Fyodor Stepanov (1870-?)

STEPANOV, Fedor Evfimovich (b. 15 Feburary, 1870; d. after 1947, exact date of death not available) was a well known composer, choral conductor, and music educator in Tambov, a provincial city some 300 miles southeast of Moscow. As choirmaster of the Tambov Cathedral, he was the first in his region to replace boys’ voices with women’s voices, following the lead of Alexander Arkhangelsky, who pioneered this innovation in the 1880s. As a composer, Stepanov had several of his early sacred works published by P. Jurgenson of Moscow. Written in a simple homophonic style, they employ a standard common-practice harmonic vocabulary and resemble numerous similar works that were popular in nineteenth-century Russia. According to some sources, he wrote as many as forty sacred choral works, but their publication status is unclear to this day. As an active choral musician in Tambov, Stepanov is known to have had a keen interest in the musical developments that were occurring in Russian church music at the turn of the twentieth century. He became aware of the innovative new works that began to be composed at that time in Moscow and St. Petersburg by composers of the “New Direction” in Russian Orthodox church—Alexander Kastalsky, Alexander Gretchaninoff, and their followers. These works tended to be written for large mixed choirs, employing octave doublings of voices to produce a rich choral texture, pedal points above and below the melodic movement of the other voices, “empty” fourths and fifths, and occasional parallelisms forbidden under the rules of textbook harmony—all of which became hallmarks of the new Russian style.

NOTE: Fedor Evfimovich Stepanov has been on occasion confused with two other individuals bearing the same first initial and surname: Fedor Vasil’yevich Stepanov (1867–1914), a prominent Russian flautist active in St. Petersburg, and Filipp Petrovich Stepanov (1857–1933), who served as the procurator of the Moscow Synodal Office from 1906 to 1917 and was thus the highest administrative head of the Moscow Synodal School of Church Singing. Although the latter was not a musician, his close association with the preeminent institution for Russian church music have led some mistakenly to attribute F. E. Stepanov’s compositions to him.