Tonality of Folk Funeral Chants in the Rzeszów Region

Abstract

Folk religious chants have already been the object of scientific study for several decades. The matter of morphological features of the religious repertoire in the living tradition includes several basic factors, such as poetic text structure (versification, strophic structure), stylistic and formal properties, metre and rhythm, melodics, and tonal considerations (cf. B. Bartkowski, Niektóre ce-chy muzycznej metrorytmiki polskich pieśni religijnych żyjących w tradycji ustnej, “Summarium. Sprawozdania Towarzystwa Naukowego KUL” 1978, no. 3 (23), p. 250). The purpose of this article is to present and analyse the tonal phenomena occurring in folk religious chants performed throughout the funeral rite in the region of Rzeszów (Rzeszów region – a region in South-Eastern Poland inhabited by the ethnic groups of Lasowiacy and Rzeszowiacy, which covers the approxi-mate area of the current ten districts (Tarnobrzeg, Stalowa Wola, Nisko, Kolbuszowa, Leżajsk, Mielec, Ropczyce-Sędziszów, Rzeszów, Przeworsk, and Łańcut). -cf. Kolędowanie na Rzeszowszczyźnie, ed. K. Smyk, J. Dragan, Kolbuszowa – Kraków 2019, p. 8, and range maps, pp. 382–383), especially during the prayer for the deceased at home, the procession to the church, the procession to the cemetery, and the inhumation at the cemetery). The musical scales upon which the melodies of the individual chants are based have particular significance in terms of their musical shape. In fact, the tonality, which constitutes a note system, influences the interval structure, the relationships between individual notes, the melody and, indirectly, the regional conditions for the performance of the chants (cf. B. Bartkowski, Niektóre cechy…, p. 250). The material will be presented based on the scale range criterion while individual tonal phenomena will be presented using selected examples.