Sources of Russian Chant Theory

Nicolas Schidlovsky

"I see the trampling of the true faith... and can no longer bear to hear the Latin singing in Moscow." Germogen, Patriarch of Russia (early 17th century)

The investigation of Russian chant originates in nascent reformist tendencies of early nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox liturgical singing. The published work appearing since then is the first substantial literature that we have on the subject. Prior to this, writing on the chant was little cultivated, and throughout the centuries the traditional theoretical treatise used by the Russians was of minimal proportions: as a grammar on the neumatic notation, the musical azbuka is characteristic for its brevity and forthright practicality; it addresses only the form of old unison chanting and is unrelated to the growth of polyphony.

But, important as it is for our understanding of the music, the literature on the Russian chant offers a number of difficulties. It is extensive, scattered, and often unavailable in the libraries. It is, of course, written mostly in the Russian language, and to steer one's way through the material requires a sense of the history behind its development. Finally, the Western student soon discovers that what might be called a "theory" of the music has to do primarily with questions of notation: speculative ideas of the type known in medieval and Renaissance Europe are conspicuously absent. The present essay takes into consideration all of these difficulties. Its main purpose is to provide a compact introduction to a largely unknown subject, moreover, a subject of particular import in view of trends in current theory and musicology.

In all branches of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russian Orthodox religious art, the imitation of European ideals left a devastating imprint traditional procedures and indigenous aesthetic codes acquired a new profile. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was the reaction to fashionable innovation, or "Italianization" as it was known, that triggered research in the domain of liturgical music. Along with the adoption of church singing in the concerto style of the baroque and rococo, Russia of the eighteenth century saw the evolution of the so-called obikhodny chant that was later collected and edited by Aleksei Lvov (1798-1870) and Nikolai Bakhmetev (1807-1891). This style of majestic, harmonized singing, always a cappella in the Orthodox practice, flourished at the Imperial Court in St. Petersburg . Even if its origin and derivation are still little understood, the impact it had on the future is overwhelmingly clear: it set a standard that dominates Russian church music to this day. The appeal of the singing lies primarily in its simple triadic progressions suitable for long phrases of recitative to be performed either by modest ensembles or large choral groups. Under favorable conditions, the amplification of harmonics by octave doubling results in the characteristic sonority known as the "Synodal" choral style.

Unfortunately, however, the singing scarcely resembles the ancient unaccompanied melodic singing of the Russians, the so-called znamenny chant rooted in the practice of Byzantium . Thus, to the knowledgeable associates of Lvov and Bakhmetev it was clear that, effective as it was, the harmonized music they heard only tenuously reflected tradition, and that a legitimate practice was to be restored only through the recovery of the original chant, both its history and sources. During the half-century or so preceding the Revolution in 1917, an emerging scholarship went in quest of reform. This quest, part of a broad cultural movement in Russia of the time, involved a fundamental revaluation of Western paradigms in search of their proper place within the life of a rapidly advancing nation.

After slow and uncertain beginnings, the work on the chant made gradual progress: it became increasingly specialized, with appreciable results both in the practical and scientific realms. A useful starting place for a survey of the research is the Bibliography of Anton Preobrazhensky (1870-1929) published in 1897. While incomplete, it contains over two hundred entries and gives a good picture of the nature of the literature. In his Dictionary, which appeared during the same year, Preobrazhensky made special mention of the late Metropolitan Evgeny of Kiev (1767-1837), the eminent founder of the field. Exactly a century earlier, the honorable hierarch had laid the cornerstone in a speech delivered while still a professor at the seminary in Voronezh . First published in 1799 in that city, the speech had a second printing in 1804 in St. Petersburg ; later editions appeared in Moscow in 1817 and, finally, in 1897. The following passage illustrates the views expressed in this widely acclaimed document:

"Besides this famous Russian choral director (i.e. Bortniansky), the works of many foreign kapellmeisters have in our time been adopted as compositions of the Greek-Russian Church, for example, Galuppi (teacher of Bortniansky), Kerzelli, Dimmler, and the eminent Sarti. But even so, the truth must be stated that either because of their unawareness of the power and expressiveness of many moments in our church poetry, or because of a prejudice only for the laws of their music, they have often disregarded the sanctity of the place and subject of their compositions, so that generally speaking, it is not the music which is adapted to the sacred words, but instead, the words are merely added to the music and often in a contrived manner. Apparently, they wanted more to impress their audience with concert-like euphony than to touch their hearts with pious melody, and often during such compositions the church resembles more an Italian opera than the house of worthy prayer to the Almighty."

