WEDDING MUSIC AND POETRY FOLKLORE OF THE RUSSIAN POPULATION OF THE SOUTHERN URALS

Abstract

The traditional wedding song of the Russian population living on the territory of mining villages in the Beloretsk district of the Republic of Bashkortostan still remains little studied area of knowledge from the ethnomusicological point of view, and for the first time becomes an object of special research. Analytical base of the article are the expeditionary records made by students and teachers of philological faculty of the Magnitogorsk State University in 1995–1999 under the guidance of the candidate of philological sciences T. I. Rozhkova. The author of the article carried out the editing of song samples. The complex approach used in the article in the analysis of ritual texts, taking into account the results of philological, ethnographic and musicological classifications, allows to systematize the repertoire of the Beloretsk wedding, to distinguish two musical and stylistic groups — song-and-lament and song-and-dance groups. Each musical and stylistic group combines a part of the wedding repertoire, which is characterized by a certain set of typical features reflecting the specifics of the form, genre, and content of songs in their direct relationship with the condition and place of performance in the rite. The analysis of musical and stylistic originality of Russian wedding songs and lamentations is conducted at the level of verbal, syllabic, and pitch parameters of chants organization. The found regularities allow to draw a conclusion about the musical and stylistic unity of local ritual and non-ritual folklore genres, providing not only the preservation of the corpus of wedding songs and wedding rites, but also the vitality of the local singing tradition as a whole.