Interperformative Relationships in Ingrian Oral Poetry

[Transcriptions and audio excerpts of sung materials are available at http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/25ii/kallio]

The Baltic-Finnic ethnic groups used trochaic tetrameter called Kalevala-meter in their oral poetry. These ethnic groups included the Finns, Karelians, Estonians, Izhors, Votes, and Ingrian-Finns. The present name of this poetic meter¹ derives from the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala (1835), which was compiled by Elias Lönnrot on the basis of folk poems. Kalevala-metric poetry was mainly sung, though it served as a vehicle for proverbs embedded in speech and recited charms. This form was the central poetic language of these groups, used in epic, lyric, ritual, and occasional songs. The very first sources derive from the sixteenth century, while the largest corpora were collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

One of the extensively documented geographical areas of Kalevala-metric oral poetry is Ingria, and in all of Ingria the majority of the sound-recordings were collected from the western districts of Soikkola and Narvusi. Beginning in 1853, many scholars traveled in West Ingria to record the predominantly female singing culture, first manually and later by using sound recording technologies. The Ingrian practices, structures, and stylistics of singing were varied, and this area is often referred as a counterpart to or a point of comparison for Karelian singing of a more male and epic character (Gröndahl 1997; Siikala 2000).

Map 1.

Ingria, Estonia, Finland, Karelia, and Russia.

In recent years, new insights have created opportunities to understand the massive archival collections from Ingria as textualized products of communicative, situational, varying singing practices. Studies on the forms, uses, and meanings of Kalevala-metric poetry have been published by the Finnish researchers Lauri Harvilahti (1992a; 1994; 2004), Heikki Laitinen (2004; 2006), Lotte Tarkka (1996; 2005), and Senni Timonen (2000; 2004), while Anna-Leena Siikala (1994; 2000) has highlighted the regional differences among typical singing practices in Finnish, Karelian, and Ingrian oral poetry. For the scope of this article, other noteworthy scholars are the Estonian researchers Janika Oras (2004; 2008) and Taive Särg (2000), as they have connected the analysis of textual, contextual, and musical aspects when studying Estonian traditions. These studies are connected to larger discussions of several partly overlapping lines of thought for understanding the dynamics of various oral traditions discussed by John Miles Foley (1995; 2002).²

The aim of this article is twofold: to introduce the Ingrian poetic singing culture, which is often referred to when discussing Kalevala-metric poetry, and to discuss aspects of performance and intertextuality. The central point here is to highlight that the meanings of a song are created on the various levels of performance; not only is the text itself worth studying, but likewise the other performance features, such as musical structures, singing conventions, and performance situations warrant analysis. After referring to the most central theoretical thoughts and concepts, I will introduce the geographical area and then proceed to a general portrait of Ingrian Kalevala-metric poetry with its typical contexts and conventions of use. As case studies, I will first discuss the interperformative relationships and situational stylistics of West Ingrian swinging songs³ and lullabies, and then focus on the various uses of one poetic theme, The Sad Widow. With this general introduction of Ingrian oral poetry and the treatment of some particular cases, I hope to draw a picture of some aspects of situational variation and referentiality in performance.

Performance and Intertextuality

The meaning of a song is not entirely in the text. Richard Bauman was one of the early scholars who launched the interest in performance (1977:9):

In other words, in an artistic performance of this kind, there is something going on in the communicative interchange which says to the auditor, "interpret what I say in some special sense: do not take it to mean what the words alone, taken literally, would convey." This may lead to the further suggestion that performance sets up, or represents, an interpretive frame within which the messages being communicated are to be understood, and that this frame contrasts with at least one...