Elena Roussanova Lucas (b. 1974) is a Russian composer and pianist who has spent most of her career in the United States, most recently as a Professor of Composition at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. As a child in the Soviet Union, she was recognized as a piano prodigy and began attending a series of prestigious Soviet music schools, including eventually the Ippolotov Ivanov State Musical Institute and the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, both in her hometown of Moscow. Along the way, she won several awards, first in piano, then in composition. She has since been recognized for her distinct and accessible music for wind band, orchestra, piano, and chamber groups.

Harvesting the Fields of Russia (2001) is Roussanova’s first published work for wind band. She provides the program notes:

Harvesting the Fields of Russia is a programmatic piece that musically depicts the scene of an early autumn harvest of the wheat fields across Russia in the nineteenth century. The first theme at measure 3 and measure 58 depicts many people cutting the wheat, swinging scythes. Through measure 31 the workers tire and their spirits lower. A woman can be heard singing a Russian folk song. She is later joined in chorus by all the workers. After the completion of a successful harvest, their spirits rise as they walk home to their houses at sunset.

This piece has an interesting origin story. From a 2010 article by Mary Hurley:

When an editor at Warner Brothers Publications asked composer and arranger Elena Roussanova Lucas to write a piece based on Russian folk music, she was pleased—and surprised. … [She] was not surprised that the publisher asked for a folk-based piece until she was told that she had only two days to finish before the recording session. While she was attending the Texas Music Educators Association Convention at the time, Lucas spent the next 48 hours in her San Antonio hotel room composing “Harvesting the Fields of Russia.” The piece later received an award in the Editors Choice category by the J.W. Pepper & Sons Inc. and earned best-seller honors.

Since that time, Roussanova has formed her own publishing company, Russa Nova Publishers, and has reissued a large portion of her music under that imprint. Visit her Berklee faculty page to get in touch with her about any of her compositions.

Here is Harvesting the Fields of Russia in performance:

Roussanova does not identify any particular folk song as her source material. So here is an unidentified Russia folk chant that has something to do with the harvest:

Incidentally, the image used in this video, Grigoriy Myasoyedov‘s “Mowers at harvest time,” is also the front cover image for Roussanova’s second edition of Harvesting the Fields of Russia.

See more about this piece at the Wind Repertory Project and its former publisher, Alfred Music, which bought Warner Brothers Publications in 2005.