Russian Music Lecture

Heyo Cosmopolitan, welcome to my Russian Music Lecture!

Let’s start things simple here. I’ll be giving a brief history of Russian music following a timeline, and will be giving examples along with breaks to allow y’all to interact with the lecture!

Jumping straight into things. Let’s go!

Feel free to pause me whenever to ask qs, but as I’m following a little bit of a tight schedule, I may or may not respond.

I am going to post songs and have y’all listen to them for a few minutes and pause the lecture for you to listen to them (10 or so songs); feel free to discuss your thoughts on the songs in chat while yall are listening to them!
Before the 18th century, Russian music was dominated by folk and church music.
Secular music on a Western model began to be cultivated in the 1730s, when the Empress Anna Ivanovna imported an Italian opera troupe to entertain her court.
By the end of the 18th century, there was a small body of comic operas based on Russian librettos, some by native composers and others by foreign maestri di cappella (Italian: “choirmasters”).
The first Russian composer to gain international renown was Mikhail Glinka, an aristocrat who mastered his craft in Milan and Berlin. His patriotic A Life for the Tsar (1836) and his Pushkin-inspired Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842)
are the oldest Russian operas that remain in the standard repertoire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NGdkEvLmBk, A life for the Tsar
By the second half of the 19th century, an active musical life was in place, thanks mainly to the efforts of the composer and piano virtuoso Anton Rubinstein,
who with royal patronage founded in St. Petersburg Russia’s first regular professional orchestra (1859) and conservatory of music (1862).
 Both became models that were quickly imitated in other urban centres. The first major full-time professional composer in Russia was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, a member of the initial graduating class of Rubinstein’s conservatory.
Tchaikovsky’s powerful compositions (e.g., Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty) are still performed widely today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjDYW46PjA8, swan lake excerpt
Other composers of Tchaikovsky’s generation were self-taught and usually earned their living in nonmusical occupations. They include Mussorgsky, who worked in the civil service, Aleksandr Borodin, also famous in his day as a chemist, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, who eventually gave up a naval career to become a professor at the St. Petersburg conservatory.
The self-taught composers tended to effect a more self-consciously nationalistic style than Tchaikovsky, and among their most important works were operas such as
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (final version first performed 1874) and Borodin’s Prince Igor (first perf. 1890), along with Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphony Scheherazade (first perf. 1888).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obPucSY6sig, Scheherazade excerpt
Three major Russian composers emerged in the early 20th century: Aleksandr Scriabin, Sergey Rachmaninoff, and Igor Stravinsky.
Scriabin, a piano virtuoso, infused his music with mysticism and evolved a modernistic idiom through which he created a musical counterpart to the Symbolist literature of the period.
Rachmaninoff, also a major pianist, is best known for his concerti and for his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1954) for piano and orchestra.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E7XHOotTX0, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Stravinsky, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, was catapulted to early fame through his association with Serge Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes he composed a trio of sensational works that received their premieres in Paris: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KOZzoSXrts, Petrushka
Both Stravinsky (in 1914) and Rachmaninoff (in 1917) emigrated from Russia, first to western Europe and then to the United States, though Stravinsky made several returns to Russia toward the end of his career.
Soviet music was dominated by Sergey Prokofiev, who returned in the mid-1930s from his postrevolutionary emigration, and Dmitry Shostakovich, who spent his entire career in Soviet Russia.
While living abroad Prokofiev was a modernist like Stravinsky, but he eventually adopted a more conservative, accessible idiom in conformity with Soviet expectations.
Prokofiev’s most ambitious early work was the opera The Fiery Angel (radio premiere 1954), after a Symbolist novel by Valery Bryusov. The crowning works of his Soviet period were the ballet Romeo and Juliet (1935–36), the cantata Aleksandr Nevsky (1939; adapted from the music that he had written for Sergey Eisenstein’s film of the same name),
and the operatic interpretation (1942) of Tolstoy’s classic novel War and Peace.
Shostakovich is best known as a prolific composer of instrumental music, with 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets to his credit.
His promising career as a stage composer was cut short when, in 1936, his very successful opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, after a novella by Nikolay Leskov, was denounced in Pravda (“Truth”), the official publication of the Communist Party, and banned (not to be performed again until the 1960s).
He and many other Russian artists also suffered repression in the Zhdanovshchina period (1946–53), during which Soviet authorities attempted to exert greater control over art.

