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A Timeline of Russian Classical Music

• Until the 18th century, Russian music consisted mainly of church music, folk songs and music for dances. Among the bourgeoisie, Italian, French, and German operas were especially popular.
• Two opposing groups of composers were founded in the 19th century: the Russian Music Society, a pro-Western association of composers led by the brothers Anton and Nikolay Rubinstein and the 'Mighty Handful', a group of composers known for using elements of Russian folk and religious music and folk themes in their works. Among the most famous members of the 'Mighty Handful' are Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky and Balakirev.
• In the beginning of the 20th century, romances written and performed in the Russian, Caucasian, Gypsy and Italian styles became popular in Russia. The greatest and most popular singers of the romance movement were Fyodor Shalyapin, Alexandr Vertinsky, Konstantin Sokolsky and Pyotr Leshchenko.
• In the 20th century, the pressure of the Soviet authorities caused many artists to leave the Soviet Union. At the same period a musical underground of folk-oriented and rock groups formed. Magnitizidat recorded and distributed forbidden folk, rock, and jazz works in small batches.
• After Communism fell, many exiled artists including Vladimir Horowitz and Mstislav Rostropovich returned to Russia to continue producing and performing their music. During this period, much of Russian rock music lost the creativity of its underground period and tended towards imitating Western groups in style.

When people decide to visit Russia, they endure the headaches that come with obtaining a visa and the long and arduous flight. (If you are not from the Antipodes or thereabouts you have no right to complain about the flight – ed.) But what all these tourists have in common is that they appreciate the art, architecture, and history of Russia, and want to learn more about it. Classical music is one of the most highly-revered arts in Russia. Russian classical music has a distinctive history, separate from Western Europe and at the same time highly influenced by Western countries. Some of the most internationally-renowned composers came St. Petersburg and Moscow as well as from smaller towns. Ballet music composers, opera composers, and even jazz musicians all made their mark in Russia's history. Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich are only some of the big names that every music lover will recognize, but there are many more that have their roots in Russia. The following article briefly explains classical music's place in Russian history, its evolution, and current position.

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Russia consists of dozens of different ethnic groups, each of which have their own forms of traditions and folk music. During the Soviet era, music was highly scrutinized and kept within certain boundaries of content and innovation. After the fall of the USSR, Western style rock and pop music became the most popular forms in Russia, perhaps because they symbolized democracy, freedom, and a cultural divide from the repressive Communistic rule. But before the Soviet era, Russian composers and musicians were innovative and influential.

Until the 18th century, Russian music consisted mainly of church music, folk songs and dances. In the 1700s, Italian, French, and German operas were introduced to Russia, making opera a popular art form among the bourgeoisie.

In the 19th century, Russia began making an original contribution to world music nearly as significant as its contribution in literature. In the first half of the century, Mikhail Glinka (1804-57) initiated the application of purely Russian folk and religious music to classical compositions. His operas Ruslan and Lyudmila and A Life for the Tsar, are considered ground-breaking works in the establishment of Russian national music, although they are loosely based and modeled on Italian opera.

In 1859 the Russian Music Society was founded to foster musical performances and appreciation for classical music from Western Europe. The most influential figures in the society were the composer Anton Rubinstein and his brother Nikolay, who founded influential conservatories in Moscow and St. Petersburg (Anton Rubinstein also was one of the best pianists of the 19th century).

In the second half of the 19th century, a group of composers that came to be known as the 'Mighty Handful' or the 'Mighty Handful' – Miliy Balakirev, Aleksandr Borodin, Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov – continued Glinka's movement away from the imitation of European classical music by adding in elements of Russian folk music and tales. Although most of them wrote Western-influenced music, this group challenged the Russian Music Society's conservatism with a large body of work thematically based on Russia's history and legends and musically based on its folk and religious music; not surprisingly, the two groups were more or less rivals. Among the Mighty Handful’s most notable works are Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic suite Scheherazade and the operas The Snow Maiden and Sadko, Mussorgsky's operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, and Borodin's opera Prince Igor. Balakirev, a protégé of Glinka, was the founder and leader of this group.

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky stood outside this group. While he didn’t take sides in the above-described ideological battle (he was too busy writing music), his music did to a large extent resemble Western European music. He produced a number of enduring symphonies, operas, and ballets, and even during his lifetime he was considered one of the world's premier composers.

The generation that followed the Mighty Handful and Tchaikovsky in the late nineteenth century included talented and innovative figures such as Sergey Rachmaninoff, a genius pianist and composer, who immigrated to Germany in 1906, Rimsky-Korsakov's student Aleksandr Glazunov, who emigrated from Russia in 1928 and Aleksandr Skryabin, who injected elements of mysticism and literary symbolism in his piano and orchestral works. Prominent Russian (and, due to the time in which they composed, Soviet) composers of the 20th century include Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich.

Traditional music didn’t die out among all this internationalism. In the late ninteenth century, Count Uvavrov led a campaign of nationalist revival which spawned the first professional orchestras with traditional instruments, beginning with Vassily Andreyev, who used the balalaika in an orchestra late in the century. Just after the dawn of the 20th century, Mitrofan Pyatnitsky founded the Pyatnitsky Choir of rural peasant singers.

