| title: | New life of traditional music in folklore festivals and spontaneous events |
|---|---|
| reg no: | ETF5119 |
| project type: | Estonian Science Foundation research grant |
| subject: |
6.4. Folklore |
| status: | accepted |
| institution: | Estonian Literary Museum |
| head of project: | Ingrid Rüütel |
| duration: | 01.01.2002 - 31.12.2006 |
| description: | Traditional music exists today as a continuous oral heritage mainly in Kihnu Island and the Setumaa region. In the rest of Estonia, traditional music and especially folksong continue their existence predominantly in amateur groups. Only a small number of groups carry the uninterrupted oral tradition on in new forms and as new expression. In most cases we are dealing with the secondary tradition, which the Finnish researcher L. Honko has called the second life of folklore. Old folksongs are learnt through the medium of written record, publications or sound recordings, and then recreated in various forms, mostly as stage programmes either as genuinely as possible, as new arrangements or as inspiration for a new composition. This cultural trend observable in Estonia today, even if it is not predominant, presents for many a welcome and interesting alternative to the global mass culture, but has, however, remained largely unresearched and without generalizations in the general cultural context. The current research project is planned as an extensive cultural anthropological questionnaire, which aims at establishing who is the subject of the contemporary folklore movement, why do these particular people participate in folklore groups, what does this participation mean to them, but also tries to inquire into their other cultural activities and interests and value criteria, in order to create a wider picture of the cultural identity and perception of self of the people involved in the folklore movement. The research will also consider the generational, gender and geographic distribution of participants, their social and educational background, the influence of domestic music making and family heritage, and the relation of performance programmes to the spontaneous informal singing. The collected questionnaire data will be processed with statistic data processing programmes, in order to establish objective correlation between different factors. In the future the project will continue with a comparative analysis among groups performing different music with the same questionnaire, while aiming to find out various influences that shape people's attitude towards music as an indicator of cultural identity. A separate part of the project will be the analysis of folklore stage programmesand events: what repertoire groups perform, what are the source materials, how is a stage programme arranged and performed, what are the preferences of the group members, relations with audience, etc. The second part will cover the contemporary informal group singing: what, where, when and how people sing spontaneously; to what extent the repertoire taught in the group and the songs in the spontaneous oral tradition do or do not overlap, etc. In conclusion, the project aims to create a concrete and objective overview, based on the self-reflection of the contemporary folklore carrier, which would reflect traditional song and music as one factor of cultural identity and as part of the self-perception of contemporary people. The project results will be published as articles and a monograph. |
| project group | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| no | name | institution | position | |
| 1. | Ingrid Rüütel | Estonian Literary Museum | head of Department of Ethnomusicology | |
| 2. | Taive Särg | Estonian Literary Museum | researcher | |
| 3. | Anu Vissel | Estonian Literary Museum | researcher | |