A Measure of Kinship:

Music in the Mission of the Orthodox Church

REV. MIKEL HILL

It was a remarkable procession that filed through a crowded Episcopal church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on September 5, 1905. Leading the procession were the parish’s cross-bearer, acolytes, choir, and rector, Father Charles Brine. Following them were seven Russian Orthodox clerics in richly embroidered vestments, including several who were prominent in the Church’s leadership at the time: Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky, dean of Saint Nicholas Cathedral in New York, Fr. Benedict Turkevich, and Constantine Buketoff, who would later serve as an archpriest in Brooklyn. The occasion that brought these Americans and Russians together was no less remarkable. A treaty, ending the two-year war between Russia and Japan over rival imperial ambitions, had been signed at Portsmouth earlier that day. In thanksgiving for this event, a service was held to which the Russian, Japanese, and American diplomats had been invited.

Reports describe an extraordinary experience. The service began with evensong, the Anglican choir singing the processional and Magnificat. At its conclusion, Father Hotovitzky offered a short homily in English. The Russian clerics then gathered at the high altar and sang the Te Deum (To God) in an arrangement by Dimitri Bortniansky. The New York Tribune described this moment “as the most solemn and impressive of the service.” Hotovitzky likewise reflected in the Russian Orthodox American Messenger, “Such singing, perhaps never heard in this church and in such strong, affecting accord, must have amazed the Americans.” Indeed, wherever the Russian church was discussed in the American press, the magnificence of her services and the beauty of her music did not fail to amaze.

The Orthodox Church, upon her expansion in the lower forty-eight in the 1880s, gave a prime role to music within her mission to attract non-Orthodox. Directors and their choirs acted as ambassadors, presenting the Orthodox Church to American audiences in a wide variety of forms and venues. Confident in their own tradition, they did not shy away from appearing in contexts outside their own church, viewing such encounters as opportunities. Parish priests also recognized the power of music to act as a bridge between Russian Orthodox and Americans. In 1919, Fr. Joseph Stephanko, the rector of Saints Peter and Paul in Passaic, New Jersey, arranged for his parish’s choir to present a concert. At this event, Fr. Joseph explained that its purpose was “to show the soul of the Russian people as it expresses itself in its devotion, knowing full well that its splendor will not only appeal to the American people, but that it will also reveal the beauty and solemnity of Russian church music.”

The best way to understand the place of music within the mission of the Orthodox Church during the early 20th century is to examine the careers of two particular church musicians: John G. Boruch, the director of the parish choir in Passaic, and Constantine Buketoff, a priest and noted baritone soloist. The records of their activities illustrate a common approach by which Orthodox immigrants engaged with the wider ecclesial culture of the United States.

John G. Boruch served as choir director in Passaic, New Jersey from 1903 to 1932. Under his direction, the choir of Saints Peter and Paul became one of the largest and most renowned choral ensembles in New Jersey. Boruch was born in 1877 in Galicia, (in modern-day Western Ukraine). In 1897, he came to the United States, where he first served as choir director in Olyphant, Pennsylvania and later in Passaic, where he and his wife, Mary Maceiko, raised two sons and two daughters. In 1932, Boruch was ordained to the holy priesthood and moved to North Carolina to serve a parish near Wilmington, remaining there until his death in 1969.

Choir of Saints Peter & Paul, 1919

Throughout Boruch’s tenure in Passaic, newspaper reports provide a glimpse of the broad range of his activities. In 1905, he and his choir appeared on a program at Passaic’s Reid Memorial Library. The Passaic Daily News commented that the choir sang selections in both English and Russian “in a most capable manner.” The evening concluded with a rousing rendition of “America the Beautiful.” And in 1913, a new church for Saints Peter and Paul was consecrated in an impressive service. In the spacious choir loft, joining Boruch’s singers were Igor Gorokhov and the celebrated male choir of New York’s Saint Nicholas Cathedral on 97th street. The impact of the music on the non-Orthodox guests at these events was obvious. After the consecration service, the Daily News the next day observed, “Russian music will surely have a place in the memories of those strangers who attended the dedication services yesterday and it might be said that there was a great number of outside denominations represented.”

Generally speaking, among those denominations most impressed by the Orthodox Church and its musical tradition was the Episcopal Church. At the national General Convention of the Episcopal Church held in New York in 1913, the choir of the Russian cathedral gave a concert that was much discussed afterward. The following year, Passaic’s Episcopal church of Saint John invited Boruch and his choir to take part in a “special musical service.” The service was introduced by the St. John’s boys choir singing Choral Evensong in a setting by Thomas Tallis. Boruch’s mixed choir of sixty voices, in turn, offered several selections that included “The Opening Psalm”—in Russian—by Ippolitoff-Ivanoff and J.B. Dyke’s “Lead Kindly Light,” which they sang in English. Such was the success of the concert, that the invitation was repeated the following year. From such examples it is clear that music was an ideal vehicle for the Orthodox community to present the spirit of its faith in a congenial and non-combative manner. John Boruch, as a capable director, served to directly represent the beauty of Orthodox worship to the larger Christian world in liturgical contexts.

