Early Russian Chant and Contemporary Compositions: A Typology of Conjugacy

Abstract

The transmission of Orthodox Christian sacral monody in the Russian sociocultural domain,
stipulated by the gradual liberation from the initial close connections with its sacral activities
and the accruement of its significance as an artistic phenomenon, has stipulated its realization by
contemporary composers in various functional, stylistic and genre conditions. All the diversity
of forms of conjugacy of the Early Russian chant with the authorial text, research of which
may be carried out in the sociocultural, genre-related and stylistic, musical-lexical and semiotic
perspectives, may be built into a certain system of typologies which presents the topic of study in
the present article. Each of the proposed typological schemes is determined by criteria represented
by the author’s setting of objectives, the latter's creative method, the function carried out by the
chant in the text of the new musical object, and the mechanisms of its adaptation.
As a whole, they form a multilevel classification organized in a crisscross principle. Its
development realized not only the goal of systematization and generalization of the extensional
musical material accrued during the course of the second half of the 20th century and the early
21st century, but also the analytic comprehension of essential phenomena and processes occurring
as the result of “germination” of the artifact of medieval sacred musical culture in contemporary
compositional practice.

Keywords: Orthodox Christian musical culture, Early Russian chant, sacral monody, sacred
music.