Estrada is a musical style largely defined by its performance. Its stars are larger-than-life personalities who draw audiences into the show through expressive singing and direct engagement. Most often classically trained vocalists, they often have operatic ranges and typically perform songs written by professional composers and poets. Performances typically lean heavily on spectacle, with large […]

Orthodox song (православные песни) is a unique genre of Christian music that draws upon the traditions of the soviet bards, estrada, and sung poetry popular in Russia and Eastern Europe. Sung by both laity and “priest-bards,” the music experienced rising popularity in the decade following the fall of the USSR as religious affiliation surged in […]

Shanson, especially as known in Russia, is full of contradictions and notoriously hard to define. Encompassing a range of musical styles, it incorporates bardic tradition and pop, with influences from rock, jazz, Slavic and gypsy folk traditions, vaudeville, cabaret, and “romance” – a Tsarist-era genre that loosely evolved from folk and opera. An important part […]

The USSR did its best to control culture and make it serve the needs of the state. However, culture, like life itself, finds a way of spreading, evolving, and surviving, often against all odds. Rock music had, by the 60s and 70s, become a cultural phenomenon in Europe and America and its spread to the […]

The Soviet-era bards were singer-songwriters who combined poetic lyricism with simple, guitar-accompanied melodies. The artform emerged in the 1950s shortly after the death of Stalin. Although it remained underground for nearly all of the Soviet period, it became a soundtrack for the lives of many Soviet citizens throughout the 1960s and 70s and beyond. Bardic […]

Russian composers contributed greatly to the genre of programmatic symphonic works. Although many were initially attracted to it by Spanish inspirations, one reason for the genre’s eventual massive popularity was that it gave the composers a popular musical form to incorporate not only native Russian tunes and harmonic structures, but also to focus on other […]

Russian music has long permeated American popular culture even despite a backdrop of long-time political tension. Russian musical themes from poignant folk melodies to complex classical pieces have become tunes that nearly everyone who grew up in America can recognize as having heard before. Often, they are specifically associated with popular cartoons, video games, or […]

The twentieth century was a dynamic period for Soviet composers who often had to work around censorship to create their great contributions to world music. Under the USSR, artists were expected to produce works that glorified the Communist Revolution and the new lives of the new Soviet masses, often while criticizing the capitalistic West. Soviet […]

Отава Ё is a folk music group founded in St. Petersburg, Russia. This popular folk fusion group started in 2003 as the side project of two bands – Reelroad and Tales of the Forest. The two members of Reelroad, Alexey Belkin and Alexei Skosyrev, paired up with two members of Tales of the Forest, Dmitry […]