ИЗВЕСТИЯ СОИГСИ

The Ossetian people’s musical calendar folklore has never been the subject of a special study. This article probes into the ethnomusicological field, which studies folk music culture in a broad ethnocultural context. The article explores the corpus of songs related to various rituals of the national calendar, which reflect the ancient religious ideas and beliefs of the people. Text sources were collections of "Iron Adæmon Sfældystad", "Ossetian Folk Art Monuments", as well as Scientific Archive NOIHSS materials and our own field researches. The article’s aim is to reveal the composition of the song cycles within the framework of the Ossetian people's calendar, to determine their genre classification, and to systematize the available material. In the study, the poetic texts analysis identified the main characteristics of the Ossetian calendar-ritual poetry. General observations are related to the dynamics of the historical development of the studied genres associated with the change of the authentic forms of existence in the secondary. The entire Ossetian calendar’s songs repertoire is performed in a traditional Ossetian vocal manner of basic two-part musical texture with Bourdon bass. Musical and stylistic features of each of the calendar ceremonial genres uniform typological relation, due to the similarity of their functions. The calendar and ceremonial songs’ unity is found not only in the musical style, but also at other levels of artistic organizations. In each of the three selected genres, we can discuss the musical and poetic regularities, characteristic for the entire corpus of the designated genre, regardless of the season. In our opinion, calendar and ritual musical folklore can be revived in the structure of Ossetian rituals on a new spiral of its historical development and in forms adequate to the nature of folklore. This seems to be the possible practical value of the developments carried out in this study.

Keywords: musical folklore, people's calendar of Ossetians, calendar-ritual songs, Ossetian ethnomusicology.

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