In the preceding paragraphs the author outlines the history leading up to the existing deplorable state. Although he is quite objective in recognizing the achievements of the Italianate musicians and is far from vindictive, interestingly enough, he focuses on Dimitri Bortniansky (1751 -1825), the most famous of all the foreign-trained composers; refined, sensitive, and highly respected for his many sacred and secular works, Bortniansky was soon to become a favorite target of criticism.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the authors who undertook to write on the subject represented different degrees of competence. Their writing is often diffuse and lacks qualified evidence. But it is, nonetheless, the stimulus for the better, critical work of the later specialists. Among the early authors, Vukol Undolsky (1815-1864) stands out as a discerning scholar. His work published in 1846 was acclaimed by the well-known Russian theorist and critic, Vladimir Odoevsky (1803-1869), who credited the author with opening "a new and hitherto unknown side in the history of our old singing."' According to Odoevsky, Undolsky had demonstrated an interpretation other than that of the majority of musicians "for whom ancient Russian singing began with Bortniansky." By mid-century, the new historical inquiry could boast of considerable accomplishments. Most importantly, it was beginning to gain support and recognition of its own ideals. This is evident in the first comprehensive textbook to appear on the subject, the monumental three-volume history of Russian church singing by Dimitri Razumovsky (1818-1889). Just one year before the publication of the first volume, Razumovsky was granted the chair in church music at the newly opened conservatory in Moscow .

At the end of the century, a sizeable literature was available on many topics concerning church singing. But it is indicative of the basic orientation of this work that hardly any of the publications deal with analyses of the znamenny repertory. Among the entries in Preobrazhensky's Bibliographythe largest number are writings of a pedagogical, aesthetic, and theological bent; four of the seven categories dividing the catalogue can be identified as materials of this type. In much the same way, the entries classified as "theory" reveal a leaning towards questions of contemporary church practice; they are mostly concerned with harmonized singing and sometimes with the use of traditional melodies in harmonized form. At the center of such discourse is the model provided in the obikhody of Lvov and Bakhmetev, with the major point of contention being other experimental approaches, especially that of the controversial Nikolai Potulov (1810-1873). In all of this, the authority of the old music is commonly recognized, but practically no attention is given to the possibility of reestablishing the authentic tradition of unison singing. At best, it seems, most of the authors were seriously misguided. In their struggle to justify new polyphonic composition, they attempted to implement alien concepts of modal theory which, as in some of the writings of the European Renaissance, occasionally resulted in unfortunate fabrications of bizarre and invalid thought.

Although rare figures such as Odoevsky and Razumovsky were conversant with the old neumes and were able to transcribe them, throughout this period the main source of the chant was an official publication by the Holy Synod. This provided the traditional melodies in the diastematic "Kievan" or "square" notation (see plates 1 and 2). In the early eighteenth century, Peter I removed the ecclesiastical presses from Moscow to the new northern capital, St. Petersburg , only to reinstall them soon after, in 1727, in the original location under the auspices of the Synod. Not until 1741 did other accessories return, and a few decades later, sometime between 1770 and 1772, the first edition of the chant appeared, guided chiefly by Stepan Byshkovsky, director of the Synodal Press. Little is known about the efforts surrounding this publication except that a small but competent group of clergy and singers was responsible for its redaction.' With the arrival of reformist sentiments, the books became the banners of tradition; they led the way to significant developments benefiting the interests of composers and scholars alike. However, that they continued to be published throughout the century and up to the Revolution is somewhat strange given the limited use they must have had in the actual church practice. Exactly how they were used in the services is uncertain, and it appears that the singers who did perform from them were trained to improvise a harmony to accompany the bare chant. In the decades before the Revolution there emerged a number of publications collecting regional recensions of the music. These tended to follow the format of the Synodal editions; they gave the melodies in simple, unharmonized form, but sometimes rejected the square notation in favor of the modern system.

