Balkan Refrain: Form and Tradition in European Folk Song. By Dimitrije O. Golemović (review)

Whatever its contents, this book would be worthy of note simply because it has been published in English; rather like Donna A. Buchanan’s Performing Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), which revealed the (frequently purposely) hidden reality of the phenomenon of Bulgarian folk music, Dimitrije Golemović’s study opens up a world that, while it will have fascinated many, will also have frustrated many who have no access to publications in Serbian and related languages. It is a greatly revised translation of the author’s study published in Serbian in 2000, Refren u narodnom pevanju (Bijeljina: Renome; Banja Luka: Akademija umetnosti).

But the book is much more than merely worthy of note: Golemović’s many years of research enable him to deal with a hugely important topic—the meaning, context and realization of the refrain in Balkan song—in magisterial fashion. His introduction, “How I Decided, Then Gave Up, and Finally Made Up My Mind To Write This Book,” is an indication of things to come, simultaneously serious and amusing, self-deprecatory but aware of the importance of what the author has to say, and, not least, eminently readable. For Golemović aims high; he says that “With the aid of the refrain—a feature of musical practice throughout the world—I have tried to fathom some of the general laws of folk singing” (p. 4). Such an ambitious project might seemed destined to failure, but since Golemović knows, like Blake, that infinity is to be found in a grain of sand, he examines the particular (those multifarious grains) with one eye on the general (the infinite).

The first chapter, accordingly, examines the “Concept and Definition of the Refrain.” It provides us with a detailed discussion of the nature of the refrain, drawing not only on earlier Serbian and Croatian ethnomusicological studies (including the work of composers such as Mokranjac and Konjović), but also relevant research in linguistics, “rehabilitating” the investigations of the Czech Ludvik Kuba to useful purpose. The remaining six chapters deal with various aspects of Balkan folksong through the lens of the refrain, and ends with a brief conclusion. Noting the variety of results arising from these approaches, then, Golemović observes that “[i]n view of the above, as the most important features of the refrain, the ones which constitute its essential quality, we may underscore the invariability of its (1) form, (2) content, and (3) position within the song. The subsequent chapters will show that no rule is without exceptions, but exceptions are not there to invalidate the rule, but to provide a more precise and thorough picture of [sic] to what the rule refers” (p. 14).

Bearing this in mind, then, the following two chapters discuss folk song from the angle of refrain: “The Development of Folk Singing, Observed through the Occurrence of the Refrain,” and “The Refrain as a Means of Shaping Folk Song.” In the first of these, Golemović places the existence of refrain in a very broad context, citing anthropological work on the development of the phenomenon of religion, of the process of naming, and ritual. Thus, “the refrain contained the most significant word in the song” (p. 19), and Golemović particularizes this with discussion of the naming of the deity in the Serbian koledo, the kraljičke and krstonoške songs, amongst others. He then develops the concept of “refrain surrounding” (the “framing verse” that appears only at the beginning and end of a song) and the stereotypical beginning of the “refrain prefix,” as part of the process of the desacralization of the songs and the corresponding loss of intelligibility in the refrain’s “naming”. A more wide-reaching classification of refrain types—prefixed, suffixed, infixed and others—ensues in the next chapter. This is highly complex, and would be very difficult to follow were it not for the copious music examples (occupying...