: Is there a school of Medieval-Russian music? I'm researching music for the SCA, and I'm supposed to be looking for specific music from the Russian (as a culture) area. I have plenty of information on Medieval music as a whole,

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

... on a more serious note, Russia inherits southwards, so one can find music specific to those:
www.musicarussica.com/search/results?period=ancient
There's also various folk choirs who can probably provide music or more information:
www.golosa.org/
On the scholarship front, Gustave Reese in "Music in the Middle Ages" points to the marriage of Prince Vladimir and Princess Anna (sister of Byzantine Emperor Basil II) that brought along priests, monks, and singers; shortly afterwards came Greek teachers (in 1053, reign of Yaroslav I) and thence to the famous choirs at Kiev, Moscow, Novgorod, Vladimir, Pskov, and Bogoliubov Monastery. From this, there should be both Byzantium and southern slavic influences.

A specific Russian form of notation (adapted from the Greek) is the kriuki or znamenny notation, which can be traced as far back as the 11th century, though documentation is fairly scant from back then. Znamenny Chant (or "Kriukovoi Znamenny Rospiev") lasted up until about the 17th century, whose notation was worked on and standardized by Ivan Akimovich Shaidurov and the monk Alexander Mesenetz (with complications on account of the plague).

Russian chant came into its own perhaps in the 12th to 14th centuries, alongside the development of the Slavonic language, though appears to have had a period of muddling, rectified on the order of Ivan the Terrible in 1551 "for the formation of institutions for the teaching of reading, writing, and singing;" (p.99) the best schools were at Moscow and Novgorod, and the best choirs of the Tsar and the Patriarch.
@book {reese1940music,
title={Music in the Middle Ages: with an introduction on the music of ancient times},
author={Reese, Gustave},
year={1940},
publisher={New York: WW Norton}
}