It was their firm conviction that for the
Russian composer only one model existed, and that was the Russian
folk-song. Only in the folk-song were to be found the musical
equivalents of the spoken speech. Only in the folk-song were to be found
the musical accents and turns and inflections, the phrases and rhythms
and colors that expressed the national temper. And to the popular and to
the liturgical chants they went in search of their proper idiom. But it
was not only to the musical heritage that they went. In search of their
own selves they sought out every vestige of the past, every vestige of
the fatherland that Peter the Great and Catherine had sought to reform,
and that persists in every Russian underneath the coating of convention.
Together with the others, Borodin steeped himself in the lore and
legends of the buried empire, familiarized himself with the customs of
the Slavs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, searched libraries for
the missals illuminated by the old monks of the Greek church, deciphered
epics and ballads and chronicles, assimilated the songs and incantations
of the peasants and savage tribes of the steppes, collected the melodies
of European and Asiatic Russia from the Ukraine to Turkestan.
And he and his companions were right.
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