#Old town horse song structure strophes full#
#Old town horse song structure strophes series#

#Old town horse song structure strophes series#

In my edition of the Karakalpak epic of Edige in the Finnish Folklore Fellows Communications series I have followed this practice by including a CD with audio and video clips. The second edition of Lord’s Singer of Tales, prepared by Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy (2000), did just that: added a CD with a video-clip and all the examples of the book as audio-files.

In the early volumes small records, and in later publications CDs, are added to the various editions and translations. A notable exception are the volumes of the series Pamyatniki fol’klora narodov Sibiri i Dal’nego Vostoka (Monuments of the Folklore of the Peoples of Siberia and the Far East), published by the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk. Only rarely do editions and translations of epics contain musical illustrations in sound. The volumes in the excellent Russian series Èpos narodov SSSR (Epics of the Peoples of the Soviet Union), now entitled Èpos narodov Evrazii (Epics of the Peoples of Eurasia), generally have an appendix on the music of the epics edited and translated, often with musical notations. John Smith’s edition, translation and study of the Rajasthani epic of Pābūjī contains a section on “The words and music of Pābūjī’s epic.” Similarly Gordon Innes’ edition and translation of three Mandinka versions of the epic of Sunjata gives some information on music, also with some musical examples. In some cases the musical aspect is somewhat better described. In Daniel Biebuyck and Kahombo Mateene’s edition and translation of the Banyanga Mwindo epic (from the Democratic Republic of the Congo) the performance of the epic is characterized as “music, rhythm, song, dance, movement, dramatic entertainment,” but the music is neither discussed nor illustrated. Lauri Honko, who edited, together with his native collaborators Chinnappa Gowda and Viveka Rai, the Tulu epic of Siri, gives some information on the differences between the dictated and the sung versions of the epic in the accompanying textualization volume, as well as on the singing of the epic in the paddyfields. This is so even in cases where a living tradition furnishes material for a study of the music.

When we look at editions and translations of oral epics world-wide, we find that even if the importance of music is acknowledged, it is generally ignored in practice. Lord notes this in his preface to the first volume of Serbocroatian Heroic Songs: As the epics are sung in performance, the analysis of music can be helpful for a correct transcription, at least when the texts are transcribed from the recordings rather than taken down from the singer’s dictation.

#Old town horse song structure strophes full#

Lord collaborated with Béla Bartók on their Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs and encouraged Stephen Erdely to transcribe more songs from the Parry collection, a collaborative effort that resulted in the full transcription of three South Slavic epics from the Bihać region of Bosnia. In the first volume of Serbocroation Heroic Songs, he included Béla Bartók’s transcription of one of the songs ( The Captivity of Đulić Ibrahim).

Although music is not discussed in Lord’s book, he was, of course, aware of the importance of the musical aspect of performance. With this title Lord acknowledged the fact that the South Slavic pjevač is literally a singer, who accompanies his song-appropriately termed pjesma-with a musical instrument. When Albert Lord published his ground-breaking study of South Slavic oral epic poetry in 1960, he entitled his book The Singer of Tales: the singer of tales, not the narrator of tales.