Folk Music from the Island of Zlarin

Sa？etak Folk music, as understood by the present author, includes all those musical phenomena which circulate among the members of relatively small human communities in direct communication. They are musical phenomena which people freely choose, adopt, perform and transmit to others. This approach defines folk music primarily in terms of its existence and only secondarily in terms of its musical and extramusical characteristics and contents. Three researchers worked with the author in collecting materials for this study. Du？an Dean of Zlarin recorded the texts of many songs and various other data about music (all kinds, not just folk music) on Zlarin. Ivo Fur？i？ of ？ibenik gave his permission for 17 of his folk music recordings (published in his book Narodno stvarala？tvo ？ibenskog podru？ja, I - ？ibensko oto？je/The Folklore of the ？ibenlk Region, I - The ？ibenik Islands /, ？ibenik, 1980) to be Included in the present study. Such recordings are marked ？Fur？i？？ here, while all the other recordings have been transcribed by the author and these remain unmarked. Zorica Rajkovi？, Research Assistant at the Institute for Folklore Studies in Zagreb, gave her permission to the author to transcribe nine examples of children's metro rhythmic rhymes and songs from her material. The collected and transcribed material (6Gc, or 72, musical examples) is grouped according to three main criteria: (a) place and role of singing, and music generally in the life of the Zlarinians, (b) textual content of the songs, (c) musical characteristics of the tape-recorded material. The first group includes lullabies (examples 1-8, two of them Italian for purposes of comparison - one from Zlarin, ex. 7, and one from Buje in Istria, ex. 8). The lullabies are transcribed in full, that is, as much as the women whose singing was recorded actually sang. This approach clearly reveals examples of quite a free musical form (ex. 1) and those with formally fixed melody-stanzas (ex. 5). The tonal relations of the narrow intervals and tones with the changing pitch are found in ex. 1; ex. 6 shows a clear diatonic scale. The metrorhythmic foundation of the rockmg of the cradle may be quite different and totally independent of the metrorhythmic foundation of the text which is being sung (ex. 2). Examples 9-13 are wedding songs. Memories of small-range tunes with the refrain on the lengthened syllables oj, e - e - oj are still alive (ex. 9). The wedding songs from the mid-twentieth century, including the seventies, are mainly performed as two-part songs in the major key (ex. 13). Over the last twenty