Strophic Form Research Articles

The specificity of musical shaping in the “Psalms of David” choral cycle by R. Tolmachov

The relevance of the article. “Psalms of David” in the poetic adaptation of Taras Shevchenko have long been a part of the choral culture of Ukraine. More than 20 composers have created musical versions of these texts, using separate verses or the entire work.
 The latest version of the Psalter is the choral cycle of the Ukrainian conductor, singer, composer and teacher Ruben Tolmachov.
 The first nights of the work took place under his leadership in May 2023 and had great success and public resonance. That is why the introduction of this work to scientific discourse is relevant.
 The purpose of the article is to reveal the specificity of musical shaping in R. Tolmachov’s “Psalms of David” choral cycle in its relationship with textual semantics.
 The methodology. With the help of textual analysis, the semantic types of psalms (didactic, pleading, laudatory, accusatory) and the peculiarities of their musical structure were determined. By the means of structural, musicological and intonation analysis, the implementation regularities of the semantics of the psalms into specific musical forms have been established.
 The results. The musical structure of all psalms was analyzed, the patterns of musical shaping were revealed, and the specifics of the relationship between the musical form and the content of the poetic text were described.
 The scientific novelty. For the first time, the analysis of the structure of Ruben Tolmachov’s choral cycle based on Taras Shevchenko’s poem was introduced into scientific discourse.
 The practical significance. The results of the research have practical value for performers of works by R. Tolmachov, as well as composers and researchers of choral music.
 Conclusions. In R. Tolmachov’s “Psalms of David” cycle the principle of strophic composition of parts prevails.
 In general, four main types of musical shaping can be highlighted, which are partially correlated with the thematic focus of the psalms.
 Didactic (enlightening) psalms, which depict the pious life of the community, have more “stable” forms (two-part, three-part).
 Psalm 12 and Psalm 149 have signs of a thorough development based on monothematism.
 The accusatory psalms, dedicated to the future Judgment Day (52, 93, 81), are made up using strophic forms with elements of reprise. At the same time, the 81st psalm is characterized by a less active dramatic development and contains a solo episode of a cathartic nature, which is designed to emphasize one of the central ideas of the cycle about the mortality of a person, regardless of his/her status, about higher moral and spiritual values.
 It is also worth noting that the architectonics of R. Tolmachov’s psalms is mostly characterized by the final position of the climaxes.

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

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".

I want to celebrate as hymns acculturation of i will sing of my redeemer (an analysis on a Sangihe Masamper song)

This research aims to analyze the acculturation process through the hymn <em>I will sing of my Redeemer, which became </em>Hymn Masamper<em>I Want To Celebrate. </em>I will use a qualitative approach to explore the perspective of ethnomusicology and hymnology through observation, interviews, and literature review. Observations have been made for a long time because the researcher is also the artist of Masamper Art. But the focus of observation from 2008 until now has been Observations were made on various Masamper performances in the Sangihe community in the Sangihe Islands and the Sangihe diaspora community on the mainland of North Sulawesi in the city of Manado. The results of the analysis found that the existence of the song "I want to be grateful," Masamper's singing in the Sangihe community, is the result of acculturation from the Hymn. song<em>I will sing of my Redeemer works by Philip </em>Paul Bliss. The results of this acculturation found that there was a change in form from a 3 stanza strophic form to a 1 stanza strophic form, but it is done repeatedly. The bars have also changed from 9/8 bars for the original song to bars for mourning (Masamper Sabuah) and 4/4 bars during party performances or competitions (Mebawalase). The tempo changes from fast to slow but uses stress on each word. Meanwhile, the meter still uses the 8.7.8.7 CM (Common Meter) pattern except for the refrain. The syllabic pattern, or singing with one note for one syllable, is still carried out, but new developments have emerged in the Sangihe community, namely the Manahola singing style, or singing before the main song word, the Mamaranca style of singing repeating words in the verse that are currently being sung, and the Yora style of singing while singing. Do word stresses on the refrain or repetition of the song, which is usually done while dancing.