The best-known composers of the late- and post-Soviet period include Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Alfred Schnittke. In the early 1990s Gubaidulina and Schnittke moved to Germany, where they joined other Russian émigrés.
Soviet conservatories have turned out generations of world-renowned soloists. Among the best known are violinists David Oistrakh and Gidon Kremer, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, pianists Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels,
and vocalist Galina Vishnevskaya. From the mid-1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform policies eased restrictions on Soviet artists,
many of Russia’s émigrés, such as Rostropovich and pianist Vladimir Horowitz, made triumphant returns.
Popular music also produced a number of renowned figures, not all of whom enjoyed official sanction.
Particularly notable is the legacy of two “balladeers”—songwriters who performed their own works to guitar accompaniment. The raspy-voiced actor and musician Vladimir Vysotsky, whose songs circulated on thousands of bootleg cassettes throughout the 1960s and ’70s, was perhaps the best-known performer in the Soviet Union until his death in 1980.
Georgian Bulat Okudzhava had an almost equally loyal following. Jazz flourished with the sanction of Soviet authorities and evolved into one of the country’s most popular musical forms.
The Ganelin Trio, perhaps Russia’s most famous jazz ensemble, toured Western countries throughout the 1980s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6kOpdtwSzY, ganelin trio
The pop singer Alla Pugacheva also drew large audiences in the 1970s. Until the 1970s, rock musicians in Russia were content to reproduce not only the styles but the songs of British and American models;
however, by the early 1980s Russian rock had found its native voice in the band Akvarium (“Aquarium”), led by song writer and vocalist Boris Grebenshikov.
The band’s “concerts,” played in living rooms and dormitories, were often broken up by the police, and, like Vysotsky, the band circulated its illegal music on bootleg cassettes, becoming the legendary catalyst of an underground counterculture
and an inspiration to other notable bands, such as Kino. Both rock and pop music continued to flourish in post-Soviet Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g--RqE1zKwc, Kino - Pack of Cigarettes
Now onto the fun stuff!
Hardbass. What is it?
Personally I love hardbass.
Hardbass developed somewhere in the 2000s in Russian poor areas and rapidly grew throughout Russia.
Hardbass began to really develop in Russia, precisely in St. Petersburg, with pioneers like DJ Snat, Sonic Mine and X Project.
After few years, it began to spread via VKontakte, Russians version of Facebook, and by 2010, various artists and videos of hardbass began to sprout all over Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and eventually the US, where it became a meme and a common example of Russian gopnik life (which is true).
Hardbass is a cultural icon as much as it is a genre; many Slav countries have adopted it, and it has been stereotypical of lower-class/layman people’s entertainment.
Modern hardbass artists you’ll find are DJ Blyatman, XS Project, and Hard Bass School.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqruIdPfF4g, - Pachustvye sebya zrosli: Consider yourself an Adult
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnTW6fZz-1E a little of a meme
Now onto Ruski Rap!
With the first attempts to adapt the genre to the Russian audience in the late ’80s, it truly flourished in the 1990s. The country was suddenly flooded with all kinds of foreign goods: from jeans and fake sportswear to advertising, music, TV and magazines.
The emergence of the rap scene was at the epicenter of this cultural explosion. After all, rap embodies everything which was forbidden in the Soviet Union.
Back then, a lot of the aesthetic was borrowed from the West, and it took decades to shake off American visual tropes. Yet in their awkward bandanas and huge jeans, ’90s rappers were a trusted voice for the first post-Soviet generation.
Russian Hip Hop and Rap kept on evolving to what it is now!
Some examples are:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV7xNtLD1wM, Oxxxymiron, a rapper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naY0uuEs9os, Another rapper, Scriptionite
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbqVh6iUFS4, FACE, another rapper
Gonna throw in a bit on Russian modern pop, which evolved rapidly post-soviet era. Some of my favorite artists are Tima Belorusskih, MiyaGi, Zivert, and Polina Gagarina, who all are extremely popular today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fzrhq0CGOw, Sharik, by Zivert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn0XeYg0hIs , Personally my favorite musician, TIma Belorussikh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wn1qWfEovM, Marlboro by MiyaGi
Now I don’t really know Ruski metal very well and I forgot to write up some things about it last night, so I asked Szron for some Russian metal songs and boom
https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/%D0%90%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F/272
https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/%D0%90%D1%80%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0/26171
https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/%D0%90%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B8%D0%B4/42770
Anyways, That’s it! Thanks for coming to my Russian music lecture; Hope you learned something, and found a song or two that you liked!