Musical horns in traditional musical culture of Western Polissia

Abstract

The function, and methods of producing signal horns in Western Ukrainian Polis- sia are characterized in this article for the first time. The research is based mainly on author’s own expedition records, as well as rare documents from the archive of Olek- sa Oshurkevich and other published sources. In traditional Western Polissian culture, the horn as a musical instrument was an integral attribute of the shepherds’ musical traditions, the same as hunters’ use. The following types of horns were developed according to their purpose: signal or entertainment (game). The first were used as signal music, which arose from the needs of communica- tion between shepherds in livestock managing; the second - mainly for esthetic plea- sure and entertainment. The horns are categorized into mouthpiece-less, mouthpiece and reed horns, as well as by the absence or presence of playing holes. The instrument had a hollow form of the natural horn of an ox, bull, ram, or oc- casionally a cow, into which shepherds could insert a wooden mouthpiece or a reed whistle. Usually, it was possible to produce only one sound on a shepherd’s horn, which determined the main tone of the instrument, and the types of sounds were played differently from each other in rhythm A single rare sample of the horn, which played a purely entertaining function in Polissian life, had a more complex design and, unlike the signal horns, it had a wide range of sounds which allowed performing various songs to accompany dances. In Polissian everyday life, the horn was used to perform dance music, mainly in solo, less often accompanied by song lyrics. Only with the development of performing art, this instrument became actively used in instrumental ensembles to make a variety of sounds and performers. It is difficult to prove how autochthonal is this musical instrument due to the nar- row area of using, the same as to describe the tradition of the playing. therefore, this topic needs further detailed study, as well as the research of other musical instruments function, in particular the trumpets, which were also an integral part not only of the shepherd’s life, but also other farmers’ musical traditions.