indeed, the reliques, the
trappings, the minaret-crowned monuments, the barbaric chants and gold
ornaments, all the thousand rich things that recalled Muscovy and the
buried empire to him, and that he loved so dearly, were valuable chiefly
because they were the emblems of the time that bore the happy present.

He was one of the famous "five" who in the decade after 1870 found
Russia her modern musical speech. The group, which comprised
Moussorgsky, Balakirew, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakoff and Borodin, was unified
by an impulse common to all the members. All were in revolt against the
grammar of classical music. All felt the tradition of western European
music to be inimical to the free expression of the Russian sensibility,
and for the first time opposed to the musical West the musical East. For
these young composers, the plans and shapes of phrases, the modes, the
rhythms, the counterpoint, the "Rules," the entire musical theory and
science that had been established in Europe by the practice of
generations of composers, was a convention; the Russian music,
particularly that of Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky, which had sought to ply
itself in accord with it, an artificial and sophisticated thing, as
artificial and sophisticated a thing as the pseudo-Parisian culture of
the Petrograd _salons_. It was their firm conviction that for the
Russian composer only one model existed, and that was the Russian
folk-song. Only in the folk-song were to be found the musical
equivalents of the spoken speech. Only in the folk-song were to be found
the musical accents and turns and inflections, the phrases and rhythms
and colors that expressed the national temper. And to the popular and to
the liturgical chants they went in search of their proper idiom. But it
was not only to the musical heritage that they went. In search of their
own selves they sought out every vestige of the past, every vestige of
the fatherland that Peter the Great and Catherine had sought to reform,
and that persists in every Russian underneath the coating of convention.
Together with the others, Borodin steeped himself in the lore and
legends of the buried empire, familiarized himself with the customs of
the Slavs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, searched libraries for
the missals illuminated by the old monks of the Greek church, deciphered
epics and ballads and chronicles, assimilated the songs and incantations
of the peasants and savage tribes of the steppes, collected