Talk:Russian folk music

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and includes many varieties of folk, popular and classical traditions. Ethnic music is especially associated with classical styles of ballet and opera, of which composers like Mikhail Glinka, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Igor Stravinsky and the members of The Mighty Handful are among the most well-known. Late in the 19th century, elements of Russian folk music (such as the balalaika) began to be used in orchestras, beginning with a Russian folk instrument orchestra led by Vasily Andreyev.

In the 20th century, operatic singers like Fyodor Shalyapin were popular in the first few decades. During the Soviet era, music in the USSR was tightly restricted. Singing ethnomusicologists like Vyacheslav Shchurov gained some renown, as did bards like Vladimir Vysotsky and rock bands like Pojuschie Gitary.

Among the most popular singers of Russian folk music in the modern era are Nadezhda Kadysheva, Zhanna Bichevskaya and the rock-oriented Boris Grebenshchikov, leader of Aquarium (who went through a folk-music phase in the early 1990s).

Bandurist 16:52, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

With 'restricted' you may mean censored? We have lots of Melodia Records from the sixties in particular. It appeared to us, in the West, that they really honoured their folk heritage, but of course, there was only one recording company which meant restrictions. We have made Russian music for decades, in Europe and Australia and in music circles, 'Russian Music' means from all areas of the former Tsarist Empire, except Poland and the Baltic States perhaps, but comprising all peoples, Jews, Gypsies, Armenians etc. and Ukrainians, too, as long as you do not have to aquire or learn bandura. Very sorry, but it would take too long to learn and then be restrictive. The field of Ethnic Russian Music is a very large one, and finding a structure that would do justice to the topic and not tread on national sensitivities (particularly with Ukrainians), is a difficult task. 121.209.49.30 (talk) 08:37, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

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Early History
I'm a relative novice in this subject, but it's clear to me that there's been a lot of recent (and even not so recent) research into Russian folk music pre-dating the late-19th century which the first main sub-section, 'Ethnic styles', barely hints at. A lot more could be said about early collections of folk music and how they distorted the source by only presenting folksongs as single melodic lines (whereas folk singing was almost invariably by a group of singers singing in several parts, partly heterophonic and to some degree polyphonic); and the use of sound recording in the very late 19th and early 20th centuries to analyse and understand what music was actually being sung by peasant singers. I may try to start expanding this section accordingly, but hope more knowledgeable experts may follow. Alfietucker (talk) 21:46, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I have a list of a number of academic articles about the subject that can be accessed through JSTOR. I'll try to help out soon. Esn (talk) 08:53, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Balalaika in 17th century?
The instrumental section currently reads: "In 1648 Tsar Alexis I of Russia under the influence of then-prevalent views in the Russian Orthodox Church banned the use of all musical instruments. At that time it was stated that instruments were from the devil. Not easily verifyable today, but some historians also believe that travelling minstrels singing disrespectful songs about the Tsar to balalaika accompaniment, could have been the real reason."

According to the balalaika article, the instrument was only invented in the 18th-19th centuries, so this seems dubious. Who are these historians? Esn (talk) 08:53, 2 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Andreyev standardized the balalaika sizes, basses, alto, prima etc. Before that the peasants built their own in their places far away from towns and communications. They could also not read so they built what pleased them. Important is that the balalaika is made of straight pieces of timber. They had no possibilities to shape timber pieces. After the Andreyev orchestra's appearance 1889 in Paris for the Expo, the sound was all the rage but the orchestra still went bankrupt. It then became the Imperial Orchestra. The church allowed only the voice. Travelling minstrels who criticized the rulers are very easily imagined, also that they were taken in by the authorities. We have a book with pics of hundreds of home made old balalaikas which are small for travelling.

When you play a song on the balalaikas (at least 3) it sounds like Russian Folk, even though it may be a salon composition. The categories became blurred because people who could play that music usually ended up as restaurant musicians and the Russian restaurant repertoire contains it all, movie themes, old waltzes, Yiddish, Moldavian and Gypsy music, fake or real. Keep the customers in the restaurant with pleasant music- that was the brief and everybody thought this was all a folk tune. Check out "Smuglyanka Moldavanka" and you'd be convinced that was a folk tune when in fact it was written in 1940. Check the flashmob version on y-tube. Red Army version is a bit stiff.

"In the 1960s, folk music in Russia continued to receive significant state support and was often seen as the antithesis of Western pop music." New microphone and recording techniques made it possible to record the softer folk string instruments, not only for Russian but for Balcan, and Latin American music as well. That was mainly responsible for the 'fashion' of folk music.Then came the movie Dr. Zhivago and suddenly people were interested.

I have spent most of my life in the shadow or maybe halo of Russian balalaika music. Russian music, folk or composed, is closer to classical music than other music and whoever leans to classical will probably prefer Russian, although the language is a barrier. In the main, Russian songs go somewhere, Irish seems to drift more which some people find boring. Ally Hauptmann-Gurski 2001:8003:AC60:1400:A09C:A504:9419:FB6E (talk) 06:57, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

"Fakelore"
I removed the following:
 * Fakeloric music includes music composed by city intelligentsia and professional composers in a folkloric manner. Some 60-80% of contemporary Russian folk music marketed to the West is not "authentic" and can be loosely labeled as Fakeloric.

