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Written in fRoots issue 341/342, 2011


MOSCOW CHORUS OF HORN PLAYERS & FOLK ENSEMBLE ULITSA
Russia – The Tradition Of Wind Instruments
Ocora Radio France C600025 (2011)

There’s a great deal more to the traditional music of European Russia than balalaikas, accordions and the Red Army Choir, but it’s not easily found in its native land and so far only sparsely represented on CD.
     For example, there are lots of interesting wind instruments – reeds, horns, pan-pipes and other flutes and whistles - and this release aims to display the sounds and melodies of those from the Vladimir, Kostroma and Yaroslavi oblasts to the north-east and east of Moscow, and Kursk to the south.
     The reeds consist of various forms of the zhaleyka, a single-reed pipe with a horn or birch-bark bell. The horns – rozhoks – represented are the soft-toned wooden, bark-wrapped shepherd’s trumpet with fingerholes, known as a Vladimirski rozhok, ranging from the near-metre-long bass to the vizgunok (squeaker). The travyanaya duda is an overtone flute made of the ribbed hollow stem of angelica or other big umbelliferous plant (but don’t try making one from the suitable-sized but horribly skin-poisonous giant cow-parsley).
     One of the most extraordinary sounds, perhaps more suggestive of Pygmy vocal hocketing than a European music, is of kukigly, panpipes. They’re played in groups, traditionally, as here, by women each holding from three to five stopped tubes, rhythmically interweaving her notes with those of the others and adding to the rhythm by short vocal whoops. (In neighbouring Lithuania a similar dismembered, distributed panpipe is called skuduciai, used for the playing of the hypnotic polyphonically overlapping Lithuanian sutartine melodies).
     These aren’t field or archive recordings. Mostly made by Russian public radio one day in May 2007, they’re of two ensembles led by Boris Efremov that reconstruct the old ways of playing nearly vanished from the villages, so are to a certain extent filtered by that process, but they’re very well played, making a fascinating listen and capturing the remarkableness of musics whose forms are very much dictated by the instruments they’re played on.
     If an instrument falls out of use, so does most of its music, and these instruments, their music, and the lives and stories of the players who’ve passed it down, are an essential dimension of European musical culture. Not something to file away on shelves and let die – there’s said to be a mass of archive recordings locked away in Moscow academia – but extraordinary stuff that gives a whole different viewpoint on Russian culture and could, should, be an inspiration for a whole lot of new music-making.
     Distributed by Harmonia Mundi. www.store.harmoniamundi.com


© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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