Doukhobor choir music

I really love this stuff. A few years ago I was corresponding with a girl from Victoria who was Doukhobor and also getting a degree in music from Uvic, her specialty was Doukhobor choir music and she also apparently had a great set of pipes being operatically trained and such. She was the first Doukhobor I'd ever met who wasn't also a relative of mine so that was cool, she sent me mp3's of some traditional music and I had them all on my old computer, I especially love the psalms. the Doukhobor Psalter comprises a large part of an even larger oral tradition which for a very long time was the foundation of the religion. Being a heretical breakway sect in Russia my ancestors suffered a lot at the hands of both the church and the Tsar they were victims of progroms and were routinely sent to forced labour camps in Siberia where the hope was that they would work themselves to death. There's a story in my family about one of my great-great-grand fathers who was conscripted into the millitary where in protest he refused to carry any form of weapon and refused to ackgnowlege the ranking officers, he was sent to a millitary prison where they flayed him to death and threw his body onto a pile of horse shit.

Anyway this is sort of coming back to Doukhobor Choir music. Doukhobor worship as I understand it could be described as charismatic, centred on the Holy Spirit and in communal singing. The number of hymns and psalms is amazing, nobody knows them all and until relativly recently nobody who knew them knew how to write them down. Another thing that developed from being forced into gulags was since they weren't allowed to sing their prayers or hymns they would take one of their songs or something like the Lord's Prayer and then chant it in a monotone and drag out every word for as long as possible so that way the guards wouldn't immediatly catch on to what they were singing. The girl who told me all about this didn't like the chanting as much as some of the other Doukhobor music but I think that's one of the best parts of the tradition.

The majority of Doukhobors were rescued from genocide by the efforts of Leo Tolstoy, the Quakers and members of the international Anarchist community most notably Peter Kropotkin. The novel Ressurection by Tolstoy was written as a way for money to be raised so that the Doukhobors could move to Canada and the book The Kingdom of God is Within You was based in part on correspondances that Tolstoy had with Peter Verrigan The Lordly who became the leader of the sect after one of my relatives Lukeria Kalmykova died.

I'm writing all about this now because I found an old sample tape where I had dubbed a couple of the songs off of my computer. I would love to learn what the words they are singing actually mean but I'd have to learn russian or borrow the skills of one of my friends... Josina can I use your mind for a few minutes?