ABSTRACT
The sound with which members of Russian folk choruses and professional soloists sing is not produced naturally, but learned. The country’s music and culture schools are run on the assumption that singers must be able to sing all types of folk music and composed music. At Gnesin, folk singing students are given the equivalent of academic musical training, but with a specialization in folk styles. They learn to distinguish and demonstrate the various regional styles of Russian folk singing; to vocally demonstrate the written musical parts in a song to each section in a chorus (bass, tenor, alto, and soprano); and to smooth over the breaks in their ranges (between chest and head voice), making a uniform sound at any range. As Giliarova told me, the technique which these schools teach produces a ‘white sound’ that is lacking in individual timbre and personality.26 Ekaterina Dorokhova, who studied at Gnesin but in the Department of Music Theory, called it ‘that awful sound.’27 Kabanova attributed this faceless sound to the way students are taught at Gnesin: ‘because one choir-master or leader directs the choir, and the choir meets four times per week for 1 1/2 hours, therefore the choir acquires a psychological dependency on the choir-master. The choir itself isn’t conscious that it has started to sing with the voice of that director.’ (CD tracks 8-9)
Gnesin also teaches its students that the meaning of the song resides in its text. One could see this principle in the Petrozavodsk ensemble’s performance. I was explicitly told by a Gnesin professor, the head judge for a Moscow competition of children’s folk ensembles, that acting out the song’s text is the ‘ideal’ in the presentation of folk music nowadays.28 However, acting out a song’s text is a fairly primitive stage technique. The Gnesin standard ignores significant developments in combining folk music and theater. For example, the Pokrovsky Ensemble and many of its followers used folk theater liberally in their concerts, and exaggerated some of its elements to produce striking renditions of folk theater classics.29 Folk theater almost never acts out the literal meaning of a song, but uses thematically-linked songs for specific purposes in the course of its play-acting. Andrei Kotov’s Sirin Choir, an offshoot of the Pokrovsky Ensemble that specializes in ancient Russian religious and spiritual folk music, studied the methods of avant-garde Polish theater director Jerzy Grotovskii and participated in
cutting-edge theater combining ancient Russian chanting and village singing styles.30 Although such high-art work might be seen as inappropriate for the Gnesin graduates who are trained to delight mainstream audiences all over the country, there may be signs of imminent change: starting in the late 1990s Kotov was hired by Gnesin to teach students some of the techniques he has gathered, and he gave a workshop on body-voice integration and rhythmic improvisation at the festival.
