Female chamber vocal cycle of the 1960s–1970s and the “new folk wave”. Part 1. In search of intonational authenticity

Shkirtil' Lyudmila Vyacheslavovna Professor of Vocal Art, St. Petersburg Mussorgsky music college 191028, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Mokhovaya str., 36, of. Mokhovaya 36 serovyuri2013@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Serov Yurii Eduardovich Doctor of Art History Associate Professor; Piano Faculty; St. Petersburg State Conservatory named after N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov Mokhovaya 36, St.-Petersburg, Russia serov@nflowers.ru

The expression "new folklore wave" originated in Soviet musicology in the mid-1960s and at first caused quite a lot of controversy. What could be new in the folk art that seemed to be studied "inside and out"? What is not mastered or known in folklore? Over time, it became clear that a new powerful artistic direction had really entered the Russian musical tradition, there was a peculiar accumulation of outstanding compositions-samples striking with originality and brightness, new recording techniques, the authors' extremely conscientious attitude to the original materials collected in the conservatory folklore expeditions. It was the work of the young, and it made its way with enthusiasm and a fair amount of rebellion. R. Shchedrin, S. Slonimsky, E. Denisov, B. Tishchenko, V. Gavrilin are the heroes of our study, the leaders of the "new folklore wave", composers for whom folk melody and rhythm, a lively intonation environment, direct emotionality have become not only a kind of "counterweight" to sophisticated techniques, but the most important component of the author's language and even thinking, and sometimes the main pillar of artistic expression.

We emphasize that the same authors addressed the "new techniques" and the "new folklore" and the reason for the composer's radicalism lies on the surface: consciously, on a rational level or intuitively came to understand the inexhaustible depth of folklore resources and the fact that much has not yet entered the "auditory memory" of composers of past centuries. The collectors of the twentieth century have seriously expanded our knowledge of folk art, and "folklore itself, in constant updating and increment with each generation, gives modifications to old formations, or even forms new ones" ^{[1, p. 78]}. The polycentric musical world of the second half of the twentieth century finally removed the "auditory shutters" from the intonation storerooms of folk art. Those who were at the forefront of the renewal of Russian music boldly updated its folklore component. New music opened up new spiritual horizons, freeing them from the dictates of time and place. The craving for a deep knowledge of folk art turned out to be consonant with the desire for general cultural values in the broadest sense of this important concept.  

Our research is devoted to the "female" vocal cycle and it is noteworthy that the authors working with authentic Russian folk art relied on the female singing tradition, it was she who became the foundation of the entire "new folklore wave". R. Shchedrin, recalling his first "expeditions for folklore", described the post-war village with a writer's tenacity: "The women, who were rejuvenated, blackened by the winds and cold, ruled the matriarchy. From under their oil-soaked, greasy, sweat-stained body jackets, reeking of superphosphate and compound feed, every minute a splash of sex threatened to burst out and explode into hysteria. <...> Hoarsely, insistently, desperately, wistfully, they sang ditties. <...> All this has firmly settled in my memory, in my ears and eyes" ^{[2, pp. 66-67]}. Russian Russian composer V. Gavrilin, who in his "Russian Notebook" raised a singing, vociferous, wailing, dittering Russian woman on a pedestal of monopera, drama, tragedy, to a height that no one in Russian music has been able to achieve since the Leningrad author, in a slightly different perspective. Gavrilin told about his post—war childhood: "The crying of widows, their bitter inconsolable songs that I heard in the Vologda village, is always in me. And later, in the orphanage, I was also surrounded only by women, and most often by those who were harshly targeted by the war" ^{[3, p. 200]}. And one more memory, already about the conservatory folklore expedition: "As a student at the Leningrad Conservatory, I came to the Lodeynopolsky district of the Leningrad region. And there, in one of the remote villages, very elderly, much-experienced women, with overworked hands and gray heads, suddenly began to sing: "I'm sitting, playing the piano, / I played and sang about him." Although, probably, no one saw the piano from them. And then I realized that for them it was a symbol of a wonderful dream, as if plunging into a wonderful dream, into oblivion" ^{[4, p. 80]}.

