Previous Page: Introduction

Responsorial singing, especially in settings of worship or liturgy, dates back millennia and is shared by diverse cultures from around the world. The practice of a musically-trained leader guiding the responses of a group of believers is a near-universal musical device. Responsorial singing can be used to mark occasions in a life such as birth and death, to welcome seasons of the year, or to revere and make intercession to a deity. This type of singing, and the worship it supports, is therefore interwoven in the very fabric of what it means to be human within the culture in which it arises. In this article, I will be using the term “chanter” to refer to the symbolic role of the flutist in …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair. “Cantor” is sometimes used as a synonym for “chanter,” but I am avoiding the use of that term as it also has strong associations with Jewish and Christian liturgical traditions. For the sake of equally representing both the Indigenous Siberian and Christian musical traditions discussed in this article, “chanter” more neutrally refers to the role of leaders in both traditions’ responsorial sacred music. When referring solely to Shamanism, I will use the term “shaman,” and when referring solely to Russian Orthodox Christianity, I will use the term “cantor.”

The practice of faith, including faiths as integral to Russian culture as Russian Orthodox Christianity and Siberian shamanism, was a perceived threat to the newly-formed Soviet government precisely because of how ingrained it was, and how connected it was to the Tsarist state. In his article “Soviet Atheism and Russian Orthodox Strategies of Resistance,” William Husband writes about how the Russian people fought for their traditions, resisting state atheism (gosateizm): “nothing in the early Soviet period generated more elemental, emotional resistance than Bolshevik antagonism toward the sacred” (1998: 76). The steps taken during the Soviet era to eradicate this resistance placed sacred music in a unique and threatened position.

Russian Orthodox Music in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras

The music of the Russian Orthodox Church emerges from the practices of the Byzantine Church and its body of chants. Led in part by the reforms instituted during the reign of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, the Obikhod of 1772 became the first published collection of music in Russia, laying out harmonized chants for use in Orthodox services (Velimirović, Lozovaya, Myers, and DeCarlo 2001). Speaking of the importance of liturgical music in day-to- day and life events for Russians, researcher Oksana Sheludyakova notes that the word “Obikhod” itself also signifies “the customary, established, steady pattern of life or activities; objects of household, everyday life, household conditions” (2017: 94).

From the perspective of the Bolsheviks, Russian Orthodoxy was the state religion of Tsarism, the system they had just overthrown. Under increasing collectivization and oppression by the Union of Atheists (formed in 1925), Russian Orthodox clergy and laity protested the nationalization of church property and the imprisonment or exile of priests and bishops (Husband 1998: 86). Priests were stripped of their right to vote from the 1920s to the early 1930s (Bulgakova and Sundström 2017: 238). By the 1940s, however, the Soviet regime found some use for the Church and began to loosen the stringency of the 1929 Law on Religious Associations. In 1943, Stalin met with leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church and allowed for the election of a Patriarch. By 1945, the Church regained its right to acquire some property and began to rebuild its former wealth (Walters 1980: 219). While some anti-religious propaganda remained—the Church no longer being politically “reactionary” but only intellectually “anti-scientific”—tolerance vascilated throughout the post-Stalin era, with ongoing threats under First Secretary and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev (Jaffé 2022: 107). In the end, Jane Ellis estimates that the approximately 80,000 functioning Russian Orthodox churches of 1914 had dropped substantially to around 6,000 by the mid-1980s (Richters 2012: 3).

Anti-Christian caricature from Bezbozhnik, a Soviet magazine, in 1929. Jesus is shown promoting drunkenness. The caption reads “The very first and wickedest moonshiner is named Jesus Christ.” Public domain image.

Governmental authorities discouraged the use of Russian Orthodox music during the Soviet era but saw opportunities to take advantage of its role in citizens' lives. Although manuscripts of sacred music were destroyed and religious works of music banned from performance throughout the cultural revolution, Stalin leveraged the fervor felt for liturgical music in 1941 to stir up support for the war effort after the Nazi invasion of the USSR. This led to publicized performances by the Patriarchal Cathedral Choir, after its decades-long suppression, during the 1940s (Jaffé 2022: 107). Surprisingly, given the relationship of the Obikhod to Orthodox worship, the government strongly preferred the four-part choral textures drawn from the Obikhod, popularized abroad by such composers as Tchaikovsky (in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom) and Rachmaninoff (in the All-Night Vigil).

