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The Russian tsars' long-term legacy of manly polyphony: chant variants, sources, and features

The Tsar's Long Life to the Faithful Tsar is one of the first chants of the polyphonic manly repertoire. The choir clerks used them to glorify Russian tsars from John the Terrible to Peter the Great at festive services. Over the course of a century and a half, the ways of its fixation and notation, the titles of monarchs and the wording of the text have changed. The report compares the variants of the chant — lesser, medium, large and great, analyzes sources that are well-known and less studied. The peculiarity of a long period of time — an extended anenaika — presents a surprise: a conditionally "multi-textual" fragment at the end of the chant. Anenaika from a long period of time, unlike many other extinct glossolalia, remained in the tradition of the commonwealth until the 18th century, showing the real sound of such melismatic inserts.