Academic literature on the topic 'German Folk dancing'

Every village has its ‘misfits’ – weirdos living at the outskirts of the community, who are only more or less tolerated by the rest of the residents. The reasons for their isolation are manifold – it can be illness, disability, but also life experiences such as war, unrequited love and political persecution. Many of them found solace and expressed themselves through art, which was often referred to as naive and primitive, as well as Art Brut. This was how they made their living, or searched for the meaning of life. In the process, they also became custodians and chroniclers of village life – its history, customs, problems and beliefs, which formed a peculiar syncretism of past and present. This mixture of the primitive and the modern delighted Ludwig Zimmerer, a German press correspondent turned collector of Polish folk and independent art. This fascination was also shared by filmmakers, including Andrzej Wajda. Some of them, like Wiesław Dymny, Henryk Kluba, Witold Leszczyński, Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Wojciech Smarzowski, and Jan Jakub Kolski, tried to picture this world of ‘village weirdos’ in their films, sometimes resorting to putting them in the role of their protagonists. This was the case in Kolski’s Jańcio Wodnik [Johnnie Waterman], Słońce wschodzi raz na dzień [The Sun Rises Once a Day] by Kluba and Dymny, as well as Leszczyński’s Konopielka Królikiewcz’s Tańczący jastrząb [The Dancing Hawk] and Smarzowski’s Wesele [The Wedding]. Each of these films showcases the village outsider or a character who becomes an outsider in the course of its plot. At the same time, the audience ventures into the seemingly exotic world of the Polish countryside and learns about its history from a hitherto unknown perspective.

Statement of the problem. Nowadays, there has been a high demand for historically informed performance, including in the educational process. However, a young performer often faces not only technical problems, but also a lack of understanding of the performance style. So, the relevance of the topic of the article is caused by urgent needs of modern concert and stage practice related to historically oriented performance as well as by the task of modern music education to introduce the Baroque styles into the educational process of vocal performers. The article offers the experience of musicological reception of the early aria genre using the example of the French “air de cour” as the personification of European Baroque aesthetics. The genre, which is little known to both Ukrainian and Chinese vocalists, is considered from the standpoint of a cognitive approach, which involves a combination of practical singing technology with the understanding of the aesthetic guidelines of the baroque vocal style as an original phenomenon. One of the manifestations of it is the “sung dance” (singing in ballet) as the embodiment of artistic synthesis rooted in the musical and theatrical practice of France during the time of Louis XIV with its luxurious court performances, a bright component of which were “airs de cour”. To reveal the chosen topic it was necessary to study scientific literature in such areas as the issues of performing early vocal music (Boiarenko, 2015), the history and modernity of vocal art (Shuliar, 2014; Hnyd, 1997; Landru-Chandès, 2017); peculiarities of the air de cour genre, which are highlighted with varying degrees of detailing in different perspectives in the works of European and American scholars: 1) in publications on the synthetic opera and ballet genres in the time and at the court of Louis XIV, in particular ballet-de-cour (Needham, 1997; Christout, 1998; Verchaly, 1957; Harris-Warwick, 1992; Cowart, 2008); 2) special studies (Durosoir, 1991; Khattabi, 2013; Brooks, 2001); 3) monographs on Baroque music (Bukofzer, 1947); 4) reference articles by authoritative musicologists (Baron, 2001, the editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica and others). A study that would focus on the aesthetic principles of the modern vocal interpretation of air de cour as a sample of the early aria genre has not been found. Research results. Air de cour, the origins of which are connected with the secular urban song (voix-de-ville) in arrangements for voice and lute and lute transcriptions of polyphonic vocal works of the Renaissance, was popular in France, and later, in Europe at the end of the 16th and 17th centuries. As part of the popular synthetic theatrical spectacle – ballet-de-cour, which combined dance, music, poetry, visual and acting arts and flourished at the court of Louis XIV as an active means of sacralizing the king’s person, “air de cour” even in its name (which gradually replaced “voix-de-villes”) alludes to the social transformations of the French Baroque era with its courtly preferences. With the transition to an aristocratic environment, the link of the genre with its folk roots (squareness, metricity, melodic unpretentiousness) weakens, giving way to the refined declamation style of musique mesurée; the strophic repetitions of the melody with a new text are decorated by the singers with unique ornamentation (broderies), which is significantly different from the Italian. The poetic word and music complement the art of dance since air de cour has also adapted to ballet numbers, providing