Is it not in the state of post-war Soviet village society, in the absence of healthy young men and the rampant drunkenness of those who remained, the impoverishment of the village, hunger, cold and flight to the cities, that the secret of such an expressive feminine principle of the "new folklore wave" lies? The fervent ditties of Varvara from R. Shchedrin's opera "Not Only Love", the hoarse-cold songs of grandma Ulyana from the music to B. Tishchenko's "Northern Sketches" and his own dreary "Cold" by V. Tendryakov, the funeral sobs of E. Denisov's "Lamentations", the lamentations of a girl in S. Slonimsky's "Songs of the Free Woman", finally, a portrait Russian Russian women and a real collection of folk song genres in V. Gavrilin's "Russian Notebook": the "new folklore wave" has a "woman's face", overworked hands, stiff padded jackets, gray heads, widow's sufferings.        

According to the pioneer of a new attitude to Russian folklore, R. Shchedrin, composers absorbed folk music not from song collections and not from transcripts of folklorists: "I absorbed it in its natural clumsy form. Without makeup. Only such art captured me, enchanted me. Numerous fakes, retouching, combing caused only irritation and dislike" ^{[2, p. 70]}. Many of Shchedrin's works are literally permeated with folklore intonations. In "Poetoria" (1968) for a reader, a female voice, a symphony orchestra and a mixed choir based on poems by A. Voznesensky, the composer saturates the most complex orchestral and choral fabric with folk turns, authentic in their origins, and the solo part of the female voice was intended for performance by Lyudmila Zykina, with her deep and such "folk" timbre. In the song "Not White, white are the Snows" (opera "Dead Souls", 1976) Shchedrin masterfully combines dodecaphone technique with Russian folklore, achieving a striking and unexpected synthesis of seemingly incompatible compositional methods and styles.

Two concerts for Shchedrin's orchestra in the 1960s - "Naughty Ditties" (1963) and "Bells" (1968) — two different views on the Russian musical and sound tradition, two clear folklore formulas, two important sonorous signs of the revival of interest in folk art. "Naughty Ditties" is one of the first serious appeals in pure symphonism to such a vivid folk tradition, to a genre that has become, to some extent, the quintessence of self—expression of the Russian village. "The playing principle is here in everything: in the very type of concerto grosso (which received such a powerful stimulus for development in the twentieth century), in the relationship between the instruments of the orchestra and orchestral groups (roll calls, imitations, imitations — the verbal text of the chastushka is only implied, which means that expressive speech intonation becomes the most important component of instrumental intonation), in a bold vertical combination of folk, jazz and academic traditions, in a witty theatrical roll call of the orchestra, conductor and listeners, detailed in the score of the composition. Shchedrin masterfully finds the symphonic equivalent of a ditto or jazz improvisation, but the most modern and innovative thing here is their free mixing. Everything is subject to academic music, and the author demonstrates its power with youthful enthusiasm and fervor" ^{[5, pp. 38-39]}.

In the "Bells", which to a certain extent continue the tradition of the great opera scenes by M. Mussorgsky (first of all, the coronation scenes from Boris Godunov), the bell system acts as an absolutely self-sufficient musical "plot", as a kind of global artistic image. In the annotation to the concert, Shchedrin noted that the source of inspiration for him "was not only the ringing of bells as such, but also another area of Russian spiritual art — iconography, in particular, the works of Andrei Rublev. The appeal to the ancient Russian culture is due to the use of certain elements of non—linear writing, dating back to the znamenny chant - of course, these elements are interpreted very freely" ^[6]. As we can see, Russian folklore is considered by the composer in its widest range: spiritual tradition, historical parallels, synthesis of arts are no less important to the author than its intonation or genre-style components. 

