Reconstruction of Typical Wedding Melodies Based on a Collection of Texts from the end of the XIX century from the Vicinity of Nizhyn Recorded by O. Malinka

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This article is devoted to analysis of wedding texts from the Mryn city by folklorist O. Malinka in his work “Malorusskoe vesilie (Svadebnyie obryady і pesni, zapys. v m. Mryn Nezhynskoho uez. Chernigovskoy gub.)”, which was published in 1897. Materials were probably collected during 1886-1890. In the collection, which contains a detailed description of the wedding ritual and 179 texts of wedding songs, unfortunately, there are no musical transcription of the lyrics. This void inspired several expeditions in order to find the “sound" of the texts. Ethnographers had a similar research experience who, since the 1970s, repeated fixations of folklore prose with “traces” of 19th-century folklorists. As a result of field investigations, 4 traditional wedding tunes were recorded, 30 texts of this collection were voiced, as well as a significant group (59 samples) of local texts that were not included in the collection from the end of the XIX century. This makes it possible to assume that Mrin’s wedding ceremony included at least 238 lyrics. By combining syllabic and rhythmic analysis of texts from the collection and audio materials collected by the author (in 2012-2018), in general, it was possible to determine 8 rhythmotypes of melodies in the local wedding repertoire. Among them, we highlight (a) a group of tunes, for which numerous plots are fixed (tirade compositions ‹Т6› и ‹Т53›), b) a group of forms with few or single texts (‹532›, ‹63›). A number of forms have been lost, namely: ‹532;557›, ‹5532›, ‹44р14;44р24›, ‹Т4›. All these rhythmotypes, as recent studies of left-bank wedding traditions show, are quite rare. The tirade compositions belong to the fret system, which in recent years is commonly called the "Desna" system. Strophic forms have special modal incarnations – the so-called three-support, characteristic of neighboring regions. This paper presents basic methods and features, which can serve as the basis of reconstruction of non-voiced texts in collections of past centuries.