Russia: romances and the seven-string

From the late eighteenth century, “Gypsy choirs” became a Russian fashion — the Count Orlov / Sokolov legend sits at the start of that public story. Nineteenth-century Moscow and St Petersburg paid for Romani choirs. The public heard tsyganshchina, “Gypsy-ness”: minor keys, open throats, violin and guitar, a sentimental fire that Russian literature both desired and disdained. The singers were professionals with a repertoire in Russian and in Romani. Anna G. Piotrowska has written that history from Tsarist through Soviet and post-Soviet rooms. Alaina Lemon’s Between Two Fires is the anthropology of the same stage.

The seven-string guitar (semistrunnaya) was the domestic instrument of this world from the late eighteenth century into the Soviet decades. When the Spanish six-string took over, the old tuning and stroke survived in a few families. The Kolpakov line is one of the last public carriers of that guitar — Alexander “Sasha” Kolpakov was music director at the Romen Theatre; Vadim Kolpakov and Oleg Timofeyev still teach the style. Loyko took tabor violin song onto post-Soviet stages.

Theatre Romen, Moscow, founded 1931, is the world’s oldest professional Romani theatre and the institutional centre of this public music. Its archive and foyer hold protocols, play texts, posters, photographs and costumes. Further records sit in RGALI. A living institution, not only a vault.