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In the course of its history, the ethnolinguistic research in Lublin has undergone several major transformations. The initial stage was the focus on the language of folklore: a database of fieldwork data dedicated to this project was started. Then, the focus shifted to a dictionary of song formulae, which eventually developed into the Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols. The project was aided by the launch of the annual “Etnolingwistyka” and a book series, colloquially referred to as “the red series”, where theoretical and methodological issues of the project were discussed. With time, these moved far beyond the problems of folklore and country dialects and were concerned with the linguistic worldview, stereotypes and symbols in folk tradition and standard variety of Polish and other languages, the profiling of concepts, point of view, the speaking subject and the semantics of value terms. The latest stage is the international comparative project EUROJOS, concerned with standard varieties of languages and public discourses, and since 2012 also the project (ETNO)EUROJOS, targeted at Slavic folk traditions. A similar and corresponding endeavour is the regional but international Polish-Byelorussian-Ukrainian project “The Ethnolinguistic Atlas of Pobuże” (focused on a fragment of the river Bug region).
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Complexity of aspects related to the existence of traditional folk customs and rites in the contemporary culture of Poland makes the researcher select only some of the cultural facts. Influence of popular culture leads directly to desemiotisation, dominance of aesthetics, degradation of primary symbolism and as a result to unification and trivialisation of native cultural phenomena. The authoress focuses only on those customs and rites that have retained their regional dimension though they certainly couldn’t have escaped the influence of foreign culture. She is interested in the selected yearly events related to the annual vegetative cycle and the liturgy of the Catholic Church, which are characterised by magic and religious symbols and signs, and to the family life concentrated on the wedding and marriage. The regionally-marked examples were drawn from one region, i.e. Upper Silesia in Poland, and were collected mainly among native population, namely Silesians. The need to take into account diverse origins of a particular phenomenon is the sine qua non condition of examining Upper Silesia from the point of view of the cultural researcher. Ethnical autonomy of the Silesians can still be seen in many cultural facts which either result from long-lasting impact of Polish, Czech, Moravian and western culture, mainly the German one, or these are new cultural standards adopted from the popular western culture in recent years. Local people get used to them quickly and regard them as their own also “thanks to” the German minority and priests. In this context the authoress distinguishes between traditional relic forms and new ones of German origin, pointing especially to searching for gifts brought by the Easter Bunny (Osterhase), Advent or Christmas markets (Weihnachtsmarkt, Christkindlesmarkt), hen parties dominated with a pre-wedding cult of penis, weddings (wedding ceremonies) conducted on the stage and the so-called dream weddings. It is hard to reach a limit of eccentric ideas showing a transition from the rite and ritual to a theatre: there are many trivialised signs of a traditional rite, much attention is paid to folk ‘authenticity’ and there are numerous examples of folklorisation of second degree. An integrative function of such regional cultural heritage is very visible here. These new forms of annual and family rites in Upper Silesia are also an example of increasingly popular relations with German burgher culture and trivialised signs of regional identity, which are regarded by the authoress as the hybridisation of contemporary culture.
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Folk Songs of Thrace by Todor Djidjev is an impressive publication of the so-called grand collections. It provides deciphering of 1,066 songs with indexes and a CD. They were collected by the folklorist and researcher in the period 1964 - 1980, which was the time of his most active fieldwork. On the one hand, the work on the collection follows a long and fruitful tradition in publishing of large song collections from separate cultural and music regions. On the other hand, there are innovations in the final product. I would recapitulate some of these novelties. This is the first work on such a collection made by a Bulgarian interdisciplinary team. Thus among the important results, there is a program, which allows for working with the song collection like a database and searching by keywords. For the first time a CD with the fieldwork recordings is attached to the deciphering of such collection. Another novelty is the created appendix with all the lyrics. The main initiator and coordinator of this complex project is Prof. Lozanka Peycheva, DSc. She is compiler and editor together with Asst. Prof. Grigor Grigorov and Assoc. Prof. Nikolay Kirov.
