The Concept of Ethnomusical Regionalism of the East Slavs: Formation and Current State

Regionalism occupies an important place in the system of modern Russian ethnomusicology, a branch of scholarship that studies the problems of the territorial structure of Russian and, more broadly, East Slavic traditional musical culture. The article traces the history of the formation of scholarship views in this field, the different stages of the formation of the concept based on structural, typological and geographical (areal) methods of research of traditional musical culture. The main scholarship achievements in the field of regionalism are associated with the names of Evgeny Gippius, Margarita Yengovatova, Irina Klimenko and other scholars. The main attention is paid to the largest level of spatial organization of the East Slavic ethnomusical culture — the musical and ethnographic macroregions formed on the East European Plain — the ethnic territory of the Eastern Slavs. According to this concept, three major musical and ethnographic regions are represented here: the Western (with the Ukrainian- Belarusian area as the center), the Northern Russian and the Southern Russian. The establishment of external and internal borders, the understanding of the laws of internal organization, the definition of unifying and differentiating factors, on the one hand, and the identification of systemic relations between macroregional cultures, on the other, are the main problems of East Slavic ethnomusicological regionalism. The main qualities of regional song traditions and the issues of their systemic relations are considered.