Herrman S. Saroni: Paths to Success as a Composer in New York, 1844–52

Herrman S. Saroni: Paths to Success as a Composer in New York, 1844–52

HACIA UNA MIRADA INTERCULTURAL DE POESÍA PARA VIDENTES DE JOSE LUIS AYALA

The visual poetry of Jose Luis Ayala in Poesía para videntes (1988) represents the assimilation of two cultures, western and indigenous, which together with the configuration of the strophic forms transgresses the Peruvian avant-garde as it was known at that time with Oquendo de Amat. In this way, with his influences in the Orkopata Group, Ayala masters indigenous poetics and disseminates it through a standard language so that it is recognized without having the barrier of understanding. That is why this work deals with the decomposition of the poetic structures of the poem through the intercultural analysis proposed by Camilo Fernandez to fully understand the construction procedures that the poet from Puno uses.

Bartók and the Violin Music of Maramureș

Abstract The Second Rhapsody, one of Bartók’s technically most demanding concert pieces for violin, arranges archaic-improvisatory bagpipe imitations for concert performance. The arrangement itself shows a well-designed, coherent structure: the succession of dances, tonally and motivically related between each other, outline a kind of evolutionary progression from free motive-structure to strophic form. Bagpipe-music had a long-term influence on Bartók’s violin music, figuring as episodes in original works like the two Violin Sonatas or the Violin Concerto; but none exploits the genre to such an extent as the Second Rhapsody. The violin pieces with motive-structure of fascinatingly wild and virtuoso character were among Bartók’s major discoveries of the collecting trips to the Maramureş region. For the Rhapsody Bartók chose melodies from the one-time Ugocsa county, whose music, closely related to that of Maramureş county, was considered by him “the most interesting in our country [i.e., Hungary of the time], due exactly to its primitive character.” In Maramureş these melodies are less eccentric; instead, the violinists have a broader and more varied repertoire of dance music. In my article I discuss the different types of violin music of this region, focusing on structural, melodic, or interpretational elements that were of special interest for the composer. For this investigation I have made use of the primary sources of the respective collections: phonogram recordings, field notations, later transcriptions.

Jenő Ádám’s Church Music Compositions

"In the present study I intend to present the church music compositions of Jenő Ádám. I will analyze the choral works of the composer that were based on the melodies of Protestant church hymns. The composer was also active as a conductor, but his name is primarily known in the field of music pedagogy. He played an important role in the elaboration and implementation of the Kodály method. In his works pertaining to church music, he adapted the melodies of the most representative church hymns of different ages. He uses both homophonic and polyphonic approaches with his works that have strophic structure or are through-composed. Keywords: Genevan Psalter, Protestant hymn, Kodály method, strophic form, through-composed works, homophonic and polyphonic approaches in composition."

The Musical Language of Rock

The Musical Language of Rock

Apollinaire et le «talisman | Mort et plus subtil que la vie» (“Les Collines”)

The main purpose of this article is to shed light on the particularly obscure 17th strophe of “Les Collines”, the important poem by Apollinaire which was originally published in Calligrammes (1918). How should the meaning of «…un talisman | Mort et plus subtil que la vie» be interpreted? The hypothesis of an allusion to Christian religion has been proposed (Schleifenbaum, 1972). While such conjecture cannot be completely excluded, other probative arguments based on the specific context of the poem and, more generally, on Apollinaire’s aesthetics suggest that the allusion rather concerns the rhymeless strophic form adopted for “Les Collines” mainly as a “calligrammatic” image: it is the strophic form imitating the quintil d’octosyllabes which is so relevant in the poet’s work. This is further demonstrated and confirmed by the fact that Apollinaire calls “talisman” a quatrain sent to him in 1915 by his “marraine”.

