Musical Style
The musical style of the older Russian criminal songs, much like the Russian Bard songs, are heavily influenced by the classical Russian romance genre of the 19th century, more specifically a subgenre known as the City or Urban Romance. Romance songs are almost always divided into four-line rhymed couplets, rarely have a chorus, and follow a fairly consistent chord progression (Am, Dm, and E, sometimes with C and G added). The strumming pattern is also predictable: it is either a march, or a slow 3/4 waltz pattern often utilizing fingerpicking rather than strumming. Romance songs were traditionally played on a Russian guitar, since its tuning makes playing these chords easier (most of them are played as a single-finger bar chord).
Read more about this topic: Russian Chanson
Famous quotes containing the words musical and/or style:
“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)