History of Music in Russia from Antiquity to 1800, Vol. 2 (Russian Music Studies)

This work is a complete translation of Nikolai Findeizen's Ocherki po istorii muzyki v Rossii, a pathbreaking two-volume opus which, in its scope and command of primary sources, and in its curiosity and generosity of scholarly inquiry, has remained a cornerstone for all subsequent studies of Russian music. Researched and written over a forty-year period dating back to tsarist times, Findeizen's Ocherki was published in 1928 and 1929 by the Soviet State Publishing House, close to the time of its author's death. Approaching the study of the origins and development of music in Russia within the context of Russian cultural and social history, Findeizen took as his major theme the divergence between the music of folk and public life and music connected with the court. Volume 1 details the development of musical culture in pre-Christian and Kievan Rus' and in Novgorod the Great; the activities of Russia's first folk musicians, the skomorokhi; the varieties and evolution of musical instruments, especially old Russian folk instruments; music in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Moscow; music in the monastery and in court life in the seventeenth century; and music and theater in the age of Peter the Great.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.