In no other country is the abyss between the official – such as folklore clichés broadcast through the media – and village musical traditions so great as it is in Russia. During the Soviet era folk music was used as a self-serving instrument by the political powers: music always had to praise the magnificence of the Soviet way of life. An official ‘folklore sound’ was imposed, a regime-friendly repertoire was sanctioned, a training network for ‘culture workers' created. Shielding oneself from these products on television and radio was impossible.
At the same time, the calendar songs and songs celebrating important life rituals (e.g. Christmas, Easter, or wedding songs) were not found in the official repertoire, as this music was associated with church and pagan customs. And of course, these old church and village customs were unwelcome remnants from the Tsarist era. Authentic music became ignored, and at best, was tolerated, which rescued and protected it from the homogenization process of the official sound, with its inherent censorship of text and style.
This musical material is probably the oldest that has been passed down from Russian folklore tradition: the songs that were sung upon special ritual occasions were always performed in a particular way – just as grandmothers and grandfathers had always sung them – generation after generation. When women sing their sowing and harvest songs, heaven and mother earth join in their bodies. They sing from earth to sky with feet stamping, with arms sweeping and swinging in the air, and use their very breath to raise up their voices to heaven. They celebrate and praise this coming together and invest their entire power in this, in order that peace and fertility are brought forth.
Our mission is to give further life to this musical tradition, insofar as this is possible in an urban context, and to present its depth and beauty to the wider public.
We sing songs from different regions of Russia. Our sources are archive recordings and our own field research. Our repertoire contains songs for different celebrations and rituals (Christmas and Easter, the end of spring, harvest songs, warding off thunder and lightning storms, and many more), wedding songs, love and dance songs, mourning songs and laments (such as army recruits’ songs), and spiritual songs.
Today it is only the babushkas (grandmothers/old women), who still know and sing these songs. That’s why you generally only hear old voices in most archival and field recordings, and can only imagine the beauty, strength and agility of their youth. However, at the time this music flourished it was mostly the younger singers who displayed the full strength of their vocal art.
Some other folklore ensembles imitate recordings of the babushkas with their voices. In comparison we use the technique and dialect of the babushkas, but each of us maintains our own vocal timbre. That’s why we sound like a young ensemble, maybe such as one of women who lived in a Russian village a hundred years ago.
We perform wearing traditional costumes from different regions of Russia, modeled on those found in museum collections and made with loving attention to detail.
We bring this wealth of Russian traditions onto the stage to offer our audiences a more complete picture, opening up to them previously unknown facets of Russia.
Ensemble Polynushka © 2004-2010
All rights reserved
Polina Proutskova:
Polina’s home spans many places: her native city St Petersburg; the Russian countryside where she travels in order to meet the old women—the tradition bearers—to learn their songs and document their culture; Berlin where her friends and like-minded musicians live; and London where she does her scientific research. Parallel to her studies in mathematics and linguistics, she trained and performed as a singer. She started her musical career with Mississippi delta village blues, and she sang jazz, funk, rock and reggae with various bands. Sephardic and Russian field recordings woke her interest in other, non-Western musical traditions.
Polina has been intensively involved with Russian folklore for many years. She has undertaken field research trips to various regions of Russia and researched in musical archives worldwide. She is proficient in the specific singing techniques and stylistics of Russian folklore, and shares knowledge and experience with Russian ethnologists and folklore ensembles.
In Berlin, aside from Polýnushka, she is active in ETO_X, mixing archaic Russian ritual songs with jazz, drum&bass and modern electronic music www.eto-x.de. With Deniza she sings the Musical Dialogue of Religions www.musikalischer-religionsdialog.de, in which she represents Sephardic and Russian folk traditions. Today Polina lives in London, where she is working on her PhD and on theoretical foundations of the new discipline of computational ethnomusicology.
Deniza Popova:
Deniza was born in Bulgaria and raised in northern Germany. Daughter of Bulgarian musicians, through her father, Ivan Popov, she learnt opera, and through her mother—artistic director of the Folklore Ensemble Rostock—was introduced to music from all over the world. Since 1989 she has lived in Berlin and studied music and singing at Hochschule für Musik ‘Hanns Eisler’ Berlin, and musicology, Bulgarian sciences, and ethnomusicology at the Humboldt and Free Universities. She is writing her dissertation on “The Authentic Bulgarian Musics”. She researches, sings and writes about Byzantine church music and its existence in the Orthodox Church, and also about Bulgarian folk music. (www.musikalischer-religionsdialog.de) Her role models are the many grandmothers, grandfathers and monks whom she met during her field research, along with the ethnologists and scholars, who through their work have made available archive material that today can rarely be found as “authentic music”. (www.forum440.de)
Dina Labinska:
Born and raised near Kiev, Dina studied music theory and music history at the Kiev State Music Academy, where, among other disciplines, folklore and ethnography were taught. Dina learnt many Ukrainian folk songs from her father, but she heard authentic village singing for the first time during her field trips as a student.
She was deeply impressed and influenced by her discovery of the other—the mythic—world that came to life in the songs and tales of village grandmothers. Along with her interest in old Slavic archaic culture, which became a part of her life, came recognition of her own belonging to this tradition and culture.
She wrote her diploma thesis on the basis of the field recordings which she made in northeast Ukraine. Her supervisor was Evgeniy Efremov, the founder of ‘Drevo’—the first ensemble of authentic village singing in Ukraine. After graduating Dina taught music in a school and worked for a radio broadcaster. She has lived in Germany since 2000.
