‘Follow the usual order, of course, start with “You can hear”.’ The gypsy pushed the guitar into the right position with his knee and played a chord, and the choir launched smoothly and simultaneously into ‘Just as you can he-e-ear …’
‘Stop, stop,’ cried the General, ‘there is something missing still. We must all have a drink.’
All the gentlemen drank a glass of bad lukewarm champagne each. The General approached the gypsies, told one of the women, a former notable beauty who was still quite young, to stand up, sat down in her seat and planted her firmly on his knees. The choir once more struck up ‘Just as you can hear’. At first the singing was smooth, but then it grew livelier and livelier, and finally it sounded as only gypsies singing their own songs can make it sound – full of extraordinary energy and inimitable art. Suddenly and unexpectedly the choir stopped singing. Again came an introductory chord, and the same melody was repeated by a sweetly tender, resonant solo voice, with remarkably original decorations and intonation, and the solo voice, in just the same way the choir had done, grew ever more powerful and animated, until at length it returned the melody discreetly and smoothly to the whole choir, who took it up again.
There was a time when no kind of music in all Russia was more beloved than the music of the gypsies, and when the gypsies used to sing the good old Russian folksongs such as ‘Not alone’ and ‘You can hear’, ‘Youth’, ‘Farewell’ and others, and when it was not considered eccentric to listen to the gypsies and to prefer them to the Italian singers. Nowadays the gypsies sing vaudeville ballads like ‘Two maids’, ‘Vanka and Tanka’, and so forth, for a public which gathers round them in city arcades. To love gypsy music, perhaps even to describe their singing as music, may appear absurd. It is a sad thing that this music has so fallen from favour. In our country gypsy music once formed a unique bridge between folk music and classical art music. Why should it be that in Italy every
At one time I was very fond of gypsy music and of German music too, and I devoted myself to the study of both. A certain very good musician who was a friend of mine, German by his musical tendency as well as by his origins, was always falling out with me because gypsy choral singing contained unpardonable musical irregularities (though like everyone else he found the solos quite superlative), and he wanted to prove this to me. I composed reasonably well; he, very well indeed. We persuaded a gypsy choir to sing through a particular song some ten times and we both noted down every vocal line. On comparing our two scores we actually discovered passages in parallel fifths; but I still refused to give in and retorted that we might have written down the actual sounds correctly, but we could not grasp the precise tempi, and that the sequence of fifths he had pointed out to me was nothing other than an imitation at the fifth – something resembling a fugue, and very successfully worked out at that. We set about writing down the music yet again, and R. was completely convinced of what I had been saying. It should be said that each time we noted down the music something new emerged – the movement of the harmony was the same, but sometimes the chords were more condensed, and sometimes in place of a single note there was repetition of the preceding motif – an imitation in fact. But to make them sing each part separately was out of the question: they were all singing the top line, and each time the choir began to sing each one was effectively improvising.
I trust that those readers who have no interest in gypsy music will pardon this digression; I felt that it was out of place here, but my love for this unorthodox yet truly popular music which has always given me so much pleasure, got the upper hand.