Describing the verse of Russian émigré poets: Poetry by Nikolay A. Shegolev and its metrical system

The article analyses Russian émigré poetry: it describes the lyric poetry of Russian emigrants in the Far East, its connection to the poetry of the metropolis and the western branch of Russian emigration. The work is focused on one of the least studied issues in the history of Russian émigré poetry, i. e., the specific development of its verse. Lyric poetry by Nikolay A. Shegolev (1910–1975), a poet of the so-called “Russian China”, offers extensive material in this respect. His poetry has been overlooked in terms of academic verse analysis to date; however, many scholars note that he was very much involved in experimental poetry. This article presents the results of a unique comprehensive analysis of Shegolev’s metrical system. The analyzed corpus includes all of Shegolev’s lyric texts available today, i. e., 110 works, 2470 verses. The authors’ analysis embraces the different literary contexts of Russian poetry: Silver age poetry, Soviet poetry, and the émigré poetry of the western branch. Statistical calculations demonstrate that Shegolev’s lyric poetry is distinct due to a vast variety of meters and verse patterns (i. e., combinations of metric and strophic forms). Evidence is provided to substantiate the assumption that in most poems the choice of a particular model is associated with motifs, theme, plot and style. It is concluded that the logic of Shegolev’s experimental verse was shaped by his individual pragmatic vision: in the setting of historic and cultural emigration, the poet was desperately pursuing ways to preserve the connection between pre-revolutionary and Soviet culture, and to naturally synthesize the heritage of classic Russian poetry with Russian poetry of the new era.

Notes on the vectors of analysis of the “metrical” repertoire of Troubadour poetry

The subject of this research is the principles of presentation to the reader of the full corpus of poetic texts of troubadours in a specialized publication in form of metrical-strophic reference book. Analysis is conducted on the approaches towards compiling such type of compendium demonstrated By I. Frank and V. B. Tomashevsky in 1950s. The author determines the strong and weak aspects of their prosodic publications. Taking into account the specificity of Old Provencal poetry, the author defines the additional ways of its presentation in the reference book comparable to I. Frank’s “Metrical Repertoire of Troubadour Poetry” that retains scientific fundamentality of the latter and addresses its flaws. The novelty of this research manifests in creation of a range of methods for compiling compendiums of strophic forms of Provencal poetry and conducted classification according to the principle of the volume of strophes, which in this article is presented in appendix page. The author concludes on the need of utilization of various methods of composing reference material, which would maintain apparent connection of strophic forms of different sizes substantiated by plausible genre proximity; possible correlation between the late medieval forms of literature in Romanic languages and forms of troubadour poetry, for establishing genetic affinity with the latter and the subsequent creation of historical poetics of the European strophe.

Children’s choir in MarkKarminskyi’s creativity

Children’s choir in MarkKarminskyi’s creativity

О двухчастных стихотворениях Ф.И. Тютчева

The article presents a typology of Tyutchev’s two-part poems, created on the basis of revealing the nature of semantic relations between their compositional elements. These are poems: 1) ith a philosophical or moral-psychological generalization in the second part, which does not just reform the content that is already clear to the reader, but reveals its meaning in the language of concepts and images (the implicit form and various variants of the explicit form: a common motif that binds the parts together; a dialogue; a chain of rhetorical questions; a persona’s consciousness, contemplating and ranking a lyrical character as the artistic center of the lyrical structure); 2) with the psychological gesture in the second part that conveys the desire of certain actions, able to change something in reality or in the inner world of the lyrical “I”; 3) with parallelism of human and nature, implemented mostly through the expanded comparison without, as a rule, a complete analogy (situation: the lyrical hero contemplates a particular material object – and an association with the world of the human soul comes to their mind); 4) with the contrast of objects of nature, its states, human and nature, life and death. In connection with the last point, it is specifically emphasized that one should not confuse the logic of contrast with contrast as a compositional technique. In the light of the analytical and interpretative operations, the following conclusion is made: all the types of relations between the two compositional elements, noted in the article, are represented by both symmetrical and asymmetric structures corresponding to different strophic forms, which allows us to speak about the flexibility of the poet’s artistic thinking, which finds different structural models for expressing the philosophical and moral-psychological content.

