The Compound refrain in the old-style song from the Land of the Foresters, Hunedoara
The Compound refrain in the old-style song from the Land of the Foresters, Hunedoara

Summary/Abstract: The land of the Foresters from Hunedoara is an extremely rich area in terms of folk music productions, both from the occasional repertoire (carols, wedding or funeral ritual songs) and from the non-occasional repertoire (old style songs). During the field research campaigns carried out by Béla Bartók (1913-1914), Emilia Comișel together with a team of researchers from Bucharest (1946-1960) and Ioan Bocșa with Alina Stan (2017), the songs with free rhythm - parlando rubato, with an excessively rich ornamentation, with archaic melodic features, stood out due to several aspects. First of all, they were collected from the countryside, a very large number of songs belonging to this lyrical genre - the old-style song; the songs are individualized in the Transylvanian repertoire through distinct musical features such as the presence of different categories of refrain in the musical stanza and the way of interpretation, characterized by a strong vocal emission, chest voice, female group performance, very long sounds at the end and very long pauses between verses or stanzas. In the present study, we want to turn our attention towards those songs and melodic types which bring in the stanza a broader refrain, consisting of two musical entities, called compound refrain. Having at our disposal musical materials collected in different periods of time, we aim to identify these refrains within the melodic types, the evolution in time, the unitary character, as well as their spread in other folk areas.

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