Folk Songs of the Central Ukraine: Surprising Cherkashchyna

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Cherkasy Oblast, formed in 1954 from various districts of neighboring oblasts, is an important center of folk songs existence of Central Ukraine, covering a part of the ethnographic territories of Eastern Podillia and Middle Over Dnipro Lands. The history of recording folk songs with melodies on the territory of modern Cherkasy Oblast goes back more than a century and a half. Cherkashchyna is the region where Ukraine has been conceived as a state. The southwestern regions of the oblast belong to the ethnographic territory of Eastern Podillia, the rest belong to the Middle Over Dnipro Lands. Cherkashchyna is the center of the formation and development of a prominent regional cultural tradition, including folk singing. Cherkashchyna is the fatherland of Taras Shevchenko and Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, Ivan Nechui-Levytskyi and Mykhailo Starytskyi. Folk songs of the region have been recorded by Mykola Lysenko, Antin Kotsypinskyi, Oleksandr Koshyts, Andrii Konoshchenko, Klyment Kvitka, Mykhailo Haidai senior, Andrii Shmyhovskyi, Oleksandr Pravdiuk and others. Dialects of Zvenyhorodshchyna have been studied by Ahatanhel Krymskyi. The collections of folk songs by O. Oshurkevych and V. Dubravin have been published under the title Songs of the Shevchenko Region in 2005–2006. The project called Polyphony has been elaborated in 2014 (headed by Hungarian Miklós Both), supported by the European Union’s Creative Europe program. The archive is created in three languages: Ukrainian, Hungarian and English. The Museum of Ivan Honchar has become the moderator of the project from the Ukrainian side. A broad singing of vowels is typical for folk songs. Sometimes singers sing consonants marked with a separate sound in the notations. Performance is characterized by the presence of word breaks of various types. The means of concatenation – an interstanza opening, starting from the second stanza, when the last line of the previous stanza is repeated solo at the beginning of the next one – is considered as one of the signs of a long song style. From the musical point of view, the folk songs of the region combine the features of Eastern Podolian hum and Transdnieper prolonged polyphony.