Shchedrin did not compose chamber vocal cycles, but we can safely attribute one of his vocal works to the fundamental ones in the mighty stylistic flow of the "new folklore wave" and the author's favorite ditto also dominates here. We are talking about the composer's opera "Not only Love" (1961) based on the story by S. Antonov "Aunt Lusha". According to Shchedrin, the writer's prose "stood out sharply from the village literature of those years for its truthfulness and lack of sweet pink syrup" ^{[7, p. 105]}. The bitter story of an elderly village woman who fell in love with a visiting boy who turned out to be both empty and unworthy of her is a bold and fresh plot in Soviet opera problems. Shchedrin became interested in Antonov's texts: "A lot of subtle nuances, a screaming contradiction of the age of the characters, a quagmire of Freudian motives. In addition, the musical form of the chastushka, which was widely used in Russian villages at that time, attracted me for a long time and seriously" ^{[7, p. 106]}.

Varvara's song and ditties are one of the "hits" of the Russian mets repertoire, an undoubted example not only of compositional skill, but also of the implementation of folklore traditions. The author uses authentic folk texts here, slightly processed, but not "slick", without the usual Soviet "gloss". In the expanded opera monocene, Shchedrin pays tribute to three folk song genres: epic chant, ditto and female "suffering". The composition begins with a free-recitative, song plan of the episode (the author gives an exact remark here — sempre poco rubato, quasi improvisato): "Through curly forests, humpbacked mountains, smooth valleys, I went everywhere." It is obvious that the composer wants to almost completely abandon the accompaniment (only unison pedals that support the tone and concise instrumental cues) and allow the voice to play with timbre, in a word, emotions. Extremely contrasting in dynamics, free from any metric shackles, complexly arranged in a fret (tonic supports only outline common boundaries), the flexible melody of the soloist conquers with sincerity, deep sadness: "No flower, no flower, no azure flower, eyes of cheerful blue flame."

The middle section is Shchedrin's favorite ditty. Rigidly rhythmically organized, desperate, with mischievous rhymes bordering on obscenity: "There was a ditty everywhere. Ditties were sung by old and young, women and men at every party, party, in clubs, feasts. They sang to the accordion, the strumming of the balalaika, to the "tongue". The texts were improvised, altered, and reshaped. In an oral momentary chastushka, people allowed themselves to make fun of the authorities, to make fun of them. Obscene rhymes were often used with gusto. <...> But there were ditties with tears. Sad, mournful, desperate. Widow's, soldier's, drunken ditties are sufferings. <...> That was how the whole country existed and sang, danced, stamped, loved, languished, was jealous, grieved, gossiped, grinned, slandered, cursed, suffered, suffered the whole country" ^{[2, p. 69]}.

Finally, the third part of the scene is "What a guy has changed is not cheating — it is considered cheating when a girl changes… Oh, mammy-mother, where should I put my love? Should I scatter it in the field, or bury it in the ground?" — an indescribably sad and frankly beautiful song. Each phrase of the soloist ends with a long glissando down through several registers, sounding like an unbearably heavy sigh. Shchedrin found a highly original formula in the accompaniment: pizzicati high violins (or staccati pianos) imitate the balalaika, moreover, mercilessly "off-key" and "stuttering" for a weak fraction of a beat.       

B. Tishchenko is among the devotees of the "new folklore wave". Russian folk song had a serious (in his early work — decisive) influence on the nature of his thematism, largely shaped his author's language. "The composer was interested in a deep layer in folklore that could become a stimulus for modern artistic ideas. Not quoting, but the very nature of the musical utterance — extremely emotional and unhurried, epic — turned out to be a breeding ground for Tishchenko's compositions, a life-giving stream in his work" ^{[5, p. 79]}. The Leningrad author has an original type of horizontal unfolding of the melody, his numerous instrumental monodies are filled with the logic of unpredictability, Tishchenko fundamentally refuses any exact repetitions, all this speaks to the truly folkloric beginning of his melodic thinking. Let's add V. Syrov's exact thought about the composer's "new" thematism, about the principle of "melodic germination, similar to the unfolding of a folk song tune", that "the composer is not content with the formal reproduction of a folklore source. Tishchenko's main discovery in this area is the combination of gradual variant changes and a conflicting thematic result" ^{[8, p. 152]}.

