Style
Titov wrote more than 200 compositions, all of them vocal music. They include complete settings of Divine Services (Sluzhby Bozhie, Службы Божие) and a psalter (by Simeon Polotsky), as well as numerous vocal concertos for feast days. His works range from short, three-voice pieces to large-scale compositions for 12- and 24-voice choirs. Titov was one of the most important followers of Nikolay Diletsky's Idea grammatiki musikiiskoi (1679), an influential treatise on composition. Znamenny Chant was another important influence on Titov's work: he even wrote a Service setting based entirely on the chant.
In Titov's music the text is the most important element, as it defines both the overall form and the shape of the melodic lines, sometimes resulting in accomplished word-painting. The musical language is largely tonal; melodic lines are treated individually in horizontal manner, with many motivic ornaments. Titov's textures in his large-scale works suggest that these pieces were meant not to separate the choirs in alteration, but to unite them, so there is no direct connection to the Venetian antiphonal style of the Western Baroque. A characteristic feature is the so-called variantnost (вариантность), the linking of melodic motifs by continuous subtle alterations which is also an important element in Russian chant and folk polyphonic traditions.
The prayer Mnogaya leta (Многая лета), or Bol'shoe mnogoletie (Большое многолетие) proved to be the most enduring of Titov's compositions, possibly because its polyphony was more simple and therefore in line with the ideals of Classical music era. It was sung in Russian churches up to the October Revolution.
Read more about this topic: Vasily Polikarpovich Titov
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can’t get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.”
—Anzia Yezierska (c. 1881–1970)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“I am so tired of taking to others
translating my life for the deaf, the blind,
the “I really want to know what your life is like without giving up any of my privileges
to live it” white women
the “I want to live my white life with Third World women’s style and keep my skin
class privileges” dykes”
—Lorraine Bethel, African American lesbian feminist poet. “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” Lines 49-54 (1979)