The Present of the Past: the Earliest Musical Notations Of

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Ennio Stipčević

The Present of the Past: The Earliest Musical Notations of

Folk Music in Croatia

1. The present of the past: music in context

Data about Croatian folk music go far back into the past, to the early Middle Ages, before singing in the vernacular, in or out of church, was recorded in musical notation. The oldest Croatian texts were in Latin, and the oldest liturgical manuscripts that include musical notation were in Latin and date from the end of the 10th century. In Roman Illyricum and in the sphere of Western-Roman political and cultural influence, Latin literacy was present for centuries before the coming of the Slavs. When the Croats arrived in their new homeland between the 6th and the 7th century and spread from the south-west Pannonian Plane to the east coast of the Adriatic Sea, they found themselves at the meeting place of the former Eastern and Western Roman Empires, of Byzantium and the new west-European kingdoms and principalities. In the 9th century they recognized Frankish sovereignty and became part of the west-European Christian cultural and political circle. In the early Middle Ages the heritage of Antiquity, of the Mediterranean spirit, and of west-European Christianity became the constants and coordinates of Croatian cultural and musical life, and determined its development during following centuries (Andreis 1982(2); Županović 1984-1989; Stipčević 1997).

In the early Middle Ages the position of the church in Croatia was also specific, because Croatian territory was located on the boundaries of three jurisdictions, Rome, Constantinople and Aquileia. Dependence on those three sources of church power was reflected in a variety of liturgies and the music that belonged to them. It is important to emphasize that from the early Middle Ages liturgy in Croatia was in Latin, but also in the vernacular, much before Luther’s reform. Croatian Glagolitic priests fostered and spread the Croatian Church-Slavonic language. They used liturgical books written in the Glagolitic script for rites of the Western Roman Church, and developed so-called Glagolitic chant (Kniewald 1963; Bezić 1973; Martinić 1981). Local folklore influenced this Glagolitic chant, especially after the 18th century. However, the course of folk influence on Glagolitic church singing is difficult to determine, because no old reliable notation of Glagolitic chant has been preserved. Instead, this kind of singing was carried down from generation to generation through oral tradition and was not systematically recorded until the early 20th century. Like in all other musical traditions that lived through the centuries and were carried down orally, it is impossible to establish what Glagolitic chant owes to local folklore, and what to links with western liturgy. Links between the past and present cannot be clearly discerned and defined (Bezić 1971).

Croatian folk music was recorded in musical notation for the first time in the Renaissance, a time when Europeans began to be clearly aware of concepts like the past and folk culture. However, this was also a time when Croatian lands were troubled by great political upheavals with far-reaching consequences. The Ottoman conquest of Croatia started at the beginning of the 15th century and Croatian territory became the site of bloody warfare. The predominant feeling that emerges from the extensive literary corpus at that time was that Croatian territory was the bulwark of Christianity (antemurales christianitatis), and books by Croatian humanists contained many records of Ottoman folk music (Cavallini 1986; Tuksar 1990). Contemporaries were especially interested in documentary information Croatian writers gave about the Ottomans. The popular and much reprinted travel books by Bartol Đurđević (De Turcarum ritu et ceremoniis, Antwerp, 1544) and Luigi Bassano (I costumi et modi particolari de la vita de Turchi, Venice, 1545) of Zadar included interesting paragraphs about folk music in Ottoman regions. It is not surprising, however, that most Croatian humanists wrote about the Ottomans and their customs in an exceedingly anti-Turkish note (Budiša 1988:265).