Among the many authors listed by Preobrazhensky, three deserve special attention: Ivan Voznesensky (1837-1916), Stepan Smolensky( 1846-1909), and Vasilii Metallov (1862-1926). Along with Preobrazhensky himself, these scholars represent the mainstream of thought from what might be called the second generation of research on the chant. As we shall see, Smolensky and Metallov, in particular, were unusually prolific and talented writers.

As the first extensive efforts devoted to the analysis of the monophonic repertory, Preobrazhensky listed two works by Voznesensky in both the "history" and "theory" categories of his catalogue. In these books Voznesensky gave a detailed study of the main branches of the Russian chant found in the publications of the Synod; he was completely systematic in examining the central tradition of both the "large" (bol'shoi) and "small" (malyi) znamenny chants as well as the "Kievan," "Bulgarian," and "Greek" families. In spite of the author's insistence on a disagreeable modal terminology, these volumes must be recognized for their overall thoroughness. The works listed for Metallov are his two texts on the history and teaching of church singing; these were designated for seminary and public school use and were modeled on Razumovsky's work of thirty years earlier." The more prominent works of this author, however, were yet to come; these began to appear shortly thereafter with his Azbuka and Osmoglasie.

Despite the efforts of Razumovsky and others, a resourceful scientific study of the old chant begins with Stepan Smolensky, who embarked on a close examination of archival materials and, by the end of the century, published a handful of unprecedented works. When Razumovsky died in 1889, the choice fell naturally on Smolensky to take the professorship at the conservatory. Thus, Smolensky, already an established writer at the time, assumed a leadership among scholars not only by virtue of merit, but in rank. It was his activity that later brought European-wide recognition to the neighboring Moscow Synodal School as an outstanding center-for the development of choral singing. His earliest writing focused on the large collection of manuscripts from the Solovetsky Monastery; together with preparing an atlas of specimens, he devoted a short article to explaining the importance of the material. He wrote: “

The comparative study and assessment of the contents of the znamenny manuscripts afford the opportunity to make some conclusions and deductions of interest both for the history of church singing in Russia and for liturgies. This area is still completely untouched and is replete, on the one hand, with positions established through convention and without foundation, and on the other hand, with new and unsuspected [ideas] which have much to correct and to shed unexpected light on the issues of doubt."

In a word, Smolensky introduced a source-critical standard unknown at the time. In the same article he describes the famous seventeenth-century Azbuka by Alexander Mezenets, a copy of which he published during the following year in a landmark edition. As he states, the treatise is of some relevance to research. Historically, written in 1668, it is evidently the work of a consummate master. Moreover, it belongs to a time of rapid decline in the chant and stands as an urgent appeal in defense of the old practice. In particular, it aims to clarify the neumatic system whose subtleties the square notes completely overlook. In an appendix to the edition, Smolensky included an extensive chart of the notation where he arrived at a remarkably clear portrayal of the chant's development. Thus, other lasting results of his work were to recognize the history of musical writing as a locus of immediate concern and to affirm an essential continuity of the melodic tradition dating back to the earliest times. As his later publications show, however, Smolensky sensed that the problems of research inevitably extend beyond the confines of the azbuka and the elementary questions of transcription.