The Soviet Era

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In the 1910s romances in exotic Russian, Caucasian, Gypsy and Italian styles became popular in Russia. The greatest and most popular singers of romances – chief among them Fyodor Shalyapin – usually sang in operas at the same time they were pursuing this newer genre of popular music. Singers, for example Alexandr Vertinsky, Konstantin Sokolsky and Pyotr Leshchenko, usually composed music and wrote lyrics themselves, However, experimentation did not prosper much with the onset of Soviet rule and oppression.

In the 20th century, Russia continued to produce some of the world's foremost composers and musicians, despite the suppression by Soviet authorities of music and other artistic thought, ideas, and performances. Restrictions on what musicians played and where they performed caused many artists to leave the Soviet Union either voluntarily or through forced exile, but the works of the emigrants continued to draw large audiences whenever they were performed. In the 1960s, Vyacheslav Shchurov organized concerts featuring folk singers from all over Russia. Shchurov thus attracted a wave of ethnomusicologists, who recorded rural folk musicians. Perhaps the most important group to follow in Shchurov's wake was the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble. Moreover, a group of musicians called bards arose at the same time. They were generally ignored by the state, but bards like Vladimir Vysotsky's helped lead a popular return to traditional music.

The same period spawned the birth of Russian rock, which all began with the band Pojuschie Gitary. They created a style called VIA and later released the first Russian rock opera, Orpheus and Eurydice. Other rock bands of the era included Tcvety, Sinyaya Ptica and Golubiye Gitary.

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By the 1980s, popular folk-oriented groups had arisen. The Cossack Kazachy Krug and Pesen Zemli became the most popular. A musical underground (magnitizdat) also arose, where poetic and satirical musicians like Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotskiy gained black market fame playing jazz and rock music. They also set their poetry to music and became popular entertainers with a satirical message. Magnitizidat also recorded and distributed forbidden folk, rock, and jazz works in small batches.

Jazz performances were permitted by all Soviet regimes, and jazz became one of Russia's most popular music forms. In the 1980s, the Ganelin Trio was the best known Russian jazz combo, performing in Europe and the United States. Jazz musicians from the West began playing regularly in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Rock music on the other hand was strictly controlled by Soviet Authorities, and recordings were strictly limited. Nonetheless, Russia's youth was fascinated with the rock music of the West. Later in the 80s, when the Communist regime began to weaken, there was more of a liberal atmosphere concerning music in Russia. Several notable Soviet rock groups emerged which were considered innovative, and such groups proliferated throughout the 80s. The Leningrad Rock Club, one of a national network of performance clubs in 1986, was the most important outlet for sanctioned rock music.

Post-Soviet Era

After Communism fell and democracy was restored in the former Soviet Union, the Gorbachev era loosened many of the restrictions placed on creative thought and the arts, and many artists returned back to their homeland to continue producing and performing their music. The pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who left the Soviet Union in 1925, made a successful return performance in Moscow in 1986, and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich returned to Russia as a conductor on tour with the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington D.C. Rock music, however, seemed to have lost that innovative, satirical, and unique edge of the magnitizdat period, and experts have noted the tendency of rock groups to simply imitate Western groups in style.

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Whether your church chooses to do a live service that is streamed online or a prerecorded service that is released online, your Christmas Eve production will have an impact on people's lives.

For many churches, Christmas Eve draws in more attendees than Easter. So Christmas Eve services represent an incredible opportunity to reach people who once attended and now don’t, the unchurched, and the fence-sitters.

Should the Christmas Eve service be the same as every other year, but just live streamed?

Whether your church performs a cantata, a full play, or a simple Christmas service with a few songs and communion, these services are both a gift to your church and to your community. They matter in the life of the church.

This year obviously looks much different than years past. And even though many tech teams have learned how to create an online weekly experience, they’re still grappling with how to create a Christmas Eve experience online.

Should the Christmas Eve service be the same as every other year, but just live streamed? Should it be different because of a significantly larger and more diverse online audience? Should it be live or should it be prerecorded?

In the all-important question of whether to go live or prerecorded, it’s important to understand that each comes with its own set of pro’s and con’s. Here are some of them to consider as you decide which route is best for your church and your team.

Producing Christmas Eve Completely Live

Pro 1: Live streaming a live event is more efficient from every aspect. Techs and talent show up, potentially do a rehearsal, and then the live event happens. If people are used to serving on the tech team, this will be especially efficient.

Pro 2: Experience. For those in the room, it will feel similar to what Christmas Eve may have felt like in the past. A lot of people have had difficulties with so much change this year, and maybe the ability to gather on Christmas Eve at the church will mean something significant.

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Con 1: No 'do overs.' The performance, the camera angles, the audio mix is what it is. This can potentially produce high stress for many volunteers, especially when it is one of the largest services of the year.

Cameras are usually positioned based on working around crowds, but in a service that is primarily attended online, it’s a good idea to reposition cameras so they’re closer to the stage.

