Abstract
Memory and Formulas in Moravian and Slovakian Traditional Songs The paper will summarize the results of the author's emerging second PhD dissertation on "Memory and Formulas in Moravian and Slovakian Traditional Songs", which places the singer's and singing community's memory at the center of analysis. First part of the talk will focus on an armchair textual analysis of selected Moravian and Slovakian songs using the criterion of memory.
After briefly discussing the mnemonic role of incremental repetition, apostrophy, parallelism, dialogue, assonance, numbers, length, and genre; the mnemonic role of bodily movement as recorded by scholars (Marcel Jousse, Vladimír Úlehla) will be discussed, and a hypothesis of mental maps will be presented. Attention will also be given to allegorical mnemonic formulae, main traces of communal memory, shaped like pebbles by communal memory, and the value system they represent shall be explored.
Second, the paper will sum up results of a recent field research based in Horná Mariková and Papradno, Slovakia, which takes advantage of comparison of 1961-textual record of Jaroslav Smutný and current 2018 audio recordings. The focus of attention will be the recordings of two now sister-singers, Cecilia (84) and Anna (78) Patáčikovy.
Apart from tracing the variation proces, it will explore on the ways the tradition bearers learned their songs, how learning the music corresponds with learning the text, the (absence of) songbooks, how their memory recalls, what it forgets and how it creatively makes up the forgotten; the way they claim some of the traditional songs as their "own", and how they understand the allegorical mnemonic meanings. Third, the talk will briefly introduce a digital humanities project www.folksong.eu on whose future development the author is co-working, and which he uses as an analytical tool.