The development of the square notation used in the Synodal edition of the chant coincides with a turbulent period in Russian history. In the mid- seventeenth century, the councils precipitated by the textual and liturgical revisions of Patriarch Nikon resulted in a vehement turn against enforced changes in the churches. This is the origin of the so-called Old Believers, a popular movement which by the turn of the century took upon itself to resist all officially sanctioned novelties. With time, the reaction was extended to many issues and came to represent a bitter distaste for the temporal powers standing in support of innovation. Being equally distrusted as a tool of the reformers, the square notation soon became an object of dissent, and the point of view originally advocated in the Azbuka of Mezenets was adopted by the traditionalists. The supporters of change meanwhile rallied behind the other influential treatise of the period, the Azbuka of Nikolai Diletsky. Written in 1679, this treatise had little to do with the old unison music; it used the square notes and expounded a method of polyphonic writing based exclusively on the Western variety. Subsequent history was to show an increasing divergence between the two practices, with large numbers of Old Believers receding to regions away from the centers swayed by the new style.

Not until two centuries later did research expose the music of the Old Believers as a source of precious information about the early chant. At least a passive awareness of the Old Believer usage is seen as early as the writing of Metropolitan Evgeny who mentions the singing as the sole carrier of the long-lost neumatic tradition. But again, we should turn to the writing of Smolensky to get a clear affirmation of the unique worth of the music, a music that, despite a continuing lack of official tolerance and a stigma of public disdain, was ostensibly the direct descendant of the original Russian chant.

We have discovered a whole region where the folk arts, both the secular and the sacred song, coexist and are completely alive and thoroughly natural to the people just as they were several centuries ago.... We have also discovered that in those places a particularly strict form of the Old Belief survives and preserves for us in a completely live form, aside from the old singing, still much more which is interesting and informative. Of course, we cannot help but welcome these live and simple old practices, and Russian archeology must not neglect to take from them everything possible for our own learning and for the instruction of future artists.”

In an earlier publication Smolensky gave special weight to the relationship of the peasant folk song to the chant.

"Underlining here the fact that the Russian folk song, the kindred sifter of our old church chant, has not been codified in its melodies, and that the znamenny and demestvenny singing have already been, for a long time, provided with a fine, special notation, I strongly affirm that the knowledge of this living practice of notation has much to reveal in the research on the structure of the Russian folk melody. We are not at a loss because of the general lack of education of these people: they know their art well. They have not lost the most important details of the theory of znamenny singing and have preserved the fine shades of its performance. Among them are still alive through tradition the many refinements not transmitted in the books, for instance, concerning the pronunciation of the text, the height of the pitch, the speed of the performance, etc. Because of this, musicians and scholars can test their own generalizations and discoveries through these living carriers of antiquity....

An interest in folk song was by no means a novelty in Russia . But it was Smolensky's awareness of the similar musical principles underlying both the repertory of the Old Believers and the peasant song that gave a new impetus to research. The pursuit of this meant an exploration of both the sacred and secular realms for elements of a national theory of the music.

To this day, the singing of the Old Believers survives as an unexhausted resource. Settlements of Old Believers have spread to many parts of the world including South America , Australia , Canada , and the United States ; they are scattered over the entire territory of the Soviet Union, in the faraway regions of Siberia, in Central Russia , and especially in the Baltic countries. Their practice is motivated by an unswerving observance of the ancient Orthodox services in a form closely resembling the common usage in Russia of the seventeenth century. Of course, some changes have been made. But these are small in comparison with the liturgical abbreviation that has occurred in the mainline practice of the Russian Orthodox. From a musical standpoint, perhaps the most interesting of the Old Believer services is the All-Night Vigil, a combination of the morning and evening offices frequently up to six hours long. Especially among the priestless sects—those groups surviving without bishops to perform ordinations—the service is maintained with particular care and offers a unique record of archaic practices in the liturgy. The Old Believer tradition likewise gives investigators a rare glimpse into the theoretical training of singers. Among the many elaborate, hand-copied manuscripts still in use, the grammars of the chant are an important category. Despite some variety in their contents, they reveal a well-established practice whose method has remained largely unchanged.