Russian Russian folk lyrics In his early vocal cycle "Sad Songs", based on poems by poets from different countries and peoples (English, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese), two songs are written in Russian folk texts and in different ways, but vividly and fully reveal the composer's approaches to their interpretation. The tragic character of the "Lullaby", its vocal and intonation turns undoubtedly goes back to Mussorgsky: "Bye, bye, bayushki, bayushki, bayushki, is there a place in paradise? At least at the very edge, accept my Nastya." There is complete "hopelessness" here, in the piano climax ("Nastenka will scream") powerful tremoli and dissonant chords create an almost visible picture of the death of a child. The situation is saved only by the obvious introspection of the image, the lullaby is sung not by the mother, but from a third, author's person.

There is no accompaniment in the song "To be tonsured", it is a freely flowing monody, endless crying-lamentation, hopelessness, sadness: "Get a haircut, my nemilaya, get a haircut, my pitiful one. I'll give you a hundred rubles for a haircut, and a thousand rubles for a haircut." There are no clock features, only half and quarter notes — the interpretation options are numerous and diverse, all musical and semantic accents are placed by the word. The text of the soprano song (the cycle is written for a female voice), as we can see, is male. In the music for the documentary "Suzdal" (1964), Tishchenko gives these folk words in two versions: literally repeats the "female" version of the "Sad Songs" (a tone higher, in an even more intense tessitura) and in the tenor, saturated with "loud" melisms and accents in an extremely high register. The men's song is played in Suzdal with a bizarre but lapidary accompaniment: sustained piano and harp pedals, brief bassoon chants, bright "flashes" of an absurd trumpet and pastoral oboe interludes.

Let us note in the context of our topic another remarkable work by Tishchenko in a documentary film — the music for the film by S. Shuster "Northern Studies". The painting tells about the nature of the Russian North, about people living on islands in the White Sea, about the Solovetsky Monastery. The composer created a vocal and instrumental suite, which he called "Northern Studies". Probably, this is the most saturated Russian folklore composition by Tishchenko, it is literally saturated with folk intonations, both vocal and instrumental— collected in the conservative expeditions of the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. Grandma Ulyana's songs create a special atmosphere in the film. In the musical score of the suite, they are recorded in the bass key, on the border of the minor and first octaves (this is probably how the voice of the real Ulyana sounded: in the contralto register, long-hoarse, cold in the northern winds). There are no clock features in these freely unfolding monodies, the score is dotted with signs of microchromatics and aleatorics. The lyrics are typically deplorable, but also full of rude folk "surrealism".

One of the most striking Tishchenkov folklore works is the music for the performance of the Leningrad Academic Drama Theater named after A.S. Pushkin based on V. Tendryakov's play "Advice and Love", which the author designed into a small vocal and orchestral suite with an unusual composition of the accompanying ensemble: oboe, two French horns, two harps, twelve cellos and ten double basses. There are, in fact, two soloists here — a mezzo-soprano and an oboe, their vocal-instrumental dialogue is akin to a leisurely conversation, while the low strings pull their heavy pedals like chains: "The birches are smoked, the Christmas trees are frozen…Oh, under my feet, meta, smooth out all the traces… White snow is sprinkled... the cold is fierce, the mountain is black…Oh, a snowstorm will come — the sun will look out, the sun will look out — the snow will melt, the black mountain will come out with water... The birch trees are smoked, the Christmas trees are frozen" - another bright musical image of an unnamed Russian woman longing for a better life, another endless crying in the cold, in the cold, another such familiar scene from Russian life. 

E. Denisov's "Crying" (1966) is the brightest page in the history of Russian music of the second half of the last century. In this vocal cycle, the author combines his folklore searches of the conservative years (first of all, the opera Ivan the Soldier) with the avant-garde hobbies of the early 1960s (let's highlight the serial technique). Denisov created a psychological drama, a truly tragic action, in the center of which is a funeral rite. According to the researcher of Denisov's work, Y. Kholopov, "there are no direct quotations and stylization in the work, but the vocal part is fundamentally connected with the deep layer of Russian folklore and its most original genre — crying" ^{[9, 136]}.  

