The Kupalo Tradition of the Village of Legedzyno (Eastern Podillya): Stylistic Changes at the Turn of the XX i XXI centuries

Abstract

Purpose of the article – comparative characteristics of musical and stylistic features of folk songs from the period of early summer to summer solstice (in the ethnic tradition of Ukraine this is the Fast of Peter and the Feast of Kupalo). These songs were recorded in the village Legedzyno Talne district of Cherkasy region in the late 1980s and early 2000s. The singers were women of the 1920s-1930s and 1940s-1950s births. Objective : to perform a comparison of the recordings at different times and to identify the characteristic features of the traditional singing style, to trace the changes in the local style in two generations of performers. Relevance : in the situation of the disappearance of tradition, in the first place, the musical style and singing manner disappear. We used historical, comparative and musical-analytical methods . The method of analytic phonetic transcription is used when notifying melodies. The basis of the folkloristic base is the archival materials of the Problem Research Laboratory of Ethnomusicology of the NMAU named after P. I. Tchaikovsky. The first section of the article contains an overview of the sources, in the second section - the ritual and ethnographic context of the Kupalo songs, in the third section - the comparative musical and stylistic characteristics of tunes (performance tempo and the level of ornamentation, frets and intonation features, texture of melody, timbral characteristic of voices). The main conclusions . We have summarized some observations. In the village Legedzino, the women of the 1950s (and younger) know the Kupala rites and songs. This demonstrates the importance of this genre for the local folklore tradition and its good preservation. But the manner of singing of ancient melodies has already become much simpler – the pace has accelerated more than twice. This has led to the disappearance of the original timbres, this was the cause of the disappearance of wealth in the range, intonation and ornamentation, which was fixed at the end of 1980s. Simplification of the musical language is a consequence of rethinking the temporal characteristics of traditional tunes and testifies to the loss of song stylistics among the younger generation of folk singers. These changes affected, first of all, the melotype of ‹ 54 2 ›. These melodies in the local tradition are much more original than the tunes of ‹ 53 2 ›. In addition, the form of ‹ 54 2 › dominates statistically (sung with a lot of poetic texts). Perhaps this is due to the origin of these two melodies at different times, their functional load in the ritual. In some cases, musical phonetics is the only marker in identifying a sublocal musical tradition. According to S. Protasova's observations, several locally-style zones are distinguished in the territory of Umanshchina. One of them was formed in the villages located in the middle and in part downstream of the Gorny Tikich river. Due to the slow pace and abundance of melodies, this song style was identified by the researcher as “ornamental”. A study of the Kupalo melodies of the village of Legedzino confirmed that it also belongs to this style zone, but is located at its southern borders. But on the basis of only records of the 2000s, it would be impossible to establish the style of belonging. The study of the phonetic features of the traditional musical language on the materials of older audio recordings is fundamental to the reconstruction of the “old world” musical style and singing manner.