great opportunities for various forms of interaction between singing and dancing and interpretation on the basis of versioning – the variable technique of combinations, which were constantly updated. Vocal numbers in ballets were used to create various musical imagery characteristics. When choosing singers, the author of the music had to rely on such criteria as the range and timbre of the voice. As leaders, the creators of airs de cour used high voices. This is explained by the secular direction of the genre, its gradual separation from the polyphonic traditions of the past era: the highest voice in the polyphony, superius, is clearly distinguished as the leading one in order to convey the meaning of the poetic declamation, to clearly hear the words, turning the polyphonic texture into a predominantly chordal one with the soprano as the leading voice. Hence, the modern performing reproduction of air de cour, as well as the early aria in general, requires a certain orientation in the characteristics of the expressive possibilities of this particular singing voice; for this purpose, the article provides a corresponding classification of sopranos. So, despite the small vocal range and the external simplicity of the air de cour form, the vocalist faces difficult tasks, from deep penetration into the content of the poetic text and reproduction of the free declamatory performance style to virtuoso mastery of the technique of ornamental singing and a special “instrumental” singing manner inherited from Renaissance polyphonic “equality” of vocal and instrumental voices. Conclusions. What are the aesthetic principles of vocal music of the European Baroque period that a vocalist should take into account when performing it? First of all, it is an organic synthesis of music, poetry and choreography. The connection of singing with dance plasticity is inherent in many early vocal works. Hence the requirement not only to pay attention to the culture ofrecitation, pronunciation of a poetic text, understanding of key words-images, which precedes any performance interpretation of a vocal work, but also to study the aesthetic influences of various arts inherent in this or that work of Baroque culture. Air de cour differs from the German church or Italian opera aria as other national manifestations of the psychotype of a European person precisely in its dance and movement plasticity. Therefore, the genre of the early aria requires the modern interpreter to understand the socio-historical and aesthetic conditions of its origin and existence and to rely on the systemic unity (polymodality) of vocal stylistics. The prospect of research. There are plenty of types of vocal and dance plasticity in early arias; among them, rhythmic formulas and dance patterns of sicilianas, pavanes, and tarantellas prevail; movement rhythm (passacaglia). And they received further rapid development in the romantic opera of the 19th century. This material constitutes a separate “niche” and is an artistic phenomenon that is practically unstudied in terms of historical and stylistic integrity, continuity in various national cultures, and relevance for modern music and theatre art.

Artikkel uurib regilaulu teema-analüüsi võimalusi teemade modelleerimise meetodi abil. Meetodi kasutamisel on probleemiks regilaulu keele piirkondlik varieeruvus. Laulutekstide esmane analüüs näitas, et sisukamaid tulemusi annab teema-analüüs ühtlasema keelega kogumite puhul. Lähemaks vaatluseks valitud Hiiumaa, Saaremaa ja Muhu laulude teema-analüüsil tuvastati 20 teemat, mis annavad kiire ülevaate vaadeldavate laulude temaatilisest struktuurist. Uurimus näitas, et tuvastatud teemad jaotuvad vaadeldud piirkonnas võrdlemisi ühtlaselt. Kuid arvutuslikud teemarühmad ei kattu üheselt regilaulu varasema liigitusega, arvestamata laulude žanrilisi erinevusi ning tuues esiplaanile vaadeldavas laulukogumis sagedamini esinevad laulutüübid. The article explores possibilities of computational topic analysis of Estonian runosong texts using the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modelling. Runosong is an oral poetic tradition known among most of Finnic peoples. Estonian runosong texts, the material of the current research, have been collected mainly since 1880s and gathered into the Estonian Folklore Archives of the Estonian Literary Museum, where the runosong database with more than 100 000 texts has been compiled (Oras et al 2003–2020). Language of runosongs varies considerably across dialects and, in addition to that, it uses a specific archaic idiom different from the spoken language which complicates the computational analysis of the content aspects of the texts. Topic modelling is a method that enables to discover abstract topics detected statistically on the basis of the frequency of the co-occurrence of the words in the texts. In case of a runosong corpus, the method could be used to automatically detect the thematic structure of a large amount of runosong texts, to compare the thematic distribution of regional traditions of the runosong, and to analyse how the thematic distribution obtained with the help of computational methods relates to the classification of the texts resulting from folkloristic analysis. The idea of the current article is to explore whether topic modelling can give meaningful results if applied to unlemmatized and highly variative runosong