The older tradition of Znamenny plainchant remained underground, excluded from any of the leniency shown by the state toward the music of the Obikhod, as it lacked propagandist potential. Composers only began to contribute in great number to the sacred music repertoire following two key events. In the monumental year of 1988, marking the millennium of the Christianization of Russia, Soviet authorities permanently opened the door for composers to write sacred music. Three years later, the USSR collapsed. As these events unfolded, the Znamenny repertoire experienced a resurgence. Those who had helped to preserve it include Archimandrite Matfei (1937-2009), chapel-master of the Troitse-Sergieva Lavra (the spiritual center of the Russian Orthodox Church), who compiled and restored nearly 500 works. These were predominantly chants from the far reaches of the Russian Orthodox Church that he and his fellow monks copied out by hand to ensure their survival. Deacon and composer Sergei Trubachev likewise prioritized the Znamenny tradition in his works, weaving such chants into his repertoire (Sheludyakova and Urals State M. P. Mussorgsky Conservatory 2017: 96).

Sofia Gubaidulina recalls being mysteriously drawn to the Russian Orthodox faith from her earliest childhood. At the age of five, in a rural farmhouse where her family was staying on vacation, she laid eyes on the first icon of Christ she had ever encountered:

For a long time I had been praying in our Kazan courtyard­—a completely irrational prayer; but suddenly I understood the connection between my prayer and that icon… Being naïve, I blurted out everything to my parents, and when they realized I was religious, they were horrified. This was forbidden! So I started hiding my emotional, religious life from the grownups, but it continued to thrive within me. Music naturally blended with religion, and sound, straightaway, became sacred for me (Kurtz 2007: 13).

Anti-religious propaganda poster from the 1920s by Demyan Bedny. “Let's put an end to the witchy church rubbish! The soiled legacy of the most shameful years: to the icons and crosses, all the ‘holy’ junk, there is now only one path left: to the dump, into the garbage pit!!” (Translation by the author) CC BY-SA 4.0

Her parents’ fears regarding her precocious spirituality was not unfounded. In 1926, the religious education of children was made a “counterrevolutionary propaganda” crime under the new Criminal Code (Askew 2000: 16-17). Propaganda posters shared messages to parents: “Religion is poison! Protect your children!”

The young Gubaidulina maintained an active spiritual life, but it would not be until her adulthood that she publicly affirmed her faith. The famed Russian pianist Marina Yudina, who often premiered Gubaidulina’s early works, became a spiritual mentor for the composer throughout the 1960s, eventually convincing her to be baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church in 1969. This public declaration of faith brought about a new period in Gubaidulina’s compositional output, beginning with Concordanza (1971) for mixed ensemble. Turning away from standard forms and twelve-tone technique and toward a higher degree of religious symbolism, she describes musical dimensions such as pitch and articulation as metaphors for philosophical and spiritual realities. In one of two interviews of Gubaidulina by the Russian-American musicologist Vera Lukomsky, conducted in 1995, Gubaidulina stated: “I understand the word 'religion' in its direct meaning: as re-ligio (re-legato), that is, a restoration of legato between me (my soul) and God. By means of my religious activity I restore this interrupted connexion [sic]” (Lukomsky and Gubaidulina 1998b: 33). Furthermore, this sense of restored connection through music is not limited to herself as the composer but including the audience as well: “The public strives for active spiritual work. And it applauds composers and performers for presenting something that allows people to experience a state of concentration, to bring themselves into a state of wholeness, to cure themselves from the state of dispersal and disconnection that they suffer in everyday life” (Lukomsky and Gubaidulina 1998a: 9–10).

It is important to note that Gubaidulina holds no false hope that her music will ever be performed within a liturgical context. She is well aware of the restrictions on instrumental music within the Eastern church. She also pays little attention to the liturgical divisions or differences in name conventions that distinguish the Catholic and Orthodox liturgy from each other:

[My works] are neither Catholic nor Russian Orthodox; they are outside church liturgy. I mean they are conceptually not strictly orthodox: they are my fantasy. Actually, all my works are religious. As I understand it, I've never written non-religious pieces. But the Orthodox Church is not interested in us contemporary composers, or in our music. The Church uses only old music that has been accepted and consecrated. So we do not write new pieces for the church. Of course, we can write religious works, but only as our own fantasy. We never aspire to bring them to the church. And I don't aspire to either. But I strongly want to participate. I feel a great desire to realize my religious needs within art (Lukomsky and Gubaidulina 1998b: 31).

Consequently, she makes little to no use of direct musical quotations from liturgical sources. Instead, her works are evocations of the transcendent experiences she accesses through liturgy. Offertorium, the violin concerto which made her internationally famous, is part of a cycle of works (with Steps, Introitus, and Alleluia) referring to the Proper of the Roman Catholic Mass (though she herself had not experienced a Mass by the time many of these works were created!). The means whereby Gubaidulina self-consciously adapts textures from the tradition of Russian Orthodox liturgical music, and the implications that references to those textures hold for post-Soviet sound studies, will be my focus in the latter part of this article.

Next Page: Siberian Shamanic Music in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras