Russian resolve

Over the years I have met some unusual obstacles to my self-appointed task of spreading interest in unaccompanied singing around the globe. The main one is that music without instruments doesn’t have any ‘musicians’ in it and therefore cannot be taken seriously. Another is that church music which is not by Bach falls into a different, less professional category from normal concert music and therefore cannot be taken seriously. But in Moscow last week I met a new problem: all the current professors at the Conservatoire who might be involved in teaching unaccompanied singing were trained in the Soviet period, when the only acceptable music in this genre was patriotic songs. The current students clearly want to move on from this tradition but there are few people to show them how. It became apparent that ‘Lenin vsegda s toboy’ (Lenin is always with you) and ‘Shiroka strana moya rodnaya’ (My spacious homeland) were not ideal preparations for singing Byrd and Gibbons, but at least these songs had created a thirst for something else.