The lyrics are borrowed from the collection "Lamentations" (Lamentations. "The Soviet Writer", 1960), which contains folk lamentations recorded by Irina Andreevna Fedosova, the largest Russian storyteller of the XIX century. N. Nekrasov and M. Balakirev, M. Gorky and N. Rimsky-Korsakov were interested in her work. F. Chaliapin spoke enthusiastically about her: "She made an unforgettable impression on me. I had heard many stories, old songs and epics before meeting Fedosova, but it was only in her amazing transmission that the deep charm of folk art suddenly became clear to me" ^{[10, 170]}. The composer's appeal to Fedosova's recordings, to this deeply humane poetic tradition of folk lamentations created by the talent of many generations of Russian women, speaks of the author's deep study of folklore and poetic material. The new musical age required new literature. And she, in turn, dictated fresh compositional solutions, immersed the musicians in stylistic and linguistic searches.

Emotional expressiveness in "Crying" is the basis of vocal technique, vocal intonation. Lamentations and tragic screams, devastated "howling" and mournful "exhaustion", despair, sobbing — all these feelings demanded new technological solutions. The soloist's part is extremely complex: singing with her mouth closed, various glissandi, whispering, tongue twisters, screams: the voice here is akin to a virtuoso instrument, sometimes it is completely intertwined with percussion-piano polyphony, turns out to be one of the many lines, a living element of the rich polyphony of the score. In the mysterious code of the work, the voice completely merges with the unreal instrumental environment, it is impossible to distinguish it, define it with the ear, it becomes a sonorous sign, part of the whole. Dodecaphone intervals imperiously require absolute precision, and this is another serious obstacle to the vocalist's comprehension of the Denisov cycle. 

The influence of Stravinsky's "Wedding" in "Lamentations" is palpable, and this is not only the structure of the percussion and piano ensemble accompanied. The combination of extraordinary inner strength, some kind of "barbaric" spontaneity, emotional fullness with conciseness, even asceticism are much stronger threads connecting the two original works. But there are undoubtedly roll calls with M. Mussorgsky, with his "Nursery", with his other vocal cycles: a folk-rustic "patter", mobile recitatives (of course, much more complexly arranged intonationally), accurate imitations of human speech: all this musical "truth" found its full-fledged, recreated in Denisov's cycle a new stage in the development of Russian vocal art, the embodiment.  

"The Songs of the Free Woman, written at the end of 1959, fully revealed the golden scattering of vocal melos Slonimsky. Having vividly perceived Russian folklore, not only in its purely musical result, but in the complex of the whole way of life, emotional and moral world, comprehending it from the inside and at the same time as if with his own gut, the composer discovered his folklore element as authentic as that of Mussorgsky, Stravinsky or Prokofiev, but also as individual"^{[11, 60]}. We note in the statement of the great scientist M. Knyazareva the idea of S. Slonimsky's assimilation of Russian folklore in the complex of the entire "way of life". The son of a famous writer, who had been in contact with the Soviet literary elite since childhood, was comprehensively and brilliantly educated, Slonimsky himself was an excellent writer. He looked very keenly at the world around him, was able to isolate the main thing, was able to express all this in his music. His approaches to the study of folklore (and not only Russian!) — akin to scientific, but fertilized by a powerful creative imagination.

The vocal cycle on folk words is written for mezzo-soprano, baritone and piano. The dramatic solution of the "Songs of the Free Woman" is very accurate and not devoid of originality: The intonation field of the female voice is a Russian peasant, mostly a long—drawn song. The piano accompaniment is dominated by sub-vocal polyphony, but also by bell-ringing, sharp rhythmics, and long, tense-sounding pedals. In the vocal part there is a half—chorus-half-conspiracy: soft, simple, sometimes a little angular, direct. Slonimsky prefers a soprano timbre in his vocal work, in "Freedom" he needed a low, chest-like sound, more appropriate, according to the author, to the folk principle. The sphere of the male voice is sharply contrasted: rigid dotted rhythms, chromatic "angles", syncopated "jumps", "prickly" intervals, "unbridled" intonations. The piano is impulsive, dense, vividly demonstrating "robber prowess". The dashing power here is expressed rather in a negative way, she does not find herself (as often happens in Russia) a positive way out, her path is "from the green wine to the knife and robbery."