If John Boruch represented the Orthodox faith through his facility as a choir director, others during the early 20th century brought wide recognition to the Orthodox Church by their accomplishments as soloists. A leading example is Constantine Buketoff.

Buketoff was born in Kherson (in modern-day Ukraine) in 1881. As a child, he was a soloist at the Kherson Cathedral. In 1904, he moved to the United States, where his older brother, Feophan, was the priest at Three Saints in Ansonia, Connecticut, near New Haven. Constantine directed the choir at Three Saints for two years, during which time he sang at the momentous Portsmouth event. In 1907, he briefly returned to his homeland to marry the sixteen-year old Millitza Lebedeff, the daughter of a priest. Upon his return, Constantine was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Raphael (Hawaweeny). He served as rector in New Britain and Hartford and helped to found several other parishes in the Connecticut area. In 1919, Bolshevik agitation at his parish in Hartford forced Father Constantine and his family to relocate to New York City, where he became the choir director at the previously mentioned Russian Cathedral of Saint Nicholas.

Constantine Buketoff

Prior to his move to New York, there are occasional news reports of Buketoff performing as a soloist, including a mention of a “musicale” in which he appeared at Hartford’s Asylum Avenue Baptist Church. But it was in New York where his career as a soloist began in earnest, facilitated by his study with the renowned vocal pedagogue Lazar Samoiloff.

In the April 1920 issue of the Musical Courier, a review appeared in which Buketoff was introduced as the “possessor of an exceptional baritone voice, which has aroused the interest of many persons.” Walter Kramer, editor for Musical America, claimed in the same article that Buktoff “has quite the most phenomenal baritone voice outside of Titta Ruffo.” Mr. Ruffo himself, the famed Italian baritone of the Metropolitan Opera, reportedly wrote to Mr. Samoiloff to compliment his excellent work as a teacher, adding that Buketoff’s “voice is a most wonderful baritone of gorgeous quality and unlimited range. I am sure under your guidance he will make a most brilliant career.” Buketoff’s range is demonstrated by the repeated instances in which he is praised for his rendition of the Prologue from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, which includes both a low B and a high A-flat. After hearing Buketoff’s performance at The Bohemian Club, the famed conductor and accompanist Max Liebling wrote that he had never heard the Prologue sung better.

Father Buketoff appeared in dozens of concerts over the course of the next few years. At a performance in New York’s Town Hall, he was joined by both his own choir of Saint Nicholas Cathedral and the choir from the Russian Orthodox seminary in Tenafly, New Jersey, under the direction of Dimitri Ressetar. The New York Tribune praised both choirs, but said the “best singing was done from the cathedral.” At the concert, Buketoff also sang, as a solo, Mikhail Chernoff’s “The Eagle,” and was praised for possessing a “voice of great beauty and power.” 

Buketoff taught Russian music briefly at the Master’s Institute, founded in 1921 by the Russian artist Nicholas Roerich on Riverside Drive in New York. He is listed among its faculty in 1923. He also continued to appear as a soloist, though his pastoral duties occupied most of his attention. He served for a time at St. Mary’s in Brooklyn, at Sts. Peter & Paul in Bayonne, New Jersey, and finally at Holy Transfiguration Cathedral in Brooklyn, where he stayed for the remaining time of his ministry. His last major musical appearance was at a gala held at the Metropolitan Opera in 1926, at which he was a soloist in Hammerstein and Gershwin’s Song of the Flame.

To encounter an Orthodox priest on the stage of the Met or a Russian choir singing at an Anglican evensong may appear extraordinary in our modern experience. Very few of the vocal ensembles currently championing Russia’s sacred music have any association with the Orthodox Church. Even fewer are soloists whose musical careers are supported by the Orthodox Church.

However, the figures of John Boruch and Father Constantine, both of whom enjoyed wide recognition and popularity both inside and outside the Orthodox Church, were not unique in the ecclesial landscape of the early twentieth century; dozens of other examples can be found. The Orthodox Church viewed these musical ambassadors as essential to her mission to America’s non-Orthodox. Father Leonid Turkevich, then dean of Saint Nicholas Cathedral, wrote in 1916: “The love of Russian church music, the growth of which we see of late in America and in England, makes all the Orthodox so truly glad. In this appreciation and the desire to learn more of our divine services we see a measure of kinship, even of the unity, of Christian souls in which the One Christ should reign supreme.” 

Metropolitan Leonty’s enthusiasm for the evangelical power of music might serve as a source of inspiration for a revitalization of the mission of the Orthodox Church in the twenty-first century. The Church needs a new generation of musical ambassadors to awaken a sense of kinship among all Christians in America by means of music and thereby to call them to return to the one Christ.