The Temporal Structure of Estonian Runic Songs

Front Cover
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, Mar 30, 2015 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 214 pages

The Kalevala, or runic, songs is a tradition at least a few thousand years old. It was shared by Finns, Estonians and other speakers of smaller Baltic-Finnic languages inhabiting the eastern side of the Baltic Sea in North-Eastern Europe. This book offers a combined perspective of a musicologist and a linguist to the structure of the runic songs. Archival recordings of the songs originating mostly from the first half of the 20th century were used as source material for this study. The results reveal a complex interaction between three different processes participating in singing: speech prosody, metre, and musical rhythm.

 

Contents

2 Segmentation of runic song performance
65
3 Prescriptive and descriptive notation
69
is this approach applicable in the runic songs?
71
5 Fribergs generative performance rules for timing and their relevance for the runic songs
74
6 Modelling of syllable durations in the runic songs
78
7 Covariance analysis
84
8 Summary
86
Chapter 6 Realization of the prosodic structure of Estonian in sung folksongs
89

8 The earliest printed references to runic songs
24
9 Collections and publications of Estonian runic melodies
27
10 Summary
33
Chapter 3 Estonian prosody
37
2 Segmental quantity
38
3 Syllabic quantity and the quantity of prosodic feet
42
31 Monosyllabic words
43
32 Q1 prosodic foot
44
33 Q2 prosodic foot
45
34 Q3 prosodic foot
46
4 Overlength
48
5 The structure of polysyllabic words and phonological phrases
50
51 Trisyllabic feet
51
52 Phonological phrases
54
6 Summary
55
Chapter 4 The metrical structure of Estonian folksongs
57
2 Validity of the quantity rules
58
Chapter 5 Estonian folksong as musical performance
63
2 Material and methods
90
3 Encoding of metre with temporal means
94
4 Changes in the temporal realization of wordinitial disyllables
97
5 Differences between regular lines and broken lines
100
6 Differences between quantity oppositions manifested by vowels and consonants
103
7 Summary
107
Chapter 7 Realization of prosodic structure inrecitation and laments
109
3 Duration of metric feet
110
4 Intervocalic consonants
113
5 Summary of results
116
6 Trochaic verse in contemporary Estonian and Finnish poetry
117
7 Between speech and song
121
Chapter 8 Conclusions
129
Appendix Notations of Estonian folksongs and laments
133
Notes
187
References
189
Index
201
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About the author (2015)

Ilse Lehiste is Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University, USA.

Jaan Ross is Professor at Tartu University, Estonia.