Mezzo-soprano and baritone song-images alternate, thus creating a natural dramaturgically bright contrasting line. There are nine parts in the cycle, solo and duet. Each represents a complete scene from folk life — picturesque, fresh, expressive: "Songs of the free Woman" could be successfully performed in the theater. In the middle of the work, Slonimsky put a comedic and grotesque genre duet song "Kumanek", a kind of interlude, as if relieving the dramatic tension of the previous parts and preparing the tragic ending of the finale: the godfather invites Kumank to visit, and each time he finds new excuses and reasons to refuse the invitation. This scene is very funny, juicy in a "kuchkist" way, akin to episodes of the "Sorochinsky Fair". And this is an important knowledge for us about the nature of the folklore origin of the composer.    

"Songs of the Free Woman" are modern, the author's intense search for a new language is felt in the work, this is truly "thaw" music. As a confirmation of our idea, we will cite another statement by M. Knyazareva, emphasizing the synthetic nature of Slonimsky's folklore aspirations: "Among the stylistic finds of the composer in this work, it is important to note the expressive properties of folklore revealed by him and transmitted with the help of a peculiar subtle rhythmics. The fractional, and therefore accentuated, initial intonations of the motifs, which are characteristic of this melos, sometimes coinciding with the lamentable rhythm, are also characteristic of the folklore of other peoples, not only Russian. We will find them in Hungarian, in Negro, and in the folklore of the peoples of the East. And since foreign folklore came to us with modern music, we feel the formula "Russian folklore plus modernity" here" ^{[11, 63]}.

Urban folklore is the most important artistic layer in the work of the composers of the "new folklore wave". The tradition of collecting samples of urban musical life in Russian music is long-standing, since the XVIII century. But the music of the city changed all the time, new genres arose, the old forms became obsolete and died out. The songs of factory people in S. Slonimsky's opera "Virinea", some scenes from R. Shchedrin's "Not Only Love" are the sound signs of the Russian city of the twentieth century. Let's add here the author's, bard's song, unthinkable outside the wide surrounding intonation fund. "Three songs based on poems by Marina Tsvetaeva" by B. Tishchenko is a talented response to the rich and lively bard tradition. Guitar accompaniment (which was supposed in the original version of the cycle), half—bitterness, half-whisper, half-singing, artlessness, lack of harmonic delights familiar to the composer, strict couplet are the main components of the special stylistic line of this work. Let's add S. Slonimsky's Akhmatovian romances and, of course, V. Gavrilin's "Evening" to our (far from complete) list of "female" vocal cycles inspired by urban folklore.

The cycle was created at the request of Z. Dolukhanova. Having performed and included The Russian Notebook for the first time in her concert repertoire, the singer, in her own words, was "poisoned" by V. Gavrilin's work and was waiting for a new work from him. Unlike the "Russian Notebook", soaked in peasant folklore and created based on folk texts, the element of urban romance, unassuming, everyday, "sensual" prevails in the "Evening". The author gave his work an unexpected subtitle: "recordings from an album of an old woman", following in line with the well-known and quite old Russian tradition (such albums were an indispensable attribute not only of county young ladies, but also of secular beauties) to write a poem, a madrigal into home albums lying in the living room of a landowner's house in a prominent place on the dressing table, or even draw a vignette or even a landscape in it. 

"Evening" is Gavrilin's highly original response to the trend of "weathering of intonations" that captured Russian music in the 1960s and 1970s. Technical sophistication, the search for a new language, and the fascination with the compositional method as a self-sufficient artistic value led the authors away from spontaneity, from emotionally colored music, from the highest simplicity and, ultimately, from the listener. A counterweight for Gavrilin, his attempts to regain the lost balance are intensive searches in the music of everyday life, in a lively intonation environment, in everyday sound realities, in singing, in speaking, more broadly — in human speech (isn't it true, the root precepts of Mussorgsky appear here!).

