IMSLP Forums

1) Song of the Volga Boatmen: does anyone know this well enough to say whether there was original material in it, or was it a straight arrangement of the folksong? If it is an arrangement, perhaps it should be on a page with other arrangements of it -- Glazunov has also done one that IMSLP has, and there may be others.

2) Les Noces: Grove describes it as a "choreographic scene" so I've tagged it as a ballet, unless someone has a better idea.

3) Le roi des étoiles -- sacred or secular?

Thanks.

Stravinsky's arrangement of the folk song was actually (I believe) dictated to him chord by chord and note by note. When I heard it I didn't have any new material in it, other than the orchestration. Apropos, I think it should probably be left as an arrangement.

Le roi des étoiles is certainly sacred, I think, since it's speaking directly about God and Heaven.

Stravinsky's setting has his very characteristic sharp-edged harmonization (a bit like the chorales in L'Histoire du soldat), though the basic folksong is the same as found elsewhere. It's an arrangement - though it is frequently treated as an original work in programs and the like (as the Glazunov setting is). Zvezdoliki is not a sacred work strictly speaking, like a mass or a Bach cantata. Balmont's text is a symbolist poem with references to the Book of Revelations (the Apolcalypse). Still, one could say it's a quasi-sacred work.

OK, Le roi des Etoiles will be tagged as a sacred chorus.

As to Song of the Volga Boatmen, it sounds to me like it needs to be on a page with "Anonymous" as its composer, and the Stravinsky and Glazunov arrangements moved there, with links from the composer' pages.

Any objections?

Is it an actual folk song, or was it written by an anonymous individual? If the former, it should probably go under 'Russian Folk Music' or something like that. Otherwise, I too agree that it should be listed as an arrangement rather than an original work (wherever it ends up).

If someone is looking for it, they are unlikely to know or guess to look under Russian Folk Songs as a title. In any case, I think that by the general style guide rules, "Russian Folk Songs" would only really be used if someone collected and published a set of them, though I see that we have various collections by "various".

I also see that some of the entries for folksongs are done with "Blahdeeblah (Folk Songs, Nationality)". I quite like this way of doing it.

It is becoming apparent from looking at the IMSLP entries that this section needs a bit of cleaning up, but I also think it probably is low priority now.

And, getting back to Stravinsky and Song of the Volga Boatmen, the song was first published by Balakirev in his collection of Russian folksongs (though IMSLP has a collection of "popular" songs, which might be he same set).

So I think it should be "Song of the Volga Boatmen (Folk Songs, Russian)" and I will also check the Balakirev on IMSLP and add a link if I need to.

OK, I have now moved both Stravinsky's and Glazunov's arrangements to this page: http://imslp.org/wiki/Song_of_the_Volga ... ,_Russian)

This brings to mind of a recurring question/thought: Should we have a number of categories like "Russian Folk Songs" to cover each ethno-linguistic family? (Perhaps employing slightly broader "Russian Folk Music" to cover purely instrumental things like dances)? The "Various" category keeps growing all the time, with a number of things there which would surely fall under a Folk Music classification.

"Various" is one of my all-time pet hates (partly due to a librarian (long gone now) who put edited collections under Various rather than under the titles or editors' names. Half of the file cabinet drawers were under "V", which made searching ridiculous).

I'm not sure if modern library science still advocates its use, but if so, it should be used sparingly, IMHO. So I wouldn't mind seeing the demise of "Various", by and large.

As to "Music" rather than "Songs", currently one of the benchmark tests for folksongs is whether there was a known author for the text, which almost certainly puts the song as recent enough to count as folk music. What kind of reasoning can we use to define folk music vs other music?

Collections are often edited by committees (as in an instance of a work I contributed, which had a very famous composer amongst the six or seven on the committee), and so the “Various” refers to both a variety of composers and editors!

So I’d be happy to ascribe these works to their editors, however that does involves them cropping up in the wrong sub-category (as an original composition when it’s not in fact, rather “edited by”). I suppose it might help people’s sanity to have categories for types of works once a fair number of them start appearing in “Various” – as is the case for the Volga Boatmen, who are now happily in Russian Folk Music land.

Cheers, Philip