Nine Talks on Russian Non-Classical Music

By Борис Гречин

I am sorry to feel that the book’s title promises less than the book is able to give to its reader. True enough, on the following pages Dr Grechin comes to talk about Russian pop music, Russian bard movement, Soviet war songs, Soviet songs for children, Soviet female artists, Russian romance, or Russian rock music—subjects which fail to give me any thrill. (I suppose the same might be said about any Western reader.) It is not the subject of his lectures, though, that makes his book valuable.
Dr Grechin begins to talk about any of his songs (that, let us admit it frankly, are interesting only for a limited number of music lovers)—and he ends up talking about Dead Poets Society (a 1989 American drama film), Arthur Miller, J. B. Priestley, George Orwell, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Butler Yeats, Matthew Arnold, Jean Paul Sartre, Karl Marx, a succession of Russian tsars, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Virgil, and Jesus Christ meeting St Andrew. A remarkable number of names and cultural phenomena are mentioned; a variety of ‘general, very general’ questions, educational, aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and religious, are given full attention. On this occasion, allow me to quote from Dr Grechin’s ‘Lesson Five.’
'I recognise that I am notoriously known for my lectures being somewhat "too general." You may suspect that, should I ever deliver a lecture about children’s songs, I most likely would start with such questions as: what are children? How do they differ from adults? How is a child to be educated? I am about to prove your suspicions right and to do precisely that.'
It is not only children, though: it is children’s premature sexualisation, rights of sexual minorities, ‘toxic’ masculinity, ‘patriarchal dominance’ of white cisgender males, the would-be exceptionalism of the snowflake generation—in short, all liberal dogmas of the brave new world of today that Dr Grechin touches upon and whose validity he bravely questions on the pages that follow. At times, Dr Grechin ceases to be an academician and begins to sound as a preacher: I almost can hear the voice of his (and my) teacher in what he says about men and women being different in terms of their spiritual tasks; I think, too, that Rinpoche-la would wholeheartedly embrace everything said by his disciple about ‘Christianity Lite,’ ‘Buddhism Lite,’ and other such spiritual surrogates. In plain words, it is a very good book.

(c) Ludwig Roemer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Борис Гречин
• Release date: Oct 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005794828

Борис Гречин

Борис Сергеевич Гречин, 1981 г. р. Канд. пед. наук. Работал в Карабихской сельской школе Ярославского муниципального района, Ярославском педагогическом колледже, старшим преподавателем в Ярославском госпедуниверситете, заведующим муниципальным детским садом No 30 Ярославля. В настоящее время переводчик. Председатель и служитель МРО "Буддийская община "Сангъе Чхо Линг"" г. Ярославля (ОГРН 1147600000283). Публикации: литературно-художественный журнал "Мера", изд-во Altaspera Publishing.Написать автору можно по адресу [e-mail]

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Nine Talks on Russian Non-Classical Music

by Boris Grechin

Preface by Ludwig Roemer

***

Published by Smashwords, Inc.

Copyright © 2020 by Boris Grechin

Text © 2020 by Boris Grechin

Preface © 2020 by Ludwig Roemer

The cover shows an illustration by Sophie Chechine. Used by permission.

ISBN: 9781005794828

Imprint: Smashwords.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without prior permission from the author.

***

EDITOR’ PREFACE

Mr Boris Grechin is a good friend of mine. (Dr Boris Grechin, I probably should say: in 2008, he was awarded his ‘Candidate of Sciences,’ Kandidat Nauk degree which is a Russian equivalent of PhD in the Anglo-Saxon world.) I still remember his long stay in Germany in 2002 when we both happened to sit close to each other in the old meditation hall of Je Tsongkapay Ling Buddhist College receiving teaching from our much esteemed master, then still alive. So many things have changed over these years…

Somehow, my image of Dr Grechin as a young man in his early twenties has always prevented me from seeing that he has grown, firstly, into a mature meditation instructor who now runs a Buddhist center in Yaroslavl, Russia, and, secondly, into a brilliant lecturer who has a full-time occupation as a teacher at a college of arts in the same Russian city.

I had an opportunity to discover his talents of a lecturer last year when I met Dr Grechin and his charming wife in Canterbury (we enjoyed two days in each other’s company). During our conversations—I wish I could record them—a lot of very interesting subjects were touched upon.

It resulted in my inviting Dr Grechin to deliver a series of lectures on Asian Art for a group of our students in the spring of 2020.

Shortly after, the Academic Board of the college decided to remove Asian Art from our missionary programme for good. Faced with an opportunity either to cancel my invitation (a bad thing to do) or to find a way out, I then suggested that Dr Grechin would give a series of academic talks to a small group of enthusiastic students on any subject he personally felt inspired by.

The coronavirus pandemic has cancelled those plans, but we were able to finally organise a series of his lectures on Russian non-classical music via Zoom in May and June 2020. This is how this book appeared.

* * *

I am sorry to feel that the book’s title promises less than the book is able to give to its reader. True enough, on the following pages Dr Grechin comes to talk about Russian pop music, Russian bard movement, Soviet war songs, Soviet songs for children, Soviet female artists, Russian romance, or Russian rock music—subjects which fail to give me any thrill. (I suppose the same might be said about any Western reader.) It is not the subject of his lectures, though, that makes his book valuable.

Dr Grechin begins to talk about any of his songs (that, let us admit it frankly, are interesting only for a limited number of music lovers)—and he ends up talking about Dead Poets Society (a 1989 American drama film), Arthur Miller, J. B. Priestley, George Orwell, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Butler Yeats, Matthew Arnold, Jean Paul Sartre, Karl Marx, a succession of Russian tsars, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Virgil, and Jesus Christ meeting St Andrew. A remarkable number of names and cultural phenomena are mentioned; a variety of ‘general, very general’ questions, educational, aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and religious, are given full attention. On this occasion, allow me to quote from Dr Grechin’s ‘Lesson Five.’

I recognise that I am notoriously known for my lectures being somewhat ‘too general.’ You may suspect that, should I ever deliver a lecture about children’s songs, I most likely would start with such questions as: what are children? How do they differ from adults? How is a child to be educated? I am about to prove your suspicions right and to do precisely that.

It is not only children, though: it is children’s premature sexualisation, rights of sexual minorities, ‘toxic’ masculinity, ‘patriarchal dominance’ of white cisgender males, the would-be exceptionalism of the snowflake generation—in short, all liberal dogmas of the brave new world of today that Dr Grechin touches upon and whose validity he bravely questions on the pages that follow. At times, Dr Grechin ceases to be an academician and begins to sound as a preacher: I almost can hear the voice of his (and my) teacher in what he says about men and women being different in terms of their spiritual tasks; I think, too, that Rinpoche-la would wholeheartedly embrace everything said by his disciple about ‘Christianity Lite,’ ‘Buddhism Lite,’ and other such spiritual surrogates. In plain words, it is a very good book.

I must say that I do not subscribe to all of Dr Grechin’s ideas and values. Being a Buddhist, I feel very uncomfortable each time when he (a Buddhist, too, and a true disciple of our deceased teacher, no jokes about that) uses such phrases and expressions as ‘faithful to the Christian principles we [Russians] must be guided by as a nation.’ (Were such phrases intended to be sarcastic? Were they spoken in perfect earnest? Does or doesn’t he, a Buddhist, see himself as a member of his own nation?) I do not know what to do about them. At the same time, I do not think that I am in a position to give any moral assessment to the author's ideas. For the time being, it is worth noting that Nine Talks on Russian Non-Classical Music is a highly recommendable reading. The book poses questions rather than provides us with answers, but we still have to remember that—to quote its author once again—‘good questions are not less valuable than good answers.’

Ludwig Roemer

LESSON ONE. INTRODUCTION. RUSSIAN POP-MUSIC. ‘A VIOLIN THAT RESEMBLES A FOX’

Dear young ladies, dear young gentlemen, dear other, I am very happy to see you. My name is Boris Grechin. I am your visiting professor for THE RUSSIAN NON-CLASSICAL MUSIC OF THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY. I will give you nine lectures, each followed by a group discussion. My choice of the songs we will be talking about will be explained somewhat later; for now, you can rest assured that all of the songs we shall deal with definitely deserve your attention.

I am still hesitant about your assessment: I believe the course will result in a test. This is an optional course, though; it is therefore highly likely that you will just have an (oral?) fail or pass exam, or given no assessment at all. Your activity in our discussions may be taken into account in your final assessment. All these issues are still to be cleared. I promise to clear them as soon as possible and to give you more precise information next time.

This opening lecture is devoted to Igor Sarukhanov, a Russian rock- and pop-musician, composer, and artist of Armenian descent, born in 1956. We shall begin with some core terms, though: with defining these terms or, rather, with un-defining them; I mean, with questioning their validity in the context of our course.

The fact that ‘anything,’ any cultural or pseudo-cultural phenomenon—including obscenities even—is worth an academic discussion, has now become general knowledge. (I will avoid songs containing obscenities as conscientiously as I can; sorry about those of you who were anticipating them.) To put it in simpler terms, if coprophagy can be defined academically or even given a series of lectures about, so of course can pop culture. Anyone who teaches arts and humanities has to plainly accept the fact that the academic knowledge of today progressively detaches itself from any moral responsibility for what it describes. Speculations on why it is happening would lead us far beyond our subject, so let us probably drop them altogether.

All this having been said, it still remains unclear how far we can rely on those very terms—‘folk music,’ ‘rock music,’ ‘pop music,’ ‘bard music,’ ‘military music,’ or even ‘symphonic music’—when talking about the Russian music of the late twentieth century. On the one hand, most of the Russian songs that we shall look into can be categorised in those terms. It is more or less obvious, for instance, that, whereas describing Victor Tsoi as a successful rock star of the 90es, we would hardly apply this definition to, say, Valery Obodzinsky. (Victor Tsoi was more than just that, to note in parenthesis: over the years after his death, his figure has acquired a sort of cult status.) And yet, there is a certain line up to which all those terms, when applied to the Russian music of the period, are still workable. Beyond this line, these definitions become bereft of any practical sense: they simply ‘fall into water’ of fruitless terminological speculations and drown there.

Let me give you three examples. Here is Nikolay Rastorguyev, performing a romance song, or just a ‘romance’—I am positive that you are familiar with the term. The Oxford Dictionary of Music states that a romance ‘generally … implies a specially personal or tender quality.’ The romance in question is, indeed, a delicate love song with a gentle melody, its text being a fine specimen of the Russian poetry of the early twentieth century and written by Nikolay Gumilyov, an influential Russian poet, literary critic, and traveller who was arrested and executed by the secret Soviet police in 1921. And yet, Nikolay Rastorguyev is very far from being a typical romance singer. He is, in fact, the frontman of LYUBE, a well-known Russian rock band. I would further say that LYUBE is a PATRIOTIC rock band, and that it also is Vladimir Putin’s favourite musical collective, to make it even more complicated. All things considered, do we deal with a romance or a rock song in this particular case?

Here is ‘In a Frontline Forest,’ a very exemplary Soviet military song of WWII, ‘official propagandistic crap,’ as some of you would perhaps want to define it. (Spoiler: it is not.) Will you now admit that it in no way resembles a military march? The song is said to be very popular among common Soviet soldiers who also composed its alternative lyrics, thus creating a folk song in the truest sense of this definition. So which one of the two categories, being ‘military songs’ and ‘folk songs,’ does ‘In a Frontline Forest’ fall into?

And now, here is the State Orchestra of Byelorussia/Belarus, performing the symphonic version