The Old Believer material was recorded digitally to a Macintosh G3 PowerBook. It was then edited and CDs were burned on-site.
After recording for two to four hours, McIlvery and Deng, who assisted with the recording project, would spend the better part of the day editing. “We needed to clear the hard drives for the next recording session,” McIlvery explains. “I couldn’t have done it without Amy. A couple of the CDs she edited on her own, start to finish. She had amazing stamina. I could see her nodding off, but she’d stick with it through the night if necessary.”
The village of Ukir lies in the taiga at the remote edge of Siberia, just 6 miles from the Mongolian border.
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Sophisticated technology and a break-neck pace were both necessary. “We had one chance to do this right, and we didn’t want to lose anything,” McIlvery says. “Most people think you just need a mike and a cassette recorder. Not so. The Old Believers have been recorded before, but not clearly enough. The musicologist, Liubov, needed to make out all the lyrics – and she did, this time.”
The results of McIlvery and Deng’s prodigious efforts: 168 a cappellafolk and liturgical songs, from seven different villages, captured and preserved on some 50 raw archival CDs and 24 edited final ones. The CDs – housed at Moscow’s Cultural Heritage Institute, with back-ups at USC’s Thornton School – are now being studied by Old Believer specialists in Russia.
Many of the lyrics are on traditional Russian folk themes involving young maidens and soldiers going off to war, but the music itself is executed in a polyphonic choral style using a special pronunciation unique to the Semeiskie.
“We weren’t there to evaluate,” McIlvery notes. Still, the music made a deep impression. “At first, the singing seemed like just a bunch of people shouting at each other,” he says. “Yet, with time, we could discern a structure, a distinctive form and melody.”
With repeated exposure, Deng – an accomplished pianist with perfect pitch – also warmed to the singing. “I started humming the tunes to myself,” she says.
Even the non-musicians fell under the choir’s spell. “Experiencing the difficulties of living there was important to the music,” says Levitt. “Hearing it [as a recording], it seems distant, foreign, hard to relate to. When you see the people, live with them, get together with them to celebrate, the music grows in meaning.”
THE "DIFFICULTIES" OF LIVING in Ukir are severe by Western standards. Food that isn’t bought on meager salaries is supplemented by kitchen gardens and hunting. There’s no indoor plumbing. Water, both for drinking and washing, is hauled from the river almost a mile away. Banyas, the traditional bathhouses, take up to five hours to fire. Outhouses are primitive wooden shacks set on flat ground, without so much as a hole dug in the dirt. Ukir’s free-ranging dogs survive largely on what people leave behind.
The brightly painted windows of Old Believer villages caught cinema major Natalie Ross’s eye. She snapped more than 800 slides on the trip.
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“People make use of every last little bit of stuff we call trash,” Levitt says. “They haveno trash. They reuse everything. And if it can’t be reused, they burn it as fuel.”
Wars and alcohol have taken their respective tolls. There are relatively few older men. There also are relatively few young women. Many go to nearby towns to study and never come back, fleeing village life, which is especially hard on women. It is the women who – according to habits both Soviet and Old Believer – do most of the labor.
Consequently, Ukir is a village mostly of old women and their middle-aged sons. The younger women who have remained are neither learning nor perpetuating the Old Believer customs that survive.
“The grandmothers – babushkas– still wear traditional dress,” says Ross, “but their granddaughters are in contemporary clothes.” She noted a curious abundance of Titanic T-shirts among the younger villagers’ wardrobe of cheap imported wares from China. “They have a contemporary mindset, and the old ways are disappearing,” Ross says.
Dire as their economic straits and bleak as their prospects for the future are, “for the most part, people don’t consider themselves poor or feel sorry for themselves,” Perkins says. “They just live their lives to the best of their abilities. They were very open, very warm and very generous with everything – including their hearts.”
The researchers had brought along their own food – canned meat, cabbage, potatoes and other nonperishable goods. In some of the villages and towns, the group had to improvise lodgings – once bedding down in a deserted schoolhouse. But in Ukir, everyone stayed at the homes of Old Believers.
McIlvery stayed with Baba (“Granny”) Nastya, who had taken over ministering to Ukir’s populace from the nonagenarian Popka (“Priestess”) Yevka. Nearly 80, Baba Nastya still gets up at the crack of dawn and works to midnight, according to McIlvery. After she had done chores for a few hours, McIlvery recalls, “she’d put her cold, hard little hands on my face and kiss me to wake me,” and the day’s recording work would begin.
WHERE McILVERY AND DENG'S WORK often kept them holed up with computer files, research conducted by other expedition members sent them door to door and, in one case, window to window.
