Six-metre rhythms as a polyethnic melogeographic system (of rhythm-syllabic fragmentation in spring songs and fast sung verses of Ukrainians and Belarusians)

Abstract

In the education of academic musicians, the 6-bar measure is not mentioned as an object worthy of special attention – from an early age children are taught to count mainly in 2-bar and 3-bar measures. School science is unaware of the fact that in the folk music of Ukrainians and Belarusians a significant number of works are "served" by the 6-bar meter, which is well suited for both moving dances and choruses, as well as for lyrical musical expressions.
 Ethnomusicologists, analyzing thousands of archives of recordings of rural (indigenous) melodies of two neighboring ethnic groups, found huge arrays of songs based on the 6-meter monochronic model. The lion's share belongs to the wedding qi-class (more than 9 thousand), a smaller one – to the spring (1300). Both cycles created quantitatively and geographically powerful arrays of moths.
 Vesnyanky densely occupied the expanses of Podillya and Pripyat Polissya (I. Klymenko. Atlas of ritual melodies of Ukrainians, vol. 2, map A19). Instead, among Belarusians they are found locally in the eastern zone.
 Wedding songs formed a huge polyethnic macro-array that united Ukrainians and Belarusians (ibid., maps A46-47). 5700 wedding samples belong to tyradic forms, 3500 are strophic forms.
 In other cycles 6-dole formulas are found only locally (winter, Kupala, harvest). In the lyrical layer its popularity is insignificant (for example, the Ukrainian story "I had one daughter"). Choruses in 6-measure are also known (well-known Ukrainian "Choboty", "Yakiv", Belarusian "Lyavonikha", "Kamarynska" and others).
 The original rhythm formula is very simple (in conventional digital coding it is | 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ||, where 2 is equal to a quarter duration). But it gave a bunch of derivative variants, formed mainly in two ways - rhythmic-syllabic splitting of initial positions (| 1111¦2 2 2 2 || = V44 and other variants) and prolongation (lengthening) of individual positions, more often end positions (| 2 2 2 2 4 4 || and other less common variants).
 The range of various forms developed within wedding songs is relatively well studied - several articles were published in a special issue of "Problems of Ethnomusicology-8" (2013). Instead, vesniankas derived from the 6-dole model are described only in some regional varieties (Podillia and Polissya) – therefore they became the main analytical object of the article (with musical illustrations). The chorus pieces of 6-bar base are also commented. The conclusions about the polystadiality of rhythmic modifications of the model, caused by the drumming algorithm in different genres and regions, are made. Correlations between verbal accents and the choice of rhythmic figures are observed.
 The conclusions present a general genre picture of this typological group of melodies and outline the areas of their distribution, emphasize the prospects for in-depth study of ritual meloforms as arguments of the "archaeological type".