Беларускія партызанскія песні [Электронны рэсурс] / склад. Т. Канстанцінава. — Электрон. дан. (136:37 гуч.). — Мінск : Беларус. дзярж. акадэмія музыкі, 2023. — 2 электрон. апт. дыскі [CD-ROM]: гуч., брашура (51 с.). — (Аўдыяатлас традыцыйнай музычнай культуры Беларусі ; вып. 15).
The fifteenth issue of the series “Audio Atlas of Traditional Musical Culture of Belarus” — “Belarusian Partisan Songs” — presents a bright and unique phenomenon of the Belarusian folk song tradition. All materials included in the publication are field recordings. They were done in student musical-ethnographic expeditions of the Belarusian State Academy of Music led by L. Mukharinskaya, L. Kostyukovets, T. Yakimenko, S. Mytko, T. Berkovich, V. Pribylova, D. Kostyukovets and L. Kudelkina; in folklore and musical-ethnographic expeditions of the Institute of Art History, Ethnography and Folklore in which participated G. Bartashevich, K. Kabashnikov, V. Kolomytseva, T. Konstantinova and V. Pribylova; in individual expeditions of collectors — I. Nazina, L. Yakubovskaya, T. Drobysheva, R. Gamzovich and M. Kozlovich. Most of the audio tracks are taken from the funds of the Cabinet of Traditional Musical Cultures of the Belarusian State Academy of Music. А number of samples belong to the Collection of Folklore Records of the Department of Folklore and Culture of Slavic Peoples of the Center for Research of Belarusian Culture, Language and Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.
On the territory of Belarus partisan songs have deeply entered traditional singing practices and are found everywhere. As the materials of the ethnomusic phonoarchive of the Belarusian State Academy of Music show, a significant part of them overlaps with war songs, the cycle of which in the Belarusian tradition is incomparably wider. The main criterion for including sound samples in the publication became their precise identification by carriers as “partisan” songs.
According to L. Mukharinskaya’s definition, the partisan songs “is one of the largest phenomenon in the Belarusian folklore of struggle”. Specific features of partisan songwriting are a very short period of creation (partisan movement in Belarus in 1941–1944) and geographic localization (occupied territories). The peculiarities of the formation and functioning of this cycle are due to its belonging simultaneously to three main spheres of art — folk-traditional, professional and amateur, which is clearly reflected in the song samples of the audio collection. At the same time, they reveal the moment of historical “selection” and show a corpus of partisan songs that have stood the test of time — decades later, they remained in popular memory and local singing practices.
The process of forming the tunes of partisan songs turned out to be complex. It is characterized by the interweaving of various trends, which are pulled into two main directions: the use of existing melodies (with varying degrees of proximity to the original source) and the creation of original samples. Audio recordings placed on two CDs give an idea of the palette of genre and intonation sources of the tunes of partisan songs, which cover the spheres of late traditional peasant folklore (ballads, lyrical, military marching and farewell), urban folklore (songs-romances, “cruel” romances, songs of sentenced to hard labor, thieves’ songs), modern folk and professional composers creativity (songs from World War I and the Civil War, revolution and Soviet mass songs). Many samples from the collection contain signs of different stylistic movements, so their strict systematization is impossible. Accordingly, the distribution of tunes on two discs is quite conditional and in a number of cases reflects one of the trends manifested in them.
The fact that partisan songs belong to the historical and stylistic layer of modern songwriting does not exclude the use of all previously established traditional styles of polyphony in their performance. The emotional intensity during performance sometimes reaches the level of singing “through tears”.
CD 1 contains samples of partisan songs, the genre and style features of which are largely determined by connections with the folk tradition. A number of songs are of the author’s origin, although the names of poets and composers are not always known. In most cases, such songs were created in certain partisan detachments and brigades and received geographic distribution in the area of their localization.
The samples included in CD 2 reveal a huge layer of Belarusian partisan songwriting, which was formed in line with tendencies to borrow. It consists of: songs of professional authors of that time, their folklorized versions and retexts; songs of World War I and the Civil War and their melodic analogues with new poetic texts; songs created during World War II, which retained the original poetic texts, but received new tunes in the partisan environment; samples with texts by unknown amateur poets and with melodies borrowed from the urban folklore.
The audio publication is intended for everyone who is interested in the traditional musical culture of Belarus.
Creators:
Author-compiler (musical part, article in Belarusian, Russian, English languages, comments, transcriptions of tunes and song texts, computer typing of musical transcriptions): Tatiana Konstantinova
Digitization of phonograms, making and graphic design of the map, photo processing, layout design, page-proofs: Vasilina Pribylova
Sound restoration and mastering recordings: Anna Konstantinova
Text editors: Mikhail Kazimirov, Svetlana Shchukina
Cover design: Aleksandr Pribylov, Anastasia Danilovich
Head of the project, general editor: Tatiana Berkovich
