Belarusian Traditional Culture in the Legacy of Oskar Kolberg
The article examines the subject of Belarusian musical and ethnographic materials collected by Oskar Kolberg. The materials on Belarusian folk culture, which were collected by the researcher throughout his whole life, were published almost 80 years after his death in Volume 52 Belarus–Polesie, while...
Main Author: | |
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Sciendo
2014-12-01
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Series: | Musicology Today |
Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.2478/muso-2014-0009 |
Summary: | The article examines the subject of Belarusian musical and
ethnographic materials collected by Oskar Kolberg. The materials
on Belarusian folk culture, which were collected by the researcher
throughout his whole life, were published almost 80 years after his
death in Volume 52 Belarus–Polesie, while some of them are also
to be found in Volume 53 Lithuania. Thus, the geography of these
materials extends far beyond the borders of contemporary Belarus.
However, individual regions of the country are not equally represented.
Using the works of his predecessors, Kolberg compiled information
about the culture and ethnography of Belarus and supplemented
it with his own research. The author of this article divides the materials
used to compile Volume 52 into two unequal groups: publications
of other authors and the personal field notes of Kolberg (together with
the materials sent to him by correspondents). The latter group, which
constitutes more than a quarter of all the materials and is essential
for assessing the Belarusian achievements of the Polish ethnographer,
has been analysed in the article. The abundance of Kolberg’s own
transcriptions of music in the volume makes his work into one
of the key sources in 19th-century Belarusian musical historiography
The author also puts forward a hypothesis concerning the Belarusian
beginnings of Kolberg’s entire collecting activity. |
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ISSN: | 1734-1663 2353-5733 |