In the 16th century the only place to escape from Ottoman danger was the safety of well fortified castles and manors. At that time the words put into the mouths of Velebit shepherds from the surroundings of Zadar in Planine (Mountains), “We, too, would flee from here if love for our country did not hold us back”, belonged to the vocabulary of the pastoral idyll, not to reality. Planine (Mountains) by Petar Zoranić (1508-before 1569) was published posthumously in Venice in 1569, but the dedication is dated September 1536. This was the first printed Croatian novel, and was written in prose and verse (Novak 1997:328-341). It contains texts in a great diversity of genres, and although its content is inspired by the classical idylls and pastorals of humanism, it is nevertheless based most of all on the local traditions of folk storytelling and singing. The Arcadian beauty of the Zadar hinterland is enhanced by descriptions of shepherds singing and playing music, their laments, ganke (riddles), recitation of folk poetry to the accompaniment of the gusle (a folk fiddle) and other folk instruments. But Zoranić’s shepherds did not only sing folk songs. To the accompaniment of the citara (here this probably means the old Greek kythara) they also sang psalms in dialogue, freely translated into Croatian, and even passed thought-out esthetic judgment about singing and poetry in general. In this idealized pastoral world Zoranić described the situation in folklore and folk music in the Zadar and Velebit region quite realistically. He used music, various folk instruments and sound signals as a poetic topos, and the sound of songs “from some noble cities” also reach this pastoral idyll. This “adorned manner of singing”, a musically polished way of singing and playing music, is just as important as folk music in Zoranić’s pastoral. Mountains thus provides information about both written and folk music on the same level of validity, allowing contemporary readers to identify with the poetic messages and visions they found closer (Stipčević 1993a:28). Somewhat later Zoranić’s contemporary, Petar Hektorović (1487-1572) from Hvar, no longer asked his readers to identify with his characters, he demanded critical reading.

2. Notations of folk music: between fact and fiction

The long poem Ribanje i ribarsko prigovaranje (Fishing and Fishermen’s Talks, Venice, 1568) is Hektorović’s most important work, and in it he emphasized the importance of singing as an art of expression (Bujić 1982:65-68; Stipčević 1993:24-27; Novak 1997:313-327). In the Mannerist fashion, Fishing adopts diverse literary traditions, reflecting the experiences of Croatian idyllic poems, letters and travelogues, and contemporary Italian eclogae piscatoriae. It is unusual that the poem also contains musical notation for two folk songs: the bugaršćica (a plaintive song) “Kada mi se Radosave vojevoda odiljaše” (When Duke Radosav Was Leaving), and the pisan (a love song) “I kliče djevojka” (The Maiden Cries Out). These notes did not become part of Hektorović’s poem by chance, they were not placed in the margins but in one of the dramatically crucial places (Kekez 1978; Bezić 1981). Scholars disputed whether the notation of the bugaršćica and the pisan recorded melodies of folk songs of a kind that no longer exist in present-day Dalmatia, or whether they were the incomplete versions of parts of lost madrigals. In a long letter to the Honourable Mr Nikša Pelegrinović, Patrician of Hvar, Chancellor of Zadar, Hektorović wrote very clearly about his effort to record the texts and melodies of fishermen’s tales and songs as faithfully as possible:

“ (…) so you will (perhaps) (…) say to yourself: why did you not invent and compose a bugaršćica and song with your own mind, but instead started from things that others can do? For this reason I would like to inform you (…) that I always liked the truth in everything, all the more so as someone who realized, as he read, that the words were newly put together and invented, may on that basis also think and hold that the rest was put together falsely and invented, as well.” (Hektorović 1986:79)

There is no doubt that Hektorović really made an effort to write down the music of the fishermen’s songs as faithfully as he could. He used white mensural notation, there are not signs for the tactus, both melodies were written in the tenor clef. The bugaršćica is syllabic, declamatory, of small melodic range (f-c1), and the nota finalis is f. The pisan, however, has a more diverse rhythm, a somewhat greater melodic range (d-c1), it even has musica ficta in the concluding section, and the nota finalis is d. While the melody of the bugaršćica is reminiscent of folk singing, the pisan has elements of the more developed popular songs sung by people who lived in towns. There is another important difference between the songs: the bugaršćica is sung by Nikola, only one singer, but the poem says that the pisan was sung by both the fishermen in two parts, “one keeping lower, the other higher”. There is no indication which of the two voices the notation records. By analogy with present folk singing in Dalmatia, we might assume that the higher voice was recorded, while the lower voice had longer-lasting notes.