Whatever happened to WP:CITE? Who came up with the "60-80%" figure? Whatever does this have to do with "marketing in the west"? The recording of "folk music" traditions is was started by the Romanticists in the 19th century. These conflated "authentic" and "fakeloric" stuff from day one. This happened all over Europe and the phenomenon is certainly not peculiar to Russia, let alone does it have anything to do with "marketing of Russian music in the west".

Take a thing like Stepan Razin's Dream. The lyrics was allegedly "collected" by "city intellectual" Alexandra Zheleznova-Armfelt in the 1890s. The woman was a composer and may or may not have either made up or "fixed" the melody herself. The lyrics as sung by Russian interprets today were written in the 1970s and are only loosely derived from the lyrics as printed by Armfelt. So what is this? "Fakelore"? "Authentic folklore"? "Folkloristic"? Who gets to make these categories and sort songs into them? I don't know, but the point here is WP:CITE.

I was going to link this article from Yuri Neledinski-Meletski because of Выйду-ль я на реченьку. Now this would be "fakelore", as it was composed by an imperial courtier, senator and cultured nobleman. But it also happens to predate Armfelt by a full century, and even as an imitation of 18th century Russian folklore, it is an early testimony of what such music would have sounded like at that time. This is more or less the best we have, as 18th-century Russian peasants didn't run around with mp3 recording devices. As for the pseudo-enlightened "marketing to the West", yeah right, I am sure all Russians can spot "fakelore" such as that by Neledinski-Meletski. That's why it is labelled "Русская народная песня" in practically every performance or edition you come across.

If you insist on reducing the notion of "authentic folklore" to ethnological field work with recording devices, you will lose close to 100% what is generally known as "folklore" because it will fall under "fakelore". But "folklore" isn't "ethnological field work recordings", "folklore" is exactly the interplay between folk tradition, Romanticist intellectuals, Romanticist composers and professional musical performers described above. --dab (𒁳) 09:03, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

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Requested move 13 November 2021

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: moved. Per Solidest's rationale and examples. (non-admin closure) VR talk 03:13, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Russian traditional music → Russian folk music – Per consistency with the other articles of the same content. Within the country context (or every other European country), traditional music and folk music are interchangeable terms, so the article should be named similarly to other similar articles on Wikipedia. Solidest (talk) 13:06, 13 November 2021 (UTC) — Relisting. Megan B....   It’s all coming to me till the end of time  17:07, 20 November 2021 (UTC)  — Relisting. VR talk 05:31, 1 December 2021 (UTC) The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Relister's comment: please give some evidence (eg examples of articles) for the consistency rationale.VR talk 05:32, 1 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Here is a close to complete list of such articles:
 * Ainu folk music
 * Alpine folk music
 * American folk music
 * Armenian folk music
 * Australian folk music
 * Azerbaijani folk music
 * Balkan folk music
 * Canadian folk music
 * Corsican folk music
 * Cuban folk music
 * English folk music
 * Folk music of Punjab
 * French folk music
 * Greek folk music
 * Hungarian folk music
 * Icelandic folk music
 * Indian folk music
 * Iranian folk music
 * Italian folk music
 * Lithuanian folk music
 * Moravian folk music
 * Mormon folk music
 * Nordic folk music
 * Occitan folk music
 * Pakistani folk music
 * Philippine folk music
 * Scottish folk music
 * Serbian folk music
 * Slovak folk music
 * Swedish folk music
 * Turkish folk music
 * Ukrainian folk music
 * Chinese traditional music [correct]
 * Danish traditional music
 * Irish traditional music
 * Persian traditional music [sort of correct, but considering that Iranian folk article exist separetely, it may be worth to rename it to 'Persian classical music']
 * Russian traditional music
 * Traditional Gaelic music
 * Traditional Japanese music [correct]
 * Traditional music in Kosovo
 * Traditional music of Galicia, Cantabria and Asturias
 * 'Traditional music' usually refers to concept where it is difficult to distinguish between traditional folk and art music (classical, studied or notated). This is more often the case with music of Turkic peoples and of Asian (West, South, Southeast, East) and Arab countries. In most of the other cases the division follows this pattern: . Talking about Western cultures in particular (Europe) - there these concepts are never mixed up or described as a single concept. Therefore Irish, Danish, Gaelic, Kosovo, "Galicia, Cantabria and Asturias" should also be renamed to folk (articles themselves refer to folk literally everywhere, without describing anything about the art music), but this is getting ahead of time though. Solidest (talk) 08:28, 1 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Traditional music of Galicia, Cantabria and Asturias
 * 'Traditional music' usually refers to concept where it is difficult to distinguish between traditional folk and art music (classical, studied or notated). This is more often the case with music of Turkic peoples and of Asian (West, South, Southeast, East) and Arab countries. In most of the other cases the division follows this pattern: . Talking about Western cultures in particular (Europe) - there these concepts are never mixed up or described as a single concept. Therefore Irish, Danish, Gaelic, Kosovo, "Galicia, Cantabria and Asturias" should also be renamed to folk (articles themselves refer to folk literally everywhere, without describing anything about the art music), but this is getting ahead of time though. Solidest (talk) 08:28, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

First line has peculiar error
What does: "which in Russia often blob folk melodies and folk elements or music of other ethnic groups living in Russia." mean? --213.31.16.52 (talk) 21:34, 9 April 2022 (UTC)