CHANTS OF OLONKHO IN THE RECORDS OF THE VILUY EXPEDITION OF M. N. ZHIRKOV

Abstract

The article examines musical notes of the Yakut heroic epic olonkho chants, produced by M. N. Zhirkov during the Viluy expedition in 1943. They are kept in the funds of M. N. Zhirkov in the National Library of RS (Y). It is revealed that the musical notes of the chants of the Yakut legends of M. N. Zhirkov are among the first notation of the olonkho chants. Before him, the musical notes of the Yakut traditional chants were produced by A. F. Middendorf and A. L. Maslov. For the first time, V. L. Seroshevsky recorded the notes of an Olonkho girl’s song. There are no musical notes of olonkho chants in musical compilations published before M. N. Zhirkov. It was only during the 1943 Viluy expedition that M. N. Zhirkov first recorded the chants of Yakut legends on notes. In the M. N. Zhirkov’s records of the Viluy expedition, there are 11 songs from olonkho. At the same time, there are no indications of belonging to the olonkho chants. Nevertheless, these chants belong to characters common in olonkho. In the analysis, an attempt was made to reconstruct the belonging of the olonkho chants to one or another Yakut epic, common in the Viluy group of districts. All chants belong to the Viluy style of singing eten yllyyr. At the same time, two other traditions of olonkho performance are found in them: Verkhnevilyuysk and Nyurba, which differ from each other in the intonation and metrrhythmically. The M. N. Zhirkov’s methods of collecting Yakut musical folklore were also studied in terms of fragmentary fixation of chants and their recording from elderly folklore bearers. The musical notes of M. N. Zhirkov are characterized by brevity, schematism, and often the lack of words. When the key is marked, the alteration signs indicate that the chant belongs to this or that key, which is typical of the initial stage of studying the Yakut traditional song, when the harmonic regularities of the Yakut folk song had not yet been studied. It is stamped in musical notations and size, which indicates that the chants belong to the Yakut traditional singing degereng yrya style. Thus, the musical notes of M. N. Zhirkov’s olonkho chants, made by him during the 1943 Viluy expedition, are the first musical records of song fragments of Yakut heroic legends during the period of active existence of the Sakha folklore.

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