Long before the azbuka became the bulwark of the Old Believers, lists of musical signs were included in the chant manuscripts. Such antecedents of the azbuka are known as early as the fifteenth century. With time, however, there developed increasingly detailed information about the neumes, and the various manuals came to include not only summary, verbal descriptions, but also the razvody, or explanations of the more complex notation through the use of equivalent, simpler signs. By the seventeenth century, the azbuka was at the height of its development, and the core of the treatise was considerably expanded. A variety of additions included appendices of the typical melodic formulas (popevki), explications of the unnotated, "secret" melodies (fity and litsa), discussions of newly developed methods of notation, as well as a number of other occasional insertions. In some cases, the newly acquired portions existed independently. Thus, the popevki could be collected in handbooks known as the kokizniki, while the particularly melodious repertoire of melismas was gathered in the so-called fitniki; similarly, the azbuka of the demestvenny chant could be kept in a separate volume containing music with a special notation. Throughout its development, the azbuka was bound to living practice; it responded to the immediate requirements of the singer and never claimed to teach more than was necessary to perform the chant." The mature seventeenth- century azbuka thus shows a vigorous growth at a time of increasing uncertainty among musicians. On the eve of momentous reforms, its expansion is vivid evidence of a general weakening in an orally based musical tradition.

The seventeenth century also witnessed the appearance of diastematic techniques to enhance the neumatic notation. One of these was the system of pomety ascribed to a certain Ivan Shaidurov of the late sixteenth century; according to this method, pitch was indicated by red letters inserted into the manuscripts. A later system, developed by Alexander Mezenets, called for the priznaki. or small black tails, to be attached to the existing neumes. Being wholly accurate in respect to pitch, the heightened notation thus gave a new theoretical orientation to the azbuka. Before, in the pre-Shaidurov times, the emphasis had been on the assimilation of the popevki, and the skill of the musician rested on the recognition of standard melodic patterns. With the arrival of the priznaki and pomety, however, the notation lent more importance to the singer's sense of musical scale. Related to this is the usage of the gorovoskhodny kholm ("the ascending knoll") which eventually became a common feature of the azbuka, often as a preface to the main body of the treatise (plate 4). Like similar representations in the West, the kholm taught the singer to sing up and down the rungs of "the knoll" using a method of basic solmization. After the schism in the late seventeenth century, the neumes incorporating the diastematic additions survived in the practice of the Old Believers. Their usage is backed by the standard kholm of the modern azbuka.

During the nineteenth and, especially, the early twentieth centuries there was a notable increase in publications on the Old Believer tradition. Evidently, the Old Believers themselves had come to appreciate the growing interest in their music for, on occasion, they cooperated in research and even hailed the work of various authors. Understandably, Smolensky was particularly regarded as the harbinger of a long-awaited thaw. Shortly before the latter's edition of Mezenets, the full repertoire of chant, the Krug in the notation of the Old Believers, was published by the Synodal Press. As some thought at the time, this signalled the completion of a task long overdue—one which was supposedly initiated by Bortniansky, who was reputed to have become a private devotee of the old chant in his later years. In fact, it is now known, the story of Bortniansky's "conversion" is apocryphal, and he was not the initiator of the project. Apparently, behind the publication were the interests of the Old Believers who saw the mounting concerns of scholars as an opportunity to obtain official recognition for their art. As we read in the preface, despite the collaboration of imperial organs and the editorship of Razumovsky—himself a member of the Russian Orthodox clergy—the funds for the project as well as the original hand-written copy of the music were supplied by the Old Believer community. By the time of the Revolution, several chant books complementing the Krug emerged from the independent Old Believer presses in Kiev and Moscow , some of them in the well-known edition entitled Znamennoe penie [Znamenny singing]. Among the latter were the znamenny and demestvenny grammars of L. Kalashnikov, two good specimens of the Old Believer treatises from the turn of the century. These, however, were not intended for the scientific community, and to teach the neumes they used only the traditional razvody without transcriptions into modern notation. Fortunately, this problem was offset by other publications.

