Theoretical Aspects of Preservation and Reduction of Traditional Wedding Rituals of the Volga German Ethnic Minority in the Russian Federation

For the first time in world ethnomusicology, the work examines the theoretical aspects of the cultural transformations of the wedding ceremony of the Volga Germans, a subethnic group that arose in Russia in the eighteenth century. Identification of the structure of the ritual and its musical content is based on archival research and the author’s field expeditions of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.