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This article is an excerpt from an extensive study on the strategies of play in the work of Konstantin Iliev (1924 -1988). The fragments herein compare the images of the verbal ‘posthumous portrayals’ of Konstantin Iliev as a tragic figure with his real presence in the field of Bulgarian musical culture and New Mu sic in this country (similar to the one of Meletinsky’ s culture-hero, an ambivalent character combining the Creator with the trickster, with the destructive lust-rating character). Two time projections in the texture of his work are deduced: a linear-vectorial and a ludic-rhizomatic, hence, through musical and analytical characteristics of some of his pieces, the text arrives at the idea of a ‘rhizomatic’ and ‘vectorial’ composer’s conduct. The ambivalence of his figure is once again accentuated through his hypostases a conductor and a composer-which would pose a dilemma: a composer or a conductor? The traumatism of this division is further kindled by the different degrees of public legitimacy of these different expressions of music. It often results from ideological spins used arbitrarily by the authorities to bring to the fore and encourage (to their own ends) this or that hypostasis. The other side to this doubleness is the figure of a ‘composer wielding the conductor’s baton’. Many of the typical of the composer syntactic breaks of the traditional form could be explained by his conductor’s idiosyncrasy. The inner ‘conducting’ of a piece in the process of its composing includes in itself a strong representation of the bodily, of the play of tension and relaxation, of stalking as well as a flair for the concretely embodied experience of time. Konstantin Iliev’s composing in this respect is not so much a metaphysical act, but rather a relatively precise effect of his habitus of conductor/composer.
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The liturgy of Cosmas and Damian was established in Western Europe in the fifth or the sixth century, probably in Rome. About five centuries later, during the tenth century single chants were composed to commemorate the holy brothers. Of the available repertory, the antiphon Cosmas et Damianus Leontius, 001938 is the most notable. The chant occurs in about 30 different copies of the Antiphoner not earlier than in Antiphoner CH-SGs 391, dated to the late tenth or eleventh century. The study reveals that this antiphon probably belongs to an early corpus of melodies for the saints’ feast. Probably, at the time there was not a fully developed musical repertory for all or most of the liturgical hours. Certain copies of the eleventh and twelfth century from modem Italy contain a complete set of laudatory melodies for SS. Cosmas and Damian. An identical repertory, at least in terms of the in cipit, occurs in the Antiphoner of Worcester GB-WO F.160, about 150 years later. The article explores the repertory of antiphons in Antiphoner of Worcester. Presumably, according to observations concerning the analysed antiphons, one could differentiate two stages in the compiling of the repertory of SS. Cosmas and Damian, and the one in GB-WO F.160 is subsequent of the compiling of Cosmas et Damianus Leontius. This, in its turn, suggests that for unknown for the time being reasons, in certain regions of Italy and/or Rome, in the eleventh and twelfth century, a more special attitude towards the commemoration of the saints has been recorded, than what we know about in earlier periods. In case the assumption of the identity of the repertories for the saints from some Italian sources and the Worcester Antiphoner is relevant, it brings the question of liturgical or other interrelationships between the two cities. Answers to this question are yet to be given in future studies.
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The article presents the first part of a study of St Luke Passion (Passio et mors Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Lu cam, 1966) by Krzysztof Penderecki, a key work to the formation of the composer’s individual style, marking the beginning of a new period in his work, which includes large-scale sacred works that have become emblematic of him. Tracing the changes in the compositional technique of the Polish author is one of the main goals of the study. It also explores the question of writing a sacred work in the twentieth century and one, too, employing avant garde techniques. Moreover, the work in question is in a liturgical genre, which has gradually disappeared from the horizon of compositional interest since the mid-eighteenth century. Hence, the issue of reconsidering the Passion genre and its relevance to Western culture in the second half of the last century. By turning his attention to the traditions of church music, Penderecki not only implemented a change in his individual compositional style. In his ambition to achieve a synthesis of innovative means of expression and historical compositional techniques, the composer offered an artistic alternative to the leaning towards fetishism obsession of the avant-garde for the self-referential ‘radically new’. Penderecki’s creative solution is seen not only as a kind of artistic confession of personal religiosity, but also as a way of claiming a social and moral stance through art in the context of the post-war political status quo in Poland as part of the Eastern Bloc. Also dis cussed are the specific problems of composing a liturgical work in a situation of socialist ideology, restrictions on religion and aesthetic tenets for realism in the arts. In this light, the St Luke Passion is interpreted as Weltanschauungsmusik, music, revealing the composer’s moral and artistic world view, founded in church tradition and proclaiming the intransience of Christian philosophy as an ideal valid also in modem times. According to Penderecki, in his own words, the restoring of the sacred dimension to reality is the only method of saving man.
