Dziesmu virknes kāzu apdziedāšanās tradīcijas kontekstā: īpatnības un problemātika

Abstract

Singing of mutual mocking songs in Latvian traditional culture is an ancient and highly cultivated custom. It can be found at clean-up days, traditional annual celebrations and family-related festivities. Of all the festivities, this tradition is most vividly manifested in weddings and has been preserved in some places until today. Singing usually takes place between two groups – boys and girls, unmarried girls and married women, guests and housemates, etc. During the wedding, the singing takes place mainly between the relatives of the groom and the bride. This custom, which permeates the entire wedding ritual, symbolically features a clash between the groom’s family and the bride’s family, which allows psychological tension to be discharged by reaching the catharsis. In particular, singing mocking songs effectively discharges the accumulated negative feelings in a socially permitted manner. The 12th volume of the academic edition “Latvian Folk Songs” (Latviešu tautasdziesmas) was published in the summer of this year. This volume continues, which was started in the previous volume by publishing wedding songs. This edition covers the wedding theme more completely than all the ones published so far, so the texts included in the 12th volume and those not included were selected as the sources for this study. A folk song is usually understood as a content-autonomous and structurally closed quatrain, but when working with song manuscripts, it turns out that they are not always complete texts in content and form or aesthetically perfect texts. Additionally, a fairly large number of songs consist of much more than four lines. If we look at the tradition of Latvian folk songs as a whole, it can be seen that, for various reasons, long songs and strings of songs have been significantly less studied; therefore, the article focuses on one of these phenomena – strings of songs. The article also focuses on the importance and development of the wedding mutual mocking song singing tradition over time and the variability and improvisational nature of the mocking songs. At the end of the article, attention is paid to the following problems of publishing strings of songs: lack of classification principles, volume limitations, including whether and how the mentioned reasons have influenced the inclusion of a string of songs in the 12th volume of “Latviešu tautasdziesmas”.