The folk texts in the "Russian Notebook" organically connect the eight parts of the work, their stylistic unity is the key to the integrity of the expanded vocal cycle. The literary basis of The Evening is different: motley, heterogeneous, even patchwork. Something was written by Gavrilin himself (and he was a wonderful writer and storyteller), something belongs to the pen of A. Shulgina, with whom the composer began to cooperate intensively during these years, one poem is from G. Heine (Gavrilin's favorite poet), the text of another song is the German folk (drinking) "Ah, my dear Augustine." The author's original poetic choice emphasizes the stylistic integrity of the idea, Gavrilin's amazing literary intuition. On the one hand, the album tradition of the XIX century assumed a variety of recordings, on the other, abundant borrowing from Europe at that time, multilingualism. This was also the case in music: the native in Russia has always been peacefully and closely intertwined with the established "foreign".

Gavrilin fills the "Evening" with musical and literary "life", relies on familiar genres and intonation turns, but is far from primitive stylization. The sincerity and great talent of the author protect this, on the whole, difficult work from triviality, banality, and clich?. Ordinariness is not synonymous with mediocrity here, and simplicity is not synonymous with vulgarity. It's as if the composer opens a music box from the past and himself, like a child, is surprised by the sounds pouring out of it. The ticking "clock" in the piano part, "puppet" waltzes, like a "fake" mechanism clusters of dissonances, pauses-"stops" in the vocal patter - all these are pieces of human life, snatched from the stream of Time, musical notes in the "album" found in the attic of a Russian manor.     

Among the performing difficulties of "Vecherka" is not to succumb to Gavrilin's "provocations" (at the level of vocal intonation, words, artistic reading), not to go beyond the boundaries separating chamber vocal music — subtle, elegant, intelligent - from "theatricality". Let's turn to the remarkable statement of the performer of "Evening" Z. Dolukhanova, confirming our idea and explaining her approaches to interpreting the vocal cycle: "A charming, subtle, purely chamber work, absolutely unlike the explosive "Russian notebook". It required new directorial solutions, a new colorful palette, a new "Experience". I immediately felt the insidiousness of this work — if you lose a little measure when performing it, as elegiac memories of the past, heartfelt sadness, sighs that "everything is gone, gone, gone" will turn into tearfulness, sentimentality, sweetness. And this will no longer be Gavrilin, because Gavrilin's music and tastelessness are incompatible concepts" ^{[12, p. 178]}.

In conclusion, let's talk about another landmark work of Gavrilin for the "new folklore wave", about his vocal-symphonic poem "War Letters", which was composed simultaneously with "Evening". There are completely different forms of folk songs here — soldiers', widows' lamentations, children's rhymes, lullabies. Here is an accurate, exhaustive statement about Gavrilin by the researcher of Russian folklore I. Zemtsovsky: "Gavrilin is not afraid of the most popular (not to say "common") intonations: he does not invent them anew, does not construct them, he pronounces and clarifies them in his own way, putting into them the deep poetry of his worldview <...> the gift of poetization of the ordinary — a special gift, and Gavrilin possesses it amazingly" ^{[13, p. 27]}.

Let's move on to brief conclusions. The renewal of Russian music, which began at the turn of the 1960s, the appeal to new techniques, the search for fresh stylistics, unusual forms of expression, led to a significant development of chamber vocal music. Due to the versatility inherent in the vocal cycle (coming primarily from the word), the ability to flexible modifications, and not demanding of the costs associated with the performing staff, it turned out to be a fertile field for the creative efforts of Soviet composers of different generations. During this period, vocal cycles became the leading genre in the works of many famous Soviet authors and Soviet music in general. 

Young composers vividly perceived Russian folklore in the complex of the whole way of life, comprehended it from the inside, through the moral world. The phenomenon of the "new folklore wave", the search by young composers for "intonational authenticity" were closely intertwined with the development of avant-garde methods of composition, with creative gorenje, with professional equipment, with a general craving for novelty, for rebellion, finally. The topic of our research is the "female" vocal cycle of the 1960s and 1970s. It is safe to say that the "new folklore wave" has a "female face", that the voice of a Russian woman — wailing, wailing, suffering, loving, going into a wild ditty — is the voice of this unique artistic phenomenon, more broadly, the voice of a whole generation of domestic authors.