INTERPRETATION OF INDIVIDUAL LOCAL PERFORMANCE STYLES OF SONG TRADITION OF UKRAINIAN KUBAN

Abstract

In the proposed the author, based on collected in 1990-1996 on the territory of the historical Black Sea region (the steppe part of the modern Krasnodar Territory of the Russian Federation ) and personally transcribed multi-genre Ukrainian folk song (more than 1.000), has studied and interpreted the individual local performance styles of five Kuban folk female singers of high artistic level. Having defined the style as a musical-aesthetic and musical-historical category, one the interpretations of which is the individual manner of specific creative work, and connected the word-group of the performance song of oral functioning with the notion of interpretation as an individual explanation of musical ethnic work in the process of its performance, the author specifies local song styles of the Ukrainians’ Kuban tradition through the artistic description of its brightest (accented) representatives. Thus, the basis of melismatic performance style by Olga Demianenko (born in 1911, Starokorsunska village, Soviet district of Krasnodar) is the drawling vocalization of poetic syllables and improvisational and free creation of the song composition. Liuboy Korchina (born in 1931, Nedvedivska village, Tymoshivsk district) demonstrated a refined, recitative-cantilene ornamental style of instrumental type, saturated with tirades, passages, grace notes, and fioritures. Nataliia Sliepchenko (born 1935, Starodzhereliivska village, Poltava district) possesses a bright ornamental recitative-cantilenestyle with elements of fioriture and “overtone” (by its definition) manner of intoning. Sophia Nesterova (born 1916, Starokorsunska village) tends to drawlingsinging of song’s melodic details and variationalcouplets formation. Antonina Shakhvorostova’ (born 1928, Voronezka village, Ust-Labinsky district) cantilenadrawlingstyle,which was influenced by the Old Cossack Don singing, can be called contaminated Ukrainian-Kuban, where сantilenе linearity seems to modulate from tone to tone in aflow of “viscous” melointoning. These singers, for many years of their efficient creative life, provided for own self-expression, contributed to accumulation and update of the stable and mobile fund of the melodic-rhythmic elements in “own” local environment and, despite sufficient social challenges, total Russification and offensive of local consciousness and regional system of standards, maintained national constant signs of primary culture.