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Variation is a universal phenomenon permeating language, culture, and entire worldviews. This book analyses issues related to both specific and common variations in folklore and language as signifiers of culture and worldview. The articles here are dedicated to different genres and forms, including spoken and written language, dancing and singing, and festivities, and involve different aspects of variation. Variation is conceptualised here as the main basis of folklore dynamics and a major issue of typology. A significant part of the volume is dedicated to variations of myths and motifs, creativity, intertextuality, and transmediality.
Versification describes the marriage of language and poetic form through which poetry is produced. Formal principles, such as metre, alliteration, rhyme, or parallelism, take precedence over syntax and prosody, resulting in expressions becoming organised as verse rather than prose. The aesthetic appeal of poetry is often linked to the potential for this process to seem mysterious or almost magical, not to mention the interplay of particular expressions with forms and expectations. The dynamics of versification thus draw a general interest for everyone, from enthusiasts of poetry or forms of verbal art to researchers of folklore, ethnomusicology, linguistics, literature, philology, and more. The authors of the works in the present volume explore versification from a variety of angles and in diverse cultural milieus. The focus is on metrics in practice, meaning that the authors concentrate not so much on the analysis of the metrical systems per se as on the ways that metres are used and varied in performance by individual poets and in relationship to language.
Known for over thirty years in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the music of Estonian composer Veljo Tormis (born 1930) was not heard in the West until the 1990s. Tormis has written more than 200 choral works, an opera, a ballet/cantata, thirty film scores, vocal and instrumental chamber music, solo songs, and several orchestral pieces. Educated at the Tallinn and Moscow Conservatories, Tormis has integrated the techniques of 20th-century art music with the melodies of the regilaul or ancient Estonian folksong.Ancient Song Recovered: The Life and Music of Veljo Tormis is the first book in a Western language about a master of 20th-century choral music. The book includes chapters on Estoni...
The Power of Song shows how the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania confronted a military superpower and achieved independence in the Baltic “Singing Revolution.” When attacked by Soviet soldiers in public displays of violent force, singing Balts maintained faith in nonviolent political action. More than 110 choral, rock, and folk songs are translated and interpreted in poetic, cultural, and historical context. Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh7vFFjK0rc
The Kalevala, or runic, songs is a tradition at least a few thousand years old. It was shared by Finns, Estonians and other speakers of smaller Baltic-Finnic languages inhabiting the eastern side of the Baltic Sea in North-Eastern Europe. This book offers a combined perspective of a musicologist and a linguist to the structure of the runic songs. Archival recordings of the songs originating mostly from the first half of the 20th century were used as source material for this study. The results reveal a complex interaction between three different processes participating in singing: speech prosody, metre, and musical rhythm.
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The book focuses on intangible and tangible heritage, language and vernacular religion of the Ingrians, Setos and Votes, three Finnic ethnic minorities sharing a long-standing identification with the Russian Orthodox faith. Written by 16 authors, the chapters are mainly based on nineteenth- and twentieth-century materials. The research history and collecting of folklore are also discussed. The historical area of the Ingrians and Votes is located in Ingria, adjacent to St. Petersburg, while the Setos have inhabited both sides of the border of southern Estonia and Russia. All three groups live on the borderline of the Eastern and Western Churches and cultural realms. Currently, the Ingrian and Votic languages are extremely endangered, while the Seto language has approximately 12,000 speakers. There is a high local interest in the maintenance and revitalisation of all three languages and cultural traditions.
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