The Museum of Forgotten Music

You open the door and the strong smell of fresh wood hits you. You feel like you are in a workshop, not a museum. Then you see the instruments: pipe, gudok, gusli, and many other well-known and mostly forgotten Russian folk instruments. They have all been collected here, in Voronezh’s Museum of Forgotten Music, by Sergei Plotnikov, 53, who, since the museum’s founding in 2007, has filled every role simultaneously – from chief to curator, from custodian to guide.

“To understand what real folk music is,” Plotnikov says, “you need to live with it and in it... Folk music performers didn’t and still don’t create songs in order simply to sing them from the stage – they live with them. For example, my mother was a spinner and she sang while working at her spinning wheel. When I was a kid, I thought she was singing some sort of prayers, but now I believe they were sacred songs and psalms... She never spun in silence – only with a song that helped her work. Some people would sing while weaving, others while mowing. Each life situation had its song.”

The story of the museum can be traced to the end of the 1990s, when Plotnikov’s wife, Inna, gave him a book on folk music instruments that included plans for how to craft them on one’s own. Inna wanted her husband to make a pipe (дудка) or a rattle for a children’s camp, where he was working part time as a leader and educator.

Since Plotnikov was a craftsman (ironically, his family name means “carpenter”), he was not daunted by the task and in fact created a bagpipe (волынка) in no time.

“I did everything properly using the plans, but it didn’t play,” Plotnikov says. So he turned to a friend who was a balalaika player, who taught him what he needed to know about music and music theory. “Soon after that, I started to make Russian folk instruments,” Plotnikov continues. “At the same time I began to study the history of musical instruments. Like many Russians, I didn’t know back then that we have so many folk instruments in our country, and such a rich folk culture.”

Most of the historical examples Plotnikov has to work from only date back to the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet occasionally archaeological excavations can help one look back further in time.

“I have friends in Veliky Novgorod,” Plotnikov says, “and thanks to that city’s land that ‘preserves’ wood, we have more and more discoveries and findings.”

A problem that arises, however, is that reconstructing historical instruments does not mean reconstructing music. For while there are many ancient texts, they do not contain the songs’ melodies. The first Russian chants that we know of, Plotnikov says, are those of the Russian Orthodox Church. For example the znamenny (“echoes”) chant, or plain song. It evolved from the Byzantine liturgy, imported to Rus in the tenth century, and reached its pinnacle in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. And what notations there are on chant scores indicate melodic transitions, rather than notes. They specify moods or gradations of how a part of the melody is to be sung. But the actual melodies themselves are lost to history.

“Still, we can imagine it,” Plotnikov says. “We call it the renovation method. For example, let’s take the gudok, which in Europe is a fiddle. This is how Jacob von Staehlin, historian, writer, teacher, member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, described it in 1750: ‘gudok of plebs, especially sailors.’ So, we can take a sailors’ song that we know from the nineteenth century and sing it with the gudok. Whether this is correct or not, we don’t know. But we have no other options,” he says with a smile.

Plotnikov’s restoration work is also aided by life in the digital age, which allows easier access to what used to be hard-to-find, compartmentalized information.

“For instance, I can use the Illuminated Compiled Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible or Russian Musical Newspaper, which have been digitized,” he says. “I have looked through all their back issues and can tell visitors anything they want to know from them. For instance, here’s a funny thing: I thought that it was my invention to set double strings on a gusli. But now, through the help of this newspaper, I found out that, in Pskov in 1906, there was a guslar named Fedot Artamonov who did the same thing. So it turns out I am his follower.”

Almost all the instruments – there are nearly 60 – on display in the Museum of Forgotten Music were made or reconstructed by Plotnikov. Only a few were purchased or donated to the museum. And the instruments are not dead displays hidden under glass; each instrument plays, and often visitors are allowed to try them out themselves, if they are able.

“I need instruments that can be easily played,” Plotnikov says. “So, during reconstruction, I may install metal pins instead of the wooden ones used at the time... Ten centuries ago, strings were made of gut, sinew or twisted horsehair. Of course, today I use modern metal strings. Therefore, I cannot say that I do real, historical reconstructions, because my aim in the end is to have instruments that are able to be played, to create sound.”

The kugikly is an ancient wind instrument made of bulrush. It was discovered during archaeological excavations, and Staehlin called it a “pan flute.” At that time, the kugikly didn’t have more than five tubes, and it was an instrument played by women.* As a rule, kugikly musicians also played only in ensembles with Kursky pipes, reedpipes (свирель), horns, and balalaikas. But not with a harmonica, as that instrument is too loud and does not allow the sounds of the other instruments to be heard.

“The harmonica is the ‘enemy’ of all the other instruments,” Plotnikov says, “because when it appeared there was no longer any need for the others.”

“You know,” Plotnikov continues, “ethnographers were too late. They started to record information about Russian folk instruments only at the beginning of the nineteenth century. So now we don’t have enough facts about instruments used well before that time. Actually, since the nineteenth century, people in Russia have stopped playing most anything but the balalaika.”

For the visiting journalists, Plotnikov demonstrated the sounds of the Kursky pipe (which he said can be made in just twenty minutes), the reedpipe (blockflute, or recorder), gudok, gusli, and balalaika. Finally, he played the wheel lyre, which in Europe was known as the organistrum, or hand organ.

Lyre-playing began to spread in Russia during the rein of Mikhail Fyodorovich, Peter the Great’s grandfather. And as late as 1960 there were people in different regions of Russia who still remembered lyrists — mostly blind musicians — who performed poems accompanied by the lyre. Such was the case in the village of Nikolskoye, Khokholsky rayon, Voronezh Oblast, where there was a lyrist named Ivan Senin, nicknamed Vanka-the-Blind. According to those who could remember, lyrists sang mostly sad songs: sacred songs, Bible parables, evangelical narratives, and penitential hymns that made listeners consider their sins.

“In the nineteenth century,” Plotnikov says, “lyrists earned money playing music in fairs or by going from village to village... A musician came, people cried; the next day he went to the next village.”

The Museum of the Forgotten Music itself (in the person of Plotnikov) travels often to festivals and concerts, where historical reenactments and folklore are cherished.

“The only thing that makes me very sad and amazes me at the same time,” Plotnikov says, “is that our museum is famous all over Russia, but not in its hometown. Often Voronezh citizens are brought here by their friends from other regions of Russia, who visit the Museum of the Forgotten Music as one of our city’s sights.”

Plotnikov dreams that one day his museum will grow beyond the two rooms it now occupies in the city’s Palace of Culture.

“What we really need is for people to become acquainted with Russian folk culture,” he says. “How can one be interested in what he has never even heard of? More than ten years ago I also had no idea what the gusli or gudok were. And for me the wheel lyre was the bottom of the well! One needs to start from something.

“For instance, when children came to our Slavic camp for the first time, they said, ‘Oh, there won’t be any disco? Hey, what kind of camp is it if it has no disco?!’ Yet, after they had had traditional dancing and singing classes... after they had created the festival with their own hands, they realized that they didn’t need disco, that they were living in a creative atmosphere that they themselves had created...”

Today, Plotnikov is no longer alone. Thirteen years ago, he says, very few craftsmen in Voronezh could make Russian folk instruments. But now, their number is on the rise as demand for Russian instruments, and Russian folk culture, grows.

And to think, it all began, at least for Plotnikov, with a book. RL