The Fifth International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony ...

Joint Singing of the Vepses and Archaic Phenomena in the
Peasants’ Multipart Singing in the Baltic Countries
341
namely in the regions of the middle and southern Vepses, in the centre of its area (Lobanov, 1997). In both
cases, by the archaic time we mean not the Stone Age but the historically observable period, reflected in the
old Russian written monuments.
Musical folklore of the Vepses started to be recorded beginning from the year 1937, its genre content
being rather poor. In their native language middle and southern Vepses perform only laments, lullabies,
chastooshkas (two-line or four-line folk verse, usually humorous and topical, sung in a lively manner), songs
for the swings, among them, performed to a specific tune, tunes without texts – melodies of call and response.
<strong>The</strong> repertoire of the Veps multipart singing mainly consists of Russian songs, which were performed by the
Vepses in the 1960s distorting the language terribly, perceiving the text rather as a phonetic than a semantic
basis of the song. In 1990s from the southern Vepses I recorded polyphonic songs of a later stratum and there
the Russian language was correct.
Songs sung by Vepses (northern), both in the Veps and Russian languages were published in the form of
a small collection of songs of the peoples of the Karelian-Finnish ASSR in 1941 (Gudkov, Levi, 1941) (ex.
1). Russian songs, recorded in the villages of middle Vepses, appeared later in the materials of the Leningrad
Conservatoire folklore expedition of 1963 to the Lodeinopolsky Region (Lapin, Lobanov, 1970). I, a first-year
student at that time also participated in the expedition (ex. 2).
Having adopted Orthodox Christianity, now Vepses have Russian names and family names and in order
to find out whether this or that of Russian songs is included in the repertoire or musical tradition of only
Vepses and not of their Russian neighbours, all the corresponding data must be obtained. So, in the collection
of songs of the Leningrad Region, which came out in 1950, there are two songs with the characteristic features
of polyphony, which I consider to belong to Vepses (Kravchinskaia, Shiraeva, 1950: No. 155, 156), but it is
not clear whether the choir they were performed by, had any links with the Veps nation (ex. 3). In a small
collection Songs of the Veps Forest (Mekhnetsov, 1994) it is only “the forest” that belongs to Vepses.
<strong>The</strong> basis of the joint singing of Vepses is the unison heterophony which is widespread all over the
northwestern part of Russia and possesses some stable traits: breaking up of the voices into intervals – mostly
in the thirds, occurs before the cadential unison, which seems to allow the accumulation of discordance, or
before any other movement toward the tonic of the mode. Such a type of heterophony may be called regulated.
I would like to quote the description of my first impression produced by the singing of Vepses: “Songs of
Vepses astounded us by their distinction and musical specificity. Almost all of them are placed within their
narrow range, most often in the fourth, with a long-drawn basic tone at the end of each stanza, and with archaic
sounding threechords, which form the basis of the tune. <strong>The</strong> original, specific manner of performing renders
the Veps songs an unusual freshness. […] <strong>The</strong> fourth or the fifth intonation at the beginning of each following
stanza falls on the sustained ending tone of the preceding one and the whole song is performed continuously
up to the very end, in chain breathing” (Lapin, Lobanov, 1970: 7-8).
F.A. Rubtsov’s note about the specific features of multipart singing of a similar style, lost somewhere
among the commentaries on the collection of songs of the Leningrad region (compiled by Rubtsov himself),
is also very significant: “In the cases of multipart singing the supporting voice emphasizes the tonic of the
mode, by means of its movements, its sounding making an impression of almost like a drone together with
the top voice” 2 (Rubtsov, 1958: 202) (ex. 3). However Rubtsov hadn’t put a problem to the Vepses manner
of singing of Russian songs.
This is how Vepses sing elegiac lyrics – beginning from long-drawn songs to romances, and it is the longdrawn
songs that sound the most stylish. Combined with another specific feature – flattening the intonation