Searching for the right form: A self-taught village player recalling performance live

Abstract

Repertoire of the excellent self-taught traditional dvojnice-player, Miladin Arsenijevic, from the vicinity of Topola (central Serbia) consists of lyrical songs of a newer rural repertoire. During a 'cognitive interview', in his attempt to recall and reconstruct old-time traveler's (putnicko) playing through performance, a 'real music situation', he has gradually condensed the developed form of the homophonic shepherd's song into the fragmentary form of heterophonic traveler's playing. In this paper the accent is on the player's search and creative process in his attempt to derive the right musical form of a piece, using his long-term memory, since he has not heard or played the piece for quite a long time. It is also a successful attempt to bring musical data from passive to active musical memory, and a transit from one collective semantic musical code to another. The motoric component plays an important role as well. The analysis of musical change shows that musical memory is a distributive system, and data is organized in groups. Musical parameters change: rhythm and tone are changed first, while other parameters seem to depend mostly on the shape of the melodic model; they gradually change while this element finds its right form.