An Old Believer consults a hand-written religious text.
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Ross – who has been archiving Cold War-era propaganda material at USC’s Institute of Modern Russian Culture for the past two years – set out to make a photographic record of the project. Armed with three cameras and six or seven different lenses, she attended every recording session, snapping shots before and after performances (to avoid adding camera clicks to the inevitable teaspoon clinks).
The rest of the time, Ross pursued her own photographic interests. The cinema major found herself particularly drawn to images of windows and window frames.
“It was very interesting to note that they’re different from village to village,” she says. “Blue and green are used as the base color in most places, with white, red and yellow accents.” Some windows were simple, others incredibly intricate, almost like gingerbread, she found. Some were abstract, others representational.
“I wish I’d taken even more of them,” says Ross, who came back with 800-plus color slides in all. “I would like, at some point, to put these photos together as a personal project.”
MEANWHILE, ART HISTORY AND BUSINESS major Camille Perkins applied herself to studying the religious icons and the textiles and costume of the Old Believers. Documenting the textiles is important, Perkins says, because, like the old-style singing, the home-spun tradition is dying out. Villagers can no longer grow the necessary hemp, nor is it profitable to weave traditional designs when cheap, mass-produced TitanicT-shirts are pouring across the border.
A villager from Arkhangelskoe dressed in full traditional costume. USC student Camille Perkins recorded what she observed of Old Believer apparel and headdress.
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Perkins went knocking on doors with Klauz, Big Masha and Levitt. An opened door usually meant an open invitation to sit down to a meal and a long talk. Klauz gathered the religious genealogy and hunted for folklore (especially tales about a giant red-haired snake reputed to live nearby). Perkins asked to see old icons – ones rescued from the church burnings of the 1920s or smaller, more intimate ones passed down through families.
She reckons that the oldest may date back 200 years, but because icons are repetitions – reiterations of a past work, copies of copies of copies – and because they don’t change very much stylistically, they aren’t easy to date, Perkins says. The lacquer that tops many of the painted icons is one of the few rough guides: It turns black after about 100 years.
With Big Masha as interpreter, Perkins interviewed people about the icons’ histories and liturgical uses as well as their personal meanings.
In the process, she discovered several outdoor icon rituals and documented them for the first time. One family in Ukir, she found, buries a small metal icon with their potatoes every year in the belief that it will help the crop. They dig it up with the harvest and restore it to its indoor altar for the winter – until it’s time to plant again. Baba Nastya, the community’s religious leader, has an icon she puts outside whenever she wants it to rain.
What surprised Perkins was just how many of the Old Believers – who treasure their icons, displaying them prominently and with religious specificity in their homes – don’t even know the names of the saints they depict.
"THE TRADITIONS ARE DISAPPEARING," says Levitt, an authority on Russian culture and intellectual history. “One thing that impressed me was the degree to which the villages had been Sovietized. They lived through collectivization, through World War II. This group was subject to the same apocalyptic forces of modern Russian history as any other. They were subject to the same culturing or deculturing process.”
Music professor Richard McIlvery and student Amy Deng during a recording session. Beset by a shortage of electricity, frequent interruptions and relentless background noise, the team pressed on. “We decided eventually just to record everything – with clinking spoons, debates and all,” says McIlvery. “We had one chance to do this right, and we didn’t want to lose anything.”
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In many places, Levitt says, people don’t think of themselves as Old Believers anymore, just Russian Orthodox. They are no longer drawing a distinction between making the two-fingered or three-fingered sign of the cross. (Two fingers is a singular sign of Old Belief, famously captured in painter Vasiliy Surikov’s tableau of royal heretic-martyr Boyarina Morozova being hauled off for torture in 1672.) That women “deaconize” in Ukir isn’t in accord with canonical practice either.
“The state of religious life is complicated now,” Levitt says. “With the downfall of communism and with the country’s newfound freedom, there’s a definite religious revival underway. In one town, we saw a church being rebuilt – the people were working very hard with little means.”
Yet the heyday of Old Belief, Levitt knows, is long gone.
“I went expecting a group analogous to the Pennsylvania Dutch,” he says. “But my original notion of idyllic isolation was a figment of my own imagination. Or maybe it was like that before 1917.”
When Levitt and the other Americans left for home, they left with some disillusionment as well as a gratitude for the ease of Western life. Along with these, they had pocketed a bundle of memories:
A hand-cranked ferry, helmed by a solitary boatman, punting a busload of people and goods across the river. Horse flies the size of fists. Sunset at midnight. A one-eyed squirrel running in circles. And wading into marrow-chilling Lake Baikal, just to be able to say someday, “I went skinny-dipping once in Siberia.”
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