Con 2: A completely live performance will likely focus more on the people in the room than the online audience. With the exception of churches with a large enough production team to focus only online and only live, the attention is at best split between the quality of online vs. in-person. This is an important point because many churches still have a majority of people attending online and a smaller percentage in person on regular Sunday mornings. This fact could potentially be amplified on a holiday like Christmas Eve.

If a church is primarily gathering in-person and has a small percentage online, then doing a completely live gathering and simply streaming it online may be the best choice. However, based on what most churches are reporting in the U.S., this isn’t the case.

Postproduction is a different skillset than producing a live service. For many churches, this is new territory.

Con 3: Staffing Christmas Eve. It may be more difficult this year to get the amount of people needed to serve on Christmas this year. Most tech teams have had to significantly grow this year to pull off live streaming church. The amount of people it now takes to make church happen is easily 30%-40% more. Gathering this large of a team on a holiday could be a challenge considering that Christmas Eve services tend to be difficult to staff on a normal year.

Tips for Going Live

If your church and your team decide that the pro’s of going it live outweigh the con’s, here are tips that can help you nail the live service.

1-Coach the pastor to speak directly to the camera and address the people online as much as possible.

Everyone knows that addressing the online audience is important. But in light of Christmas Eve it could be even more important because of the amount of people who are likely to attend digitally this year. Again, it could be many people's first encounter with the church. Reminding the pastor of how important this is will be helpful.

2-Consider repositioning your camera(s) closer to the platform to make the online viewing experience better.

Oftentimes, cameras are positioned in the room based on working around crowds, but in a service that is primarily attended online, it’s a good idea to reposition cameras so they’re closer to the stage and give a better angle for the online audience.

Producing Christmas Eve Prerecorded

Pro 1: This option means the Christmas service can be recorded in sections instead of all at once. This is a benefit because it allows the team to take the time to adjust lighting, audio levels, and video cameras for each segment of the service. For example, if the primary segments in the Christmas Eve Service is singing, preaching, and maybe a dramatic segment, then it could be scheduled in three different nights, leaving time in between to recalibrate the gear for each part of the service.

Pro 2: Prerecording allows the team flexibility with people's schedules. For example, if there are four different segments to the Christmas Eve service and the pastor is only in two of them, he or she can record their two sections independently from volunteers who are singing or contributing in some other way to the service.

This may also mean not needing to have the entire production team for each segment of the service. For example, if there are three cameras but two of them will be stationary for the pastor's portion of the service, then less camera people need to be scheduled for those segments.

Pro 3: Audio and video can potentially be remixed after it is recorded. If the church has the ability to multi-track audio and record each camera independently, then recording and editing in post is possible. This will result in the highest quality possible.

Pro 4: The last pro—the all-important 'take two.' Being able to capture multiple takes of a performance and put them together can have a significant impact on the overall quality of the Christmas Eve service. Multiple takes can especially make a significant difference for the music portion of the service. The ability for vocalists to sing the song in a few different takes and then choose the best version is a significant benefit.

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Con 1: The first con to prerecording is time. Prerecording simply takes more time. There is more setup time, more editing time and more energy spent from the team. While it may be challenging in a live service to get the entire team to a Christmas Eve service, the premium is paid in hours for the production team. There is more time spent recording all of the segments as well as post editing audio and video. The product will be better, but it will take longer.

Con 2: The second con could be lack of knowledgeable volunteers. For example, some churches may have great live sound engineers, but they may never have multi-tracked and remixed a service for YouTube consumption. Postproduction is a different skillset than producing a live service. For many churches, this is new territory. The con can simply be that the production team may not have experience doing this. In some cases, a church might be able to pay for someone to edit and remix the service for them. There are several services that do this now, as well as many people who contract themselves out to churches for these types of occasions.

Tips for Prerecording

If you have the time to prerecord, the technical ability to craft a polished product in postproduction or the time and resources to hire out that job, here are some pointers that are wise to follow.

1-Schedule more time for each segment than you think you need.

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If one of the benefits of prerecording is being able to get multiple takes, so schedule time for multiple takes. Make sure there is enough time for both the production team and the people on platform to feel comfortable with going through their portion a few times.

Scheduling enough time between each segment is also very important. If the production team needs to reset cameras, lighting, or microphones, then making sure there is enough time for the team to get in the room will be helpful.

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2-Calibrate for each segment.

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Lighting changes affect video significantly. When a church does a live service that has significant lighting changes, video coloration can suffer. However, when the service is prerecorded, then the production team can white balance and set ISO for each part of the service. This can help the service be as dynamic as you want without letting the quality suffer.

3-Watch and listen to the service ahead of time.

For those that have not done a good deal of postproduction editing and mixing, how it looks and sounds on a computer screen vs. a TV is different. Take time to upload a version of the service to test it before it is released for the entire church to enjoy in their homes.

Whether your church chooses to do a live service that is streamed online or a prerecorded service that is released online, your Christmas Eve production will have an impact on people's lives. So whichever way you choose to go, think it through. You are sharing the most important story ever told—a story that couldn’t be told without the help of your production team.