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At a political level, multicultural ism is deemed to be a utopia, but the processes of its establishing after the 1960s-defining, developing a methodology, integration in the legal and educational systems- have had their effects. In the memorial music following the First World War, multicultural thinking is an established fact. Through combining and placing diverse cultural lexical and music symbols in an environment of mutual substitutability, of equality, where they develop harmoniously in parallel, Alexander Kastalsky’s Requiem for Fall en Brothers anticipated the formula bequeathed by Karlheinz Stockhausen, according to which the overriding priority of our time is to preserve as many forms and manners of performance as possible so that to allow for hearing the vibrations showing themselves in forms in thou sands of different ways. In such a light of the idea of multiculturalism, using the parallel analytical approach between Kastalsky’ s example and later pieces of compositions of requiems for the victims of violence (incl. the requiems by E. Firsova, V. Artemov, K. Penderecki, J. Wallmann, etc.), the common traits but also the individual specifics are traced as well as some steady models such as intertwining quotations or paraphrases of the Dies Irae sequence; quests for the associative sonorous effect of campanology; implicit or explicit vision of theatricality; striving for comprehensive synthesizing of obvious national symbols; inclusion of poetic sources and their interweaving in the context of the canonical text of requiem; development of detailed concepts and theoretical argumentations, accompanying the compositions and showing clear pacifistic social messages; references to the canonical form and structure of requiem. The music observations are furnished with examples of scores and at times are argued with referent philosophical and anthropological views such as those by Samuel Huntington and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. The observations and conclusions map out the contemporary memorial music, particularly that of the requiem compositions, creating preconditions for further profound approaches and analyses within this field of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century music.
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This article is devoted to the 80th anniversary of Academician Vassil Kazandjiev (b. 5 September 1934), a notable Bulgarian composer, conductor and pedagogue. Vassil Kazandjiev is the author of numerous chamber works for unusual ensembles of various, differing in sounding instruments. Among these, there are five pieces for winds, strings and piano: Strofi [Verses] for flute/piccolo, violin and piano (1968), Concert Improvisations for flute, viola, harp and cembalo/piano (1974), Miraji [Mirages] for clarinet, violin, cello and piano (1997), Kaleidoscope (2002) and Trio-Sonata (2007) for clarinet, cello and piano. Chronologically, the pieces belong to different periods of his compositional work, while in terms of their expressive means such a division proves to be rather conditional. Kaleidoscope is solved entirely on the basis of sonorous and aleatoric means. It is closer to Strofi and Concert Improvisations (where the author used in various degrees the same compositional technique) than to Miraji, composed five years earlier, and Trio-Sonata, written five years later, where these means were applied especially and purposefully in some transitions and culminating points of the development. As the composer said, ‘I do not work by prescription, I do not devise in advance how this time the piece should look, but rather opt for my ideas intuitively, they would pop up in the act of expression and in my means of expression. The idea of a work of mine goes more often than not with a vision of a form, of an image and by image I mean the shape-generating process, the stages in the development’.
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This article looks at the dynamics of the relationship between the company and the family in an Estonian mining town. In the Soviet period, the "double movement" of the second wave of marketization ensured that the family continued to be embedded in the workplace.
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