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 Kalevalametric 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: