The Fifth International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony ...

190
ŽANNA PÄRTLAS (ESTONIA)
RETRACING PROCESSES OF CHANGE: THE CASE OF THE SCALES OF THE SETU SONGS
(SOUTHEAST ESTONIA)
It is often remarked that the musical thinking of traditional musicians changed noticeably during the last
century. <strong>The</strong>re are many styles of traditional music that are quite viable nowadays, but are not the same as they
were even a few decades ago. <strong>The</strong> tradition of the Setu multipart singing is a typical example of such a situation.
<strong>The</strong> musical tradition of the Setu is one of the few in Estonia that has been preserved in active use until
today. Nowadays multipart singing is one of the most important symbols of ethnic identity of the Setu people.
In recent decades the growth of ethnic consciousness among the Setu led to a revitalization of the old song
tradition. <strong>The</strong>re are many singing groups comprised of younger and older people who try to keep the tradition
of multipart singing alive. However, one should recognize that the most ancient and original features of the
Setu song style are disappearing.
<strong>The</strong> direction of the changes that can be observed in the contemporary singing style of the Setu is also
typical of many European folk song traditions. <strong>The</strong> main tendency is towards the musical style of European
professional music, based on functional harmony, equally tempered tuning, a proportional rhythmic system, and
regular metre. With regard to the multipart texture, the diminishing of the hete-rophonic divisions within
the choral parts and, therefore, a general simplification of the texture are characteristic of contemporary Setu
singing. <strong>The</strong> present paper deals with changes in the intervallic structure of the scales, which are an essential
feature of the Setu song style.
<strong>The</strong> most specific and probably the oldest scale of the Setu songs is the so-called “one-three-semitone
mode”, which consists of the intervals close to one and three semitones (the structure of this scale can be
expressed in semitones as the succession 1-3-1-3-1 and written by notes such as D-Eb-F#-G-A#-B). 1 <strong>The</strong> onethree-semitone
mode is on the verge of disappearance nowadays – partly because the respective repertoire,
work and ritual songs, is mostly out of use today, and partly because of the diatonization of the old song tunes.
<strong>The</strong> present paper focuses on the processes of diatonization of the Setu tunes as they appear in archival and
contemporary sound recordings. <strong>The</strong> research is based on the comparative acoustic analysis of the recordings
made at different times (from the 1930s up to the end of the first decade of the 21 st century) by means of different
recording techniques including shellac discs, tape-recordings and contemporary digital multi-channel technique.
<strong>The</strong> aim of this paper is not only to confirm the fact that a diatonization of tunes is really taking place. <strong>The</strong>
acoustical analysis of the Setu multipart songs seems also to be interesting for two additional reasons. Firstly,
the one-three-semitone mode itself is a very unusual phenomenon, which should be described more precisely,
and secondly, despite the prevalence of diatonic scales in the Setu songs today, the singing of the contemporary
Setu choirs has a special quality of intonation which is hard to explain by means of an aural analysis.
As a matter of fact, the diatonization of the ancient Setu tunes is not a trend of recent decades only:
these processes started much earlier. Furthermore, there are reasons to believe that the Setu song tradition
was not stylistically homogeneous in the more distant past either and that the different scale types existed
simultaneously, interacting with each other and forming various mixed and transitional structures. In my
earlier studies (Pärtlas, 2004) I suggested the hypothesis of the “bi-linguistic” character of musical thinking