Parallelism and Musical Structures in Ingrian and Karelian Oral Poetry
- Parallelism and Musical Structures in Ingrian and Karelian Oral Poetry
The focus of this essay is the complex relationship between textual parallelism and performance in historical oral poetry. Since there is no possibility of carrying out any personal ethnographic fieldwork, the main approach to the local categorizations and meanings of singing is to analyze recurrent patterns and combinations of different elements in archival material. This approach relates to discussions about ethnopoetics and textualizing oral poetry.1 Previously, I have analyzed the local understanding of genres and registers via the analysis of the relationships between poetic texts, melodic structures, singing practices, and performance arenas in archival material relating to one cultural area (Kallio 2013 and 2015).
The present essay analyzes relationships between textual parallelism and musical structures in sound recordings from two Finnic singing cultures with related languages and similar poetic forms, but different singing practices. The singers of Ingria and Archangel Karelia had slightly different uses, versions, and interpretations of so-called kalevalaic or Kalevala-metric poems (runo-songs).2 The singing styles of these poems varied by region, song genre, performance setting, and performer, and these kinds of factors also affected the relationship of textual and musical parallelism. On a general level, the recordings may be divided into four, partly overlapping cases:
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1). There is no regular connection between textual parallelism and musical structures.
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2). Textual parallelism is highlighted by melodic variation.
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3). Patterns of verse repetition are connected to textual parallelism.
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4). Textual parallelism and musical structures are mutually coordinated in a way that may even approach regular patterns of two or four verses.
The analysis of the relationship of the linguistic (or textual) features and the forms of performance is a task involving both abstract metrics and practical performances. In the case of Kalevala-metric oral poetry, certain forms of performance may affect poetic structures, such as parallelism, and, on the other hand, the metrical or linguistic form of the poem affects the way it is performed. Analyzing how performers link textual parallelism and musical structures in performance may allow for a more sophisticated analysis of what the singers themselves might have considered a parallel verse. The analysis of the relationship of textual structures and details of melodic variation is beyond the scope of the present essay, although such an analysis would offer new perspectives on the ways the singers understood both the textual and musical structures of their songs (see Oras 2004 and 2010; Särg 2001, 2004, 2005, and 2009).
The material of this essay consists of the oldest sound recordings from Ingria and Archangel Karelia: 244 recordings from Western and Central Ingria (1906-1938) and 272 recordings from Archangel Karelia (1915-1960).3 These include performances in Izhorian, Ingrian-Finn, and Karelian languages, all belonging to Finnic language family.
It is evident that the recorders had rather strong preferences towards certain types of performances. Roughly put, the ideal performance, for the scholars, was a long, poetically coherent epic poem performed with clear voice and musical structures similar, as much as possible, to the aesthetics of classical western music. The genres that lacked regular poetic structure or were evaluated to be improper, contemporary, or unaesthetic went mostly unrecorded (Kallio 2013:50-82; see also Stepanova 2014 on unmeasured laments). With the exception of the earliest recordings in Ingria, the recordings tend to be solo performances—and the solo songs often have more flexible structures than those performed by a group (Heinonen 2009; Kallio 2013:146, 164; Timonen 2004:260-61. In addition, the recording situations affected the performances, for example, by decreasing variation and altering the voice quality (Kallio 2010:396-98). Due to the recording history of Finnic oral poetry and the resulting character of the archival material, the present essay does not build on quantitative approach.
Poetics and Performance
Typically the only way to try to understand how the historical users and creators of archived oral poems have understood the relationships between different levels of poetry and performance is to analyze the poems and the different ways they have been performed. Although metrics themselves do not address the ways poems are performed, the structures connected to performance may sometimes add...
