and Russian hymns may be based on the following regularities:
- A common philosophical paradigm in the Eastern Orthodox church
- Common rules for the divine service
- An orientation towards Byzantine hymnography by both Georgian and Russian traditions
- Common musical-calendar system of Octoechos
- Common performance practices in the prohibition of musical instruments during the divine service, and a
common tradition of acappella performance by male choir
- A common Typicon
Judging by the sparse historical sources it is clear that Georgian and Russian chanters listened to one another’s
singing. So far Georgian scholars have only written about the influence of 19th century Russian music on the
composition of new Georgian three and four part hymns in a western style, but there are a few problems with this
narrow study. One of these problems is the existence of Russian traditional polyphony that is not western influenced
and is in fact, as quite a few Russian scholars have pointed out, quite “dissonant”. <strong>The</strong> provenance of these types
of polyphony remains unknown.
At different times throughout the past century the history of Georgian-Russian musical ties have been studied
by scholars such as N. Dimitriadi, Z. Huseinova. An important correspondence was also maintained between two
great supporters of church chant in their respective countries, Vasil Karbelashvili and Stephen Smolenski.
Now we turn our attention to two early forms of Russian multipart chanting: strochnoe and demestvennoe, first
attested to in sources from the 1520s and written down in putno-demestvennoe musical notation. <strong>The</strong>se types of
polyphony are characterized by the occurrence of frequent dissonances, occasional non-coordinated text underlay,
and polyphonic movement in all voices that often creates an unusual vertical sonority.
For the sake of comparison, examples of these polyphonic chant styles will be compared with an example of
seventeenth century znamenny multipart chant, which features a fully coordinated vertical homophonic sonority.
According to Ekaterina Smirnova, punto-demestvennoe is the earliest form of polyphonic Russian chant. <strong>The</strong>
evolution of this form can be observed from the earliest examples of multipart chants in otherwise monophonic
manuscripts, up to and including the production of manuscripts which include exclusively multipart hymns.
Znamenny polyphony she assigns to this new type of harmonic thinking, which later develops into the partes style.
From these sources and other historical sources, Smirnova considers the 1670s as the Golden Age of the putnodemestvennoe
style (Smirnova, 2003: 3).
<strong>The</strong> following section discusses these three examples.
1. To Your Cross, we bow Lord – strochnoe polyphony. <strong>The</strong> manuscript (RNB, Q. I. 875 l. 50 ob) dates to the
1690s, transcribed by E.A. Smirnova.