Two of the best introductions to the chant to appear at this time were clearly the Azbuka and Osmoglasie by Metallov. In accordance with traditional theory, Metallov approached the music through a study of the popevki, litsa, andfity. Perhaps more than any of his predecessors, he had come to see that a knowledge of the notation was essential but insufficient— that the pomety and priznaki make transcriptions of the old melodies possible but give only limited insight into other important realms. A mastery of the chant, he realized, still depended on a basic versatility with the stock of conventional melodic phrases and motifs in each of the eight liturgical modes. Metallov especially stressed this in the supplement to his Azbuka, the Osmoglasie. Here he provided what is in actuality a combined kokiznik andfitnik, with an extensive list of melodic formulas from the various hymns. Compared with Razumovsky's count of 215, Metallov gathered 283 examples, all of which he conveniently wrote in the square notation. In the edition he explains his method by spurning the use of unrelated theory: "... the eight modes of the znamenny chant," he says, "must be studied not according to a foggy, distant, and for us, extinct system of the ancient modes, but through the live and typical melodic examples of each mode, through the popevki, according to the traditional practice of the singer and the grammars of the neumatic notation." Thus, Metallov's approach was both accurate and realistic. While preserving the fundamentals of the old system, it made allowance for the uninitiated beginner whose greatest handicap was a basic inexperience with the sound of the singing. By side-stepping the difficult issues of notation in the Osmoglasie, he moreover showed that, for the novice, the Synodal redaction is a perfectly valid place to start. Against the background of the developing research, the Azbuka and Osmoglasie by Metallov are important achievements. In these treatises, the fruits of a new historical and theoretical awareness were admirably translated in an accessible, appropriate, and enduring format. Later, Metallov also revealed his extraordinary abilities as paleographer.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the focus of attention increasingly turned to the earliest history of the chant." Overshadowed by the abundance of material appearing after the fourteenth century, the manuscripts of the pre-Mongol period are comparatively few in number, primitive in appearance and, most importantly, closed to transcription. Although the earlier writers such as Undolsky and Razumovsky had given tentative appraisals of these remote sources, they did little to further an understanding of their history. At the end of the century, as a result, some basic assumptions concerning the Byzantine-Greek origins of the Russian chant remained unexamined. What is more, prevailing ignorance of counterpart Greek manuscripts obstructed the view and even served to lead astray such a figure as Smolensky. In 1901 Smolensky made his notorious conclusions denying the Greek derivation of the Slavic neumes. The evidence, he thought, suggested the contrary—the adoption of Slavic notation by the early Greeks!

In 1908, however, Preobrazhensky published his path-finding essay showing the existence of irrefutable parallels between the Byzantine and Slavic usages. Against the claims advanced by Smolensky he suggested that, although the earliest Slavic notation cannot be transcribed—and it is possible that we will never know its sounds—a comparison of the Greek and Slavic sources shows the occasional use of similar, and in places, identical melodies. Graphic analysis, Preobrazhensky contended, bears this out conclusively and moreover leads to another telling correlation: the use of similar musical signs is apparently related to a closeness in the poetic structure of the Greek and Slavic hymns. This phenomenon in particular seemed to substantiate the Slavic determination to preserve the original Byzantine melodies, a principle which Preobrazhensky believed was deep in the Russian chant tradition and to which he even attributed some of the later curiosities of the music such as the khomovoe singing of the Old Believers. In the end, Preobrazhensky asserted that the notation we find is unquestionably of Greek origin and was "completely taken over and assimilated by the Slavic singers." As the author himself noted, it was during an expedition to Mount Athos and Constantinople that he was able to consult the necessary materials. His next and final article on these findings did not appear until almost a decade after the Revolution.

