The Incantations of the Veps People: Issues of Learning a Musical Language
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Abstract
The article is devoted to research of incantations of the Veps people – an ancient genre of oral ritual poetry of the peoples
of Northern Europe, one that is the least studied at the present day. There have been various kind of incantations in
existence: the ritual (pertaining to weddings, funerals and recruits) and non-ritual (“ad hoc” incantations). The article
gives an idea of the earliest notated incantations of the Veps peoples and, in general, of the history of research of
Veps incantations from the point of view of their musical specificity in Russia and in other countries. While revealing
the specificity of this musical and poetical genre of the Veps ethnicity, the author examines issues of researching the
language of music, in particular, the vocal technique. Most of the Veps’ funereal incantations are characterized by
their gradual rise of tessitura, which is obviously caused by the intensity of intonating, connected with a heightened
emotionality. This, in its turn, stipulates the instability of the vocal technique, assembled from stable and mobile
segments of the sound fabric. The research of the Veps musical culture, in particular, the analysis of the pitch structures
and the vocal techniques in the incantations (which cannot be expressed by our established system of musical notation),
have been carried out with the aid of contemporary research methods of ethnomusicology with the application of
computer technologies (with provision of programs making it possible to carry out a detailed analysis of the temporal
structure of any type of musical signal).
Keywords: the culture of the Russian North, Baltic-Finnic folk music, incantations of the Veps people, ritual
communication, the vocal technique of incantations.
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References
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