Parallelism and Musical Structures in Ingrian and Karelian Oral Poetry

Abstract

Listening to historical oral poetry usually means listening to archival sound recordings with no possibility to ask questions or compare performances by one singer in different performance arenas. Yet, when a greater number of recordings from different singers and by different collectors is available, the comparison of these performances has the potential to reveal some locally shared understandings on the uses of poetic registers. In the present article, this setting is applied to examine the relationships of textual parallelism and musical structures in Kalevala-metric oral songs recorded from two Finnic language areas, Ingria and Karelia.

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Fig. 1. The beginning of a song on the mythical journey of Lemminkäini, performed by Nasti Huotarin’i.

SKSÄ A130/22a; musical transcription by Ilona Korhonen.

Fig. 2. Lines 10-19 of the song on the mythical journey of Lemminkäini, performed by Siitari Karjalaini.

SKSÄ A 296/5-8; musical transcription by Juulia Salonen.

Fig. 3. First lines of the song on the boat trip of the old sage Väinämöinen and the creation of the first Kantele-instrument, performed by Anni Kiriloff.

SKSÄ A 72/1. 1991, musical transcription by Juulia Salonen.

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