ЕВОЛЮЦІЯ ВЕСІЛЛЯ НА ВОРОНЯКАХ: СЛІДАМИ ОСКАРА КОЛЬБЕРҐА Й ОСИПА РОЗДОЛЬСЬКОГО

Contemporary folk expeditions “retracing the footsteps of predecessors” belong to some of the most important and far-reaching research areas of folkloristics. Ethno- graphic materials representing different epochs from a geographic area can be used for comparative study. As a result, it is possible to consider evolutionary processes and external influences on oral traditions of a geographic area over a period of time. Thanks to the existence of ethnographic field notes of the traditional wedding ceremony in the Voronyaky region (Brody district, Lviv oblast) made in the second half of the 19th century, these processes can be observed and quantified. Collected by prominent collectors of musical folklore Oscar Kolberg (1814–1890) and Osyp Rozdolsky (1872–1945), these records of folk traditions are unparalleled in their his- torical and ethnographic significance in Ukrainian folklore studies. Not only do they establish a reference point to critically assess the collection of folk music of the previ- ous era, they also provide evidence of how the wedding tradition has changed in the region by comparing them to more recent field recordings. Thus, this study has several objectives. First, it examines the extent of ethno- graphic work completed by O. Rozdolsky and O. Kolberg in the Voronyaky region. Next, the methodological approach to collecting music is assessed, which determines how representative these materials are to the geographic area in question. The eth- nographic materials from different periods are compared to determine the structural, semantic, and repertoire changes of the wedding ceremony. Lastly, an analysis of the wedding ritual cycle as practiced in the Voronyaky region – its ethnography and melo- typology – is completed based on extensive contemporary field work of the region conducted by the author. A comparison of the collected folk song materials from different time periods shows the extent of the changes of the Voronyaky wedding ceremony, especially in its song texts, the order of rituals, its form, and content. While a trend of the simplifica- tion of the wedding ritual (e.g., the length of the traditional wedding is shortened from two days to one day), the process of how the modern wedding ceremony has been simplified from its previous practice is described. Similarly, the study shows how the repertoire of older wedding songs are performed less frequently or have also been shortened compared to earlier recordings from the last century. A similar tendency is observed with the melodies from the different periods in both quantitative and qualitative terms. A musical analysis and comparison of the melodies show a decrease in the total number of melodies performed throughout the ceremonies. Some of the melodies have been replaced by new ones, usually composed songs of literary origins associated with new wedding ceremonies. This simplifica- tion of the ceremony also affected the song forms themselves, which is most vividly expressed in the wedding chants and the recitative songs, which in more recent times have adopted more strophic forms.

Reconstruction of Typical Wedding Melodies Based on a Collection of Texts from the end of the XIX century from the Vicinity of Nizhyn Recorded by O. Malinka

This article is devoted to analysis of wedding texts from the Mryn city by folklorist O. Malinka in his work “Malorusskoe vesilie (Svadebnyie obryady і pesni, zapys. v m. Mryn Nezhynskoho uez. Chernigovskoy gub.)”, which was published in 1897. Materials were probably collected during 1886-1890. In the collection, which contains a detailed description of the wedding ritual and 179 texts of wedding songs, unfortunately, there are no musical transcription of the lyrics. This void inspired several expeditions in order to find the “sound" of the texts. Ethnographers had a similar research experience who, since the 1970s, repeated fixations of folklore prose with “traces” of 19th-century folklorists. As a result of field investigations, 4 traditional wedding tunes were recorded, 30 texts of this collection were voiced, as well as a significant group (59 samples) of local texts that were not included in the collection from the end of the XIX century. This makes it possible to assume that Mrin’s wedding ceremony included at least 238 lyrics. By combining syllabic and rhythmic analysis of texts from the collection and audio materials collected by the author (in 2012-2018), in general, it was possible to determine 8 rhythmotypes of melodies in the local wedding repertoire. Among them, we highlight (a) a group of tunes, for which numerous plots are fixed (tirade compositions ‹Т6› и ‹Т53›), b) a group of forms with few or single texts (‹532›, ‹63›). A number of forms have been lost, namely: ‹532;557›, ‹5532›, ‹44р14;44р24›, ‹Т4›. All these rhythmotypes, as recent studies of left-bank wedding traditions show, are quite rare. The tirade compositions belong to the fret system, which in recent years is commonly called the "Desna" system. Strophic forms have special modal incarnations – the so-called three-support, characteristic of neighboring regions. This paper presents basic methods and features, which can serve as the basis of reconstruction of non-voiced texts in collections of past centuries.

