Abstract:  
The article studies the problem of cultural tradition in the late period of the creative work of a Moscow composer Vladimir Rubin. The aim of the research is to reveal the tendency to the restoration of links with the historical past in Rubin’s spiritual compositions using the example of the oratorial tetralogy (the oratorios “The Song of Ascension”, “The Songs of Love and Death”, the vocal-symphonical cycle “The Guardian Angel”, and the oratory “Be Gracious”). The author detects Rubin’s artistic principles which are based on the traditions of the European music of the classicism and romanticism periods, Russian liturgical chant and Russian composing school. The research methods include the system-complex method, theoretical, historical-cultural, empirical, logical, and the method of extrapolation. The scientific novelty consists in the study of Vladimir Rubin’s oratorial work in the context of him inheriting the cultural and historical traditions. The author is the first to disclose the neo-mythological mind of the composer and the dialogics of the musical language and hypothesizes about the peculiarities of tessitura and register usage for the purpose of spatio-temporal organization of music fabric. The author concludes about the inclusion of Rubin’s large vocal-symphonical works into the framework of Russian spiritual music in general and spiritual oratorio in particular.