texts. For LDA topic modelling I used the application MALLET (McCallum 2002). The initial trials with the whole corpus of runosong texts made it clear that the language of the songs is too variative to reach the level of content. It also became obvious that it is necessary to remove stopwords and refrain words. The topics, obtained from the runosongs from all over Estonia, represented dialectal variants of the language rather than thematic clusters and it was necessary to restrict the material. I used stylometric analysis (using R package stylo, Eder et al 2013) to divide the area into linguistically more homogenous subregions, and chose the area of Western islands of Estonia with 16 parishes and 3672 song texts for further explorations. With this material I decided to generate 20 topics. Within this smaller area the topics did not cluster regional language variants any more: (1) the linguistic variants of the main concepts of a topic were brought together under the keywords of the same topic; (2) in most cases, the detected topics were distributed among all the parishes included in the selection. Looking at the 20 keywords, the topics indeed seemed to reflect certain thematic subgroups of the songs. In several cases the most prominent song type of a topic was reflected in keywords, in other cases the keywords referred to larger groups of songs. Five of the 20 topics focused on weddings, more precisely, on different episodes of the wedding ritual: adornation and dressing, arriving and greeting, finding the bride and taking her to her new home, sharing the presents prepared by the bride, and recommendations to the bride and the groom. In all these topics the verbs refer either to the present or the future (rather than to the past which is common in narrative songs). A topic of swinging songs includes also the songs about dancing and feasts. Five topics focus on different narrative plots about the troubles of young people, about wooing and marriage. Lyric songs about the life of orphans and about singing form a separate topic each, and there is a separate male topic covering the songs of various genres related to horses, riding and the woods. The largest topic includes the songs on working at home and outside, but also the songs about premarital sex. There are two topics with the focus on well-known children’s songs and lullabies. Two topics relate to German landlords, their power and activities, and one to recruiting and the war. As a conclusion of this exploration: (1) for topic modelling it is necessary to use the texts in homogenous language variants; otherwise, the linguistic differences override the topics at some point; (2) it is possible to use unlemmatized texts for topic modelling, but in this case the grammatical features (tense, modality) interfere with topic analysis; (3) the proportions of variable and stable (recurrent) elements (song types, motifs) in the material have a clear impact on topic formation: the more frequently an element occurs in the material, and the more stable is its wording, the bigger its probability to form the centre of a topic, whereas distinct but rare themes remain unnoticed and will be shared between the topics of more prominent subjects; (4) common sets of words assembled together as the topic may, in addition to the common thematic focus, refer to a common framework, for example environments, and behavioural or communicative patterns (for example, begging for something). Compared to the folkloristic classification of folk songs, the automatic distribution of songs (1) highlights the subjects occurring more frequently in the body of songs (for example, a topic highlights swinging songs instead of calendar songs of the folkloristic classification); (2) partly overrides the genre differences (for example song games can be found under different topics, whereas forming a distinct group in folkloristic classifications).

“You Are Leaving the American Sector,” signs read as Martha Graham and her company crossed from West Germany to celebrate Berlin’s 750th anniversary. The East German government sought reunification; for the communists, “reunification,” “peace,” and thus the promise of “human bonds” became political weapons. Although the “Stalin Note” in 1952 promised West Germans “the rights of man” and some freedoms, Stalin demanded military neutrality. The US and West German governments finally decided it was communist propaganda. “Peace” remained a contested term with the “peaceful Soviets,” positioned against a “warmongering America.” Graham’s East Berlin repertory featured Frontier, the same work of Americana that had she had presented at the White House in 1937 and then more recently under Gerald Ford. Unlike Graham’s pioneer woman, East Berliners stood in front of a wall, a barbed-wire fence; Graham’s dancer stood in front of a fence and envisioned an expansionist future—not a stopping point. “The girl is seeing a great landscape, untrammeled,” Graham said to an East German of her pioneer woman, performed by an African American dancer to emphasize racial inclusion as an American tenet: “It’s the appetite for space, which is one of the characteristics of America. It’s one of the things that has made us pioneers.” Five months later, Ronald Reagan stood in the West demanding, “Tear down this wall.” Reagan and Graham worked in tandem to bring East Germany into the Western fold.