The musical notation in Hektorović’s poem is the oldest known record of Croatian folk music, which gives is special importance. This was the first time that notes were written to record singing in Croatian. The Venetian printer Gioanfrancesco Camotio, who printed Fishing, is known to have printed several other books in Croatian, but inserting the text under the notes must certainly have been a special printing problem. Thus it is not surprising that there are printing inconsistencies (in writing the text under the notes, recording pauses, the duration of notes), even obvious mistakes. This is probably the reason for recent different interpretations of why Hektorović included the music in his poem (Županović 1969; Bezić 1969).

It is especially important that Hektorović’s fishermen do not only recount folk poetry, they also sing, and singing is an important mode of expression. Hektorović’s fishermen Paskoje and Nikola are simple shepherds, not “learned” shepherds like Zoranić’s, they know nothing of classical tradition. Nevertheless, just like the humanists of their time, they look nostalgically into the past, into the lost golden age, aurea aetas. What is more, one might say that their conversation reflects Ficin’s ideal of poetic inspiration, furor divinus. Expressing themselves in verse and song, Paskoje and Nikola seem to have adopted the neo-Platonic mode that became the standard humanistic belief about the role and strength of music and poetry after the Florentine intermedia at the beginning of the 16th century, and especially after Ficin’s discussions (Bujić 1990). This humanistic perception about the strength and role of music and poetry (both composed and folk), which Zoranić, Hektorović and other Croatian Renaissance writers indicated more or less openly in their works, was explicitly presented in Croatia only in the paper Irene, ovvero della belleza (Venice, 1599) by Miho Monaldi (1540-1592) of Dubrovnik. This treatise clearly expounds subjects from art philosophy and psychology, in the first place in connection with circumstances in Dubrovnik. One entire chapter (Dialogo ottavo) is devoted to music theory. Unfortunately, Monaldi’s Dialogo says nothing about the problems of musical notation for folk music at that time, nor does it have data about folk music in the Dubrovnik area (Tuksar 1977; Cavallini 1994:45-80).

Hektorović’s musical notation had a dual function. It is a relatively faithful record of two songs sung by Croatian fishermen, but at the same time the songs were creatively included in the poem as a whole. In other words, the songs and musical notation were certainly not “words newly put together and invented”, they were not the fruit of Hektorović’s poetic liberty. Nevertheless, their main function was to be part of a work of fiction planned on a broader scale. This shows the importance of Hektorović’s letter, in which he clearly defined his attitude to folk songs. This letter is important not only because of how he speaks of folk singing, but also because Hektorović found it important to give his opinion of folk singing and of problems involved with faithfully recording it. The main purpose of this specific metatextual intervention was to help the contemporary reception of the bugaršćica and the pisan, folk songs whose texts and music Hektorović tried to write down as faithfully as possible.

A year after Hektorović’s poem Fishing and Fishermen’s Talks came out, Giulio Cesare Barbetta, an Italian composer for the lute, published the oldest known musical notation of a Croatian dance in the collection Il primo libro dell’intavolatura de liuto (Venice, 1569) (Stipčević 1997:57). The dance is called Pavana sesta Detta la Schiauonetta, it is one of several pavanes with “national” characteristics (Fiamenga, Todeschina), but no melodic or rhythmic features distinguish it from other pavanes in that collection (Thomas 1973:142-184). Barbetta offered no additional information about it in the text of the dedication or at the beginning of the collection. In his other collections for the lute Barbetta published some other Slav dances (from Russia, Poland), but the fact that he published the dance Schiauonetta (the Venetian name for the Croats from Dalmatia; schiavo, schiavone = Slavo) should not be put down to his interest in the “exotic”. On the contrary, Barbetta could have seen Croatian dances almost every day in Venice, a city that was the administrative, economic and cultural centre for many of the Croatian coastal regions (Istria, Dalmatia). The Croats who lived under Venetian administration in regions that were the Venetian domini da mar had churches, brotherhoods and printing houses in the Serenissima, and one of the most beautiful Venetian waterfronts is called after the Croats - Riva dei Schiavoni (Riva od Hrvatov). The fact that Barbetta wrote down the dance Pavana sesta Detta la Schiauonetta shows the diversity of Venetian music life in the Cinquecento, a diversity to which their Croatian neighbours on the other side of the Adriatic also contributed (Stipčević 1992). Another interesting musical record from that time also testifies to the stratified musical contacts between the Croats and Italians.