Turchaninov, Peter Ivanovich (Archpriest)

Born in 1779 in the family of a Kiev nobleman. He was brought up in the Kiev public school. The boy was taken for a wonderful voice in the choir of General Levanidov. Prince Potemkin heard the Levanidian choir in Kiev , was delighted with the voice of Turchaninov and took him to Petersburg , entrusting the leadership of Giuseppe Sarti . In 1792 he returned to Kiev in the same choir, which was then under the direction of Wedel . He was with him in Kharkov , where he completed his education. Then he was the regent of various choirs in Kiev and Sevsk .

In 1803 he was ordained a priest, and in 1809 he was summoned to Petersburg and appointed regent of the Metropolitan Choir. Since 1827 - a singing teacher in the Court chapel . Apparently, D. S. Bortnyansky had a great influence on the formation of musical taste and compositional technique of Turchaninov.

He died in 1856 . He was buried at the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery .

Turchaninov continued Bortnyansky's undertaking in the field of harmonization of Old Russian chants. In his transcriptions, one can see the love of church life, the desire to show the immutable value of the old Russian tradition. As noted by I. A. Gardner:

“The main feature of Turchaninov’s spiritual and musical creativity is that he devoted his work almost exclusively to harmonization of many statutory tunes; the number of his free spiritual and musical compositions in comparison with harmonization of statutory tunes is small ” ^[1]

Turchaninov made a lot of efforts to clothe these melodies in forms that are understandable to contemporaries, as representatives of educated layers of society have already forgotten how to appreciate the severity of the style of unanimous statutory singing.

Distinctive features of Turchaninov harmonization are:

• frequent preference for broad voice,
• transmission of church melody, as a rule, to viola,
• preservation of true intervals of melodic movement (except for alterations ).

The harmonization of Turchaninov is not without its well-known flaws noted by contemporaries. Broad voting is not only a feature, but also a stumbling block in Turchaninov’s transcriptions, with the exception of bass, for the most part he forces the rest to sing in higher registers, which is not accessible to all choirs. For example, Archpriest Dmitry Razumovsky wrote:

“Wide vote is the main drawback in the works of Turchaninov. It is difficult and almost impossible to find a choir that could easily and freely perform them. But he seems to have written his works for his own choir, and not for all Russian choirs, extremely diverse in composition and quality. ” ^[2]

Nevertheless, its harmonization is a big step in the direction from arbitrariness to the ancient singing tradition. These works are still heard in Orthodox churches.

Of the arrangements, the most common are dogmatists, zadostniks , irmoses of Great Thursday , Heel and Saturday , “You are clothed,” “Keep silent,” Sunday troparia in praise, cherubim , etc.

The work of Archpriest Peter Turchaninov stands, as it were, at the junction of two eras. At this time (the second third of the 19th century ) in secular music, a fascination with the Italian style was already "out of fashion" and was replaced by a new style of German romanticism. This direction penetrates into the everyday life of the court choir and then spreads in the Russian Church with the active participation of A.F. Lvov and his followers.

In the arrangements of Turchaninov, features of both directions are noticeable. From the point of view of harmony, they are adjacent to the old "Italian" school, the same can be said about his desire to maintain the "right" meter. “If in relation to the ancient melody Turchaninov turned out to be“ higher ”than Bortnyansky, then little has changed in his attitude to harmony, and the type of sound-pitch organization remains essentially the same. By comparing a number of chants, it is not difficult to establish the dominance of major and minor, which seem to “absorb” the ancient melody, neutralizing its ecclesiastical mode, ancient modality, ”writes N. S. Gulyanitskaya. ^[3]

On the other hand, there is a more attentive attitude of Turchaninov to the text, he avoids repetition and distortion in it. Apparently, creating his arrangements, Turchaninov relied on the well-known South Russian tradition of "folk" harmonization, for example, one that existed in the Kiev Pechersk Lavra. The expression is attributed to him: “One must be able to find the simplest suitable chords”, which characterizes his composer method with respect to harmonization ^[4] .

In addition to the transcriptions of the ancient chants created by Turchaninov and having a serious impact on the further development of singing art in Russia, this author also penned a number of works in the “free” style. In this area, the composer remains faithful to the canons of the "Italian" period both in terms of musical techniques and in the interpretation of the liturgical text. The author considered it permissible, for example, to arbitrarily replace and reduce statutory verses in a concert with the words of the Great Saturday chant "Resurrect God, judge the earth." The performance of this play is so ingrained in the liturgical practice of the Russian Orthodox Church that many clergymen are confused when they hear this hymn in the service of another author, with verses taken from the Triodi and not introduced by Turchaninov.

• Hieromonk Paul (Short). Church Singing Conversations
• TURCHANINOV PETR IVANOVICH
• [2]
• RUSSIAN SPIRITUAL MUSIC // Encyclopedia " Round the World ".
• http://spb-tombs-walkeru.narod.ru/boh/turchaninov.htm