Spiritual song in the genre system of sacred music: questions of terminology

Purpose of the Article. The purpose of the article is to clarify the place of the spiritual song in the genre system of sacred music of the main Christian denominations based on the analysis of the basic definitions of the spiritual song genre in various national traditions. The research methodology consists of a combination of comparative, historical, cultural and musical-liturgical methods, with the help of which the spiritual song was described as a component of the genre system of the European liturgical musical tradition from the Middle Ages to the present. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time in Ukrainian science, based on the characteristics of the definitions of the genre of the spiritual song in different national traditions and confessional centers, national and confessional features of the genre system of European sacred music were highlighted. Conclusions. The genre of the spiritual song throughout the history of Christian music has been interpreted in different ways. In early Christianity, the spiritual song was interpreted as a poetic fragment of the biblical text, which came on behalf of the Old Testament or New Testament characters. This tradition has been preserved in Western Christian and Eastern Christian hymnography. In the late Middle Ages in Western Europe, the genre of spiritual songs transformed. The term «song» («cantio») began to denote musical and poetic works of the strophic form written in Latin, and later in national languages, which performed the paraliturgical function, but over time became the central musical and poetic genre of the liturgy of the Western rite, radically changing it genre system. In the Ukrainian-Belarusian lands, under the influence of the Western liturgical tradition, the term «song» as a musical and poetic work of a strophic form became the basis for defining the genre in all Christian denominations. In the Russian spiritual-song tradition, which was fundamentally different from the Ukrainian-Belarusian lack of long-term connections with the Catholic culture, the musical and poetic works of the strophic form were called psalms or spiritual verses.

Beispiele zyklischer Elemente in mehrstimmigen Lamentationen des 16. und frühen 17. Jahrhunderts

Der Begriff Lamentationszyklus {Lamemtationes Jeremiae Prophetae) hat zwei Bedeutungen: der liturgische Zyklus umfaßt je nach Zeit und Region eine bestimmte Anzahl und Kombination von Lektionen - und der musikalische Zyklus, Gegenstand der vorliegenden exemplarischen Untersuchung, in dem wiederkehrende Satze der musikalischen Gestaltung (Strukturierung und Verklammerung) dienen. Im späten 15. Jahrhundert lassen sich Beispiele fur eine schlichte strophische, eng an den Choral (tonus lamentationum) gebundene Anlage feststellen. Im Laufe des 16. Jahrhunderts wurden differenzierte Zyklusformen entwickelt, in denen nicht nur Sätze wiederholt, sondern auch wiederkehrende Satzmodelle paraphrasiert wurden. Satzwiederholungen strukturieren Lamentationszyklen; bestimmte wiederkehrende Sätze haben Refrainfunktion. Zyklische Elemente zeigen sich als gattungsspezifisches Gestaltungsmittel, die von vielen Komponisten individuell eingesetzt wurden.

Строфический макросинтаксис: октава, терцина, сонет (Россия и Италия)

The article discusses the results obtained with the help of a computer program created for the automatic analysis of strophic syntax. The program was created using Boris Tomashevsky’s method, which is based on the analysis of punctuation at the end of the poetic lines (the strength of the syntactic pause is evaluated depending on the absence or presence of a punctuation sign: a comma, a dash, a semicolon or a full pause / question mark / exclamation mark). The application of this method to different types of poetic texts made it possible to describe general and unique trends, characterizing authors of different national traditions and periods. This result shows the necessity of a macrostudy that would include a larger number of strophic forms, texts and time periods.

Metrics and Textual Criticism in the Cantigas d’amigo: External Responsion by Pairs of Strophes

In the cantigas d’amigo external responsion (the inter-strophic correspondence of verses that occupy the same position in the strophic form) is sometimes observed by pairs of strophes. Recognition of this phenomenon solves what had seemed to be problems in several texts and should be taken into account in textual criticism.

"SEVENTH VERSES IN BRUSOV’S STROPHIC REPERTOIRE"

"The author comes to the following conclusions by analyzing ten cases of the use of seventh verses by Brusov: 1. These poems aren't cyclizing in the strophic of Brusov poetry either in thematic or in genre forms or structurally. 2. The different strophic models, which have never repeated each other, are used in them. 3., Despite the passionate interest which he had in the most exotic strophe structuring, the experimenting poet didn’t reach the half-sonnet as a firm strophic form."