Two books by Metallov represent other milestones in this research. Both published in 1912, the Simiografiia and Bogosluzhebnoie penie were lasting contributions involving comprehensive studies of the earliest Slavic sources. The breadth of insight exhibited by these publications dwarfed previous pioneering efforts, and if scholars had already surveyed some of the materials, Metallov now showed a masterful command of manuscripts in most of the important archives. In broad terms, he established a useful periodization of the manuscripts and examined the tenth to the twelfth centuries as the formative stage in the znamenny singing. As he put it, the music from the centuries after the Mongolian invasions was "the result of the development... of the essential beginnings and elements, the character and organization of the church singing from the pre-Mongol period." Both books by Metallov are still the only ones of their kind, and to the student without simple access to the archives they are of immeasurable importance. If one can learn to account for the new post- revolutionary locations of the documents, the Simiografiia, a set of reproductions from the early manuscripts, forms a particularly welcome complement to Smolensky's earlier publication.

By the time of the Revolution, more than a century had elapsed since the first efforts on behalf of the Russian chant, and it seems only fitting that in those years the writers should have turned to surveying the many achievements of the field. We could cite a number of works, all of which gave special acknowledgment to what had already been done. While the publications are useful for a conspectus of the research, they are also important in another way: they stand at the threshold of fundamental changes. The most conspicuous of the coming changes was to be the dissociation of interests from ecclesiastical concerns. If the earlier work had been essentially motivated by reform, in the future, practical aims related to the Church would no longer be expressed. One of the last exceptions was Preobrazhensky, who in 1924 acclaimed the recent stylistic turn—especially in the works of Kastalsky and compositions such as Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil op. 37—as an important event in the history of Russian sacred music. With the disappearance of the old objectives, a pervasive nationalism occupied the foreground and became the hallmark of post-revolutionary endeavors. New scholarship evaluated the music through the eyes of secular, cultural history, an approach which is already evident in the first large text from the Soviet period by Nikolai Findeizen (1868-1928).

After the Revolution, Metallov not only reviewed the past but suggested aims for the future. Specifically, he wrote about intensifying research on the oldest sources and pleaded for new efforts in the area of facsimile publication. The closing passage from his essay of 1924 is of interest both for the conviction with which it speaks and for the mood which it conveys. Metallov was never to publish again.

To make known the most important manuscript materials of the Greek and Russian church music—at least in the neumes, and, - if possible, partly in [modern] notation—is of paramount importance to those interested in this branch of music not only because the time is ripe to size up what these sacred materials and their wealth have to tell us in the context of contemporary musical needs, but also, because these precious materials are subject to the annihilating forces of time, to random destruction, to catastrophic cataclysms and to other dangers; [they] might become inaccessible to Russian music and to the coming generations, which would be an irreparable cultural loss. The present time of increased mobilization of all the working forces of the nation and the people, of both the material and spiritual riches, this is our time, which is especially beneficial for the aforestated goals.

By the mid-twenties, Metallov and Preobrazhensky stood as the last among the eminent pre-revolutionary scholars. Eventually, with them vanished a certain generosity of approach. The work of these scholars had relied on unhampered experimentation; it advanced new methods without hesitation and, at the same time, with a certain assurance of results. It remains an open question why, over the years. Soviet research has consistently adopted narrower, more restricted interests, and why comparatively little has been done to continue along the path of renowned predecessors. Thus, for example, Metallov's ideas concerning publication have yet to materialize, and if it were not for a few volumes in the series of Danish Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, the status of research on the earliest repertoire, it is likely, would have remained unchanged for close to seventy years.

Overwhelming credit for contemporary work on the chant belongs to Maxim Brazhnikov (1902-1973). As a student of Preobrazhensky in the late twenties and a prolific writer, Brazhnikov symbolized a continuity between the old and the new research. However, in spite of his claims to broad involvement in all the historical periods and an apparent support of Preobrazhensky's interests, Brazhnikov has concentrated on the later sources beginning with the fifteenth century. As a whole, his research has had only marginal input into the problem of transcription, and the statistical methods which he advanced, unfortunately, have done little to uncover what has not already been known. Among his works, many of which remain unpublished, are included several discussions of archival methodology, transcriptions from the manuscripts, and significant findings on the problem of early Russian sacred polyphony. A history of the azbuka, by far his largest and most valuable contribution, originated in a doctoral dissertation of 1969; it gives a fine historical summary of the contents of the early theoretical sources. The most comprehensive recent account of the history of Russian chant is that of Nikolai Uspensky (b. 1900). In contrast to the long stream of monographs by Brazhnikov, this publication has placed the author in the forefront of Soviet musicology with a single, ingenious stroke. Uspensky gives a chronological survey from the earliest period through the crisis years in the seventeenth century. In doing so, the author has drawn on the important domestic and foreign research and has accompanied his discussion with abundant analyses of musical examples. Uspensky's work is unique in the Soviet literature and offers one of the best aesthetic assessments of the Russian chant to appear in recent years. In the final chapters of the book, the author gives an excellent introduction to the polyphonic art in Russia prior to the arrival of Western theory.

