Spring-Time Ritual Folk Songs from Zvenyhorodshchyna: Ethnography, Typology, Geography

Abstract

Spring-time ritual folk songs are currently a relict phenomenon in the local tradition of the historical Zvenyhorodka region (which covers the current Zvenyhorodka and parts of the neighbouring regions of the Right Bank of Cherkasy region) studies, so each recorded unit (song, text, description of a ritual or even a mention of their former life) is perceived by the researcher as an very important finding.
 In the Eastern Podillia region of Cherkasy region (on the lands of the historical Uman region) until recently, you could hear stories about the rituals and songs of the spring-time cycle. On the other hand, spring-time melotypes are almost completely absent in the Naddnipryanshchyna villages (except for Nadtyasmynnia area). In this way, Zvenyhorodshchyna appears as the frontier of the actual ritual folk songs certain layer existence and at the same time – a transition zone between two large ethnographic regions, which absorbed the musical and stylistic features of both of them.
 In the most complete collection of calendar and family rituals of the Right Bank of Cherkasy region, the beginning of the 20th century – monograph "Zvenyhorodshchyna" by A. Krymskyi, in addition to a detailed description of customs, rites and comments on them, contains more than 40 texts of spring dances, games and songs, as well as fasting verbal verses – "khrystuvannia", performed during the round of courtyards by children and young people on Easter. A certain number of samples of spring-time ritual genres are also found in music and ethnographic publications of different years and in the author's contemporary recordings.
 The largest part of the local spring repertoire is made up of round dance and dance songs: "Shum", "Kryvyi Tanec", "Mak", "Zaichyk", "Proso", "Podolyanochka", "Verbovaya Kladochka", "Tuman", etc. Spring dances begin to be led and sung from Easter or even during Lent.
 Among the genres of spring-time ritual singing, there are unique examples of early spring appeals, a group of lyrical ("velychalni" according to Y. Yefremov) ("Oh vesna, vesna, vesnyanochka", "Oi u pravuyu seredu", etc.) and timed ones to the spring season songs.
 The collected and analyzed musical and ethnographic data formed the basis of typological maps that allow us to draw conclusions about the geographical distribution of certain spring melotypes in the Zvenyhorodshchyna region.