Our online course of learning how to play the gusli has finished. At the last lesson at the request of the audience, we learned three new games. The first is the declared game under the songs of “Zavidovka” of the Tver tradition, this is a play on the songs. The second is a game for dance and the eponymous song “Yablochko”. And the third is a play on the epic song ” Yegoriy and the serpent.” It should be noted, that the last is a formula and polytext play, various spiritual verses are performed to it. That is, after examining this one game, we learned to play other songs with a similar tune. Let’s sum up! Our video listeners (there were about 20 people in each session online and about a thousand hits posted video recordings of activities), have learned the basics of how to play the wing and helmet-shaped gusli, and learned all the basic techniques of how to play with the right and left hand, have learned the basic rhythms and learned to combine them, which serves as the basis rule for independent modeling the composition and arrangement of the game. Actually, the development of this skill gives us an opportunity to improvisation in the game, and this is one of the basic skills, that each guslar should know.
Video course contains the overview of the information on the issues of different traditions: North-Western, Southern, Central regions, as well as the Urals and Siberia.
Of course, we can’t make out all the main genre forms of Gusel music in for such a short time, so we plan the next cycle of practical classes, we will tell you about it in the near future. We thank all the participants for attending our classes and look forward to see you on our further lessons. See you soon!
You can watch our video lessons at the Russian gusli and Chinese guqin museum channel on Youtube.