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Some Aspects of Formal Expression in Serbian Folk Songs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2019

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Extract

In serbian folklore, poetry and music are inseparable. The very term poem refers in popular speech to the combination of text and melody. There is no recitative “as if from the book.” Vuk Karadžić, in the preface to his first publication of songs, remarked on the difficulties he experienced in his attempts to write down spoken texts: “for many singers sing without thought; they can only sing the text but cannot recite it.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 By the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 

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References

1 Vuk Stefanović-Karadžić, Serbian Folk Songs, 1 vol. Državnno izdanje, str. xxxvii, xlvii, xlviii (Belgrade, 1891).Google Scholar

2 This term was first applied by Bartók, Bela in Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York, 1951).Google Scholar

3 The Greek term echos (Slavonic: glas) concerns the eight modes of the Byzantine Octoechos (Slavonic: Osmoglasnik). The Serbian folk term glas does not represent “mode” in this sense but has a descriptive connotation with respect to musical form and poetic structure.Google Scholar

4 First parts of the verse line are repeated, then the whole verse line.Google Scholar

5 Kajda means melody in some regions of Serbia. Turkish kaide (Arabic: qaidä) means rule, principle, order, foundation, melody.Google Scholar

6 Rabadžijski glas (“carting” glas) refers to the glas of the men who followed the loaded wagons (carts) in the nineteenth-century trade caravans.Google Scholar