Marina L. Zaytseva

The study outlines the transformations that Russian museum activity has undergone in the second half of the 20th century in terms of forms and meanings. The authors conduct a historical review of the music festival "December Evenings", which is a museum project initially devised to embody synthesis of various arts. The paper singles out socio-cultural aspects promoting the development of artistic and educational Russian traditions, such as salons, music circles, musical and poetic evenings of the 19th — early 20th centuries, domestic solo and chamber ensemble performance. The analysis of "December Evenings" festival programmes revealed that the principles of monothematism and monostylistics were put forward from the very first decades of the museum project functioning. The authors identify the 1986's festival to be the peak of the monostylistic concept, which featured a concert and theatrical production of the play "The Snow Maiden" by A. Ostrovsky (with music by P. Tchaikovsky), set against the exposition of paintings by I. Levitan. The combination of musical programmes, art exhibitions, theatrical productions, and inviting museums to contribute with household items of the appropriate epoch reflects a creative and sometimes provocative nature of the projects aimed at updating the museum festival's format. 1988 and 1989's festival programmes demonstrated a tendency towards conveying new museum festival concepts, based on expanding the range of themes and designing polystylistic experiments. After the passing of the festival's founder, S. Richter, outstanding Russian violist and conductor Yu. Bashmet maintained the highly-performing standards of the participants invited to the "December Evenings". Simultaneously, he transformed the format from a chamber event, preserving the traditions of home music-making, to a large-scale secular festival. To devise the festival concept the comparing and contrasting were largely used, which allowed to determine common and distinctive features in the worldview of composers and artists and their expressiveness (the festival "Harmony and Counterpoint. Russia — Germany of the 19th century", 2003). The culturological aspect identified in the "December Evenings" festival provides an opportunity to single out the factors contributing to the project's success, ensuring its social significance, and providing the potential to re-actualise social memory and shape cultural consciousness of the society. The authors highlight the role social communication — accumulating and information preserving – plays in the project and focus on its crucial function within the festival. The study also addresses the potential for a long-term development of the festival.