In the absence of a written legacy like that of the West, theory of the Russian chant involves a fundamentally restricted set of concerns. The main subject of technical discussion is the neumatic notation; the essential sources are the grammars and the practice of the Old Believers. Thus, if only for the unsolved questions of transcription, the study of the music faces substantial challenges. Some of these are self-evident. About half of the recorded history of the chant remains silent in the manuscripts, and only the extent to which scholarship is able to uncover the meaning of the neumes delimits what we can know about the repertoire.

From the outset, however, the problems were also of another sort. In the first place, paradoxically, the original challenge had come from the West, and it is probably of more than passing importance that Metropolitan Evgeny composed one of his essays at the request of Anton Friedrich Thibaut, a known advocate of the Cecilian reform movement. This had far-reaching ramifications. Modeled on the Western scholastic approach, the research willy-nilly set out to explain exactly that which for centuries had lacked discussion. The difficulty was not immediately perceptible; hence, the invocation of classical modal theory in the initial response. Secondly, the ideals which gave rise to research confronted scholars with the task of an aesthetic transformation in the Church. Ultimately, the aim was to bridge the deep gulf between two disparate practices. But what this actually implied, and how this was to come about, remained undecided. An intellectual understanding and appreciation of traditional ways was not enough, and because of this, it seems, some genuine interests remained largely by the wayside; others were utterly thwarted. Despite the recovery of historical awareness, in the churches the singing proved capable of change, but only of a limited kind, and it is perhaps indicative of certain misgivings in this regard that in 1904 Smolensky saw fit to acknowledge an important point: neither the old form of chant nor its notation had fallen into disuse through any sanctions of the Church. In other words, conceivably, the practice should be restored. But it is precisely on this crucial question that Living Tradition itself, of which the Church was the official guardian, stepped in with remarkable confidence. Although time had shown a basic failure to implement the facts of discovery, and an incurable distraction with polyphony barred the return to the austere unison of the chant, composers of sacred music increasingly looked to the old melodies for inspiration. And this, finally, was the lesson to be learned. As far as the actual practice was concerned, an intelligent compromise was the only way to go, and "suitability of expression" had to prevail over "purity" and "authenticity" as the underlying motive of new trends. Fortunately, most persons understood this. And in the Church, radical measures were not taken; nor were they necessary in view of the way things existed. The burst of creativity in religious composition just prior to the Revolution is probably the best indication that a path had already been found.

While the notation and facts surrounding it constitute the essential issues, it seems that to grasp the music we should look beyond the overt traces. Here would be the grounds for a more expanded theory treating the lively topics concerning not only the local species, but the early music of the Christian world at large. Apart from the history, the language, and the sacred texts, it is the liturgy that holds the clues to many facets of this repertory, and the liturgical environment is inseparable. The literature on the Russian chant and the history of its appearance above all show the distance of research from the tradition being examined, and if discussions have been prone to conceptual inadequacies, misunderstandings, and a lack of effective terminology, this is symptomatic of an existing tension between native "theory" and what was sought. The materials of the chant are vestiges of a culture founded on oral processes of transmission. To understand the chant and to look beyond the problems of the notation is, first of all, to penetrate the methods which sustained the music throughout the centuries. The results should then be brought to bear in light of similar discoveries with other chant types.