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Macedonian Folklore Songs
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Macedonian
folklore art has centuries of history behind it. Information on its origins
goes back to 1325--26, when a Greek chronicler and diplomat recorded that,
during a journey he made in Macedonia, he had heard the folk songs which
celebrated the deeds of local heroes, and at Strumica he had watched some
folklore dances, accompanied by a special musical instrument. Later, in
the 16th century, an Austrian priest wrote down some songs of the region
of Kostur, which was the first recording of Macedonian creative art.24
Independently of the records taken of the origins of Macedonian folklore,
reliable evidence today is contained in the texts of the real art of the
people. In them is reflected the genesis of popular thought regarding religion,
ethics, morality, economics, etc. It is thus possible by induction to assume
those elements that reveal the beginning of Macedonian folk-art. The difficulty
in ascertaining the origin and development of Macedonian folklore is mainly
due to the fact that this people, handicapped by their well-known backward
social and political conditions, did not have the cultural possibility of
writing down and publishing the wealth of their oral poetry. Later, when
the first information furnished by various foreign students began to be
published, the existence of this heritage of Macedonian folklore became
known. Among these students must be mentioned Vuk Karadgich, who included
some Macedonian songs (music) in the collections of folklore-songs he published.
So did the Russian Slavonic scholar Victor Grigorovich, who was the first
to record a Macedonian prose work.
As soon as scholars began to show a keener and more detailed interest in
folk-songs and Macedonian music, a succession of increasingly large and
varied collections appeared, which become the object of more careful research.
In the 1850s, when the period of the Macedonian renaissance began, various
collectors of songs and Macedonian music were active and a great many works
conceived and created in preceding centuries were published, among which
folk-songs and music were of the first importance.
The ideas inspiring the renaissance of the Macedonian people were often
manifested through a series of folklore activities, which was no accident
when one remembers that this people had been fighting for independence for
many years, so that these activities appeared one of the most notable cultural
and artistic expressions. Consequently, the frequent publications of Macedonian
folk-songs and Macedopnian music suggested a deeper study of them. But this
was extremely difficult because the publications of these folk-songs were
disseminated outside Macedonia, as was the case with the "Collection"
of the Miladinov brothers, published in Zagreb in 1861, and other works
of the kind, while Macedonia groaned under the Turkish yoke. Therefore,
these Macedonian folk-music and songs were often published in Bulgaria,
which had gained its independence shortly before. 
At that time, too, there were many others interested in folk-songs and Macedonian
music , such as Dimitar Miladinov, Kusman Shapkarev, Panajot Ghinovski,
Marko Tsepenkov, Partenia Zografski, Georgi Pulevskl, Eftim Sprostranov,
Vassil Ikonomov, Dimitar and Vassil Molerov, Nam Tahov and Atanas Iliev.
Moreover, the various problems connected with Macedonian folklore were treated
in a .number of books, such as those by Efrem Karanov, Dimitar Matov, Anton
P. Stoilov, and others. These researches are still being pursued today by
several foreign students. Thus, for example, the Czechoslovakian Academy
of Sciences published a collection of Macedonian folk-tales under the title
of Lidove povidky jihomakedonske, edited by Juri Polivka and Petar Lavrov,
in Prague in 1932. Juri Polivka also published an essay on the significance
of Macedonian folk-art and its place in the world. The well-known French
Slavonic scholar, Andr Mazon, published in Paris his collections of Macedonian
folk music and songs: Contes slaves de la Macdoine sud-occidentale (1923)
and "Documents, contes et chansons slaves de l'Albani'e du Slid"
(1936).
There is no aspect of the suffering and oppressed life of the Macedonians
that has not inspired folklore music and songs. There are songs for births,
weddings, the daily toil, struggles, and the grave. Thus the folk song is
a source for the history of the life of the Macedonian people. Expressed
for many centuries in authentic verses, the folk song has the merit of being
a real historical record in addition to its artistic value.
They are songs, stories, parables, proverbs and riddles, into which the
people seem to have infused all the innate genius of their race: heart-beats,
tears and the mournful smiles of their life in captivity, together with
the vague memory of better times, always far away. These songs accompany
the Macedonian always and everywhere: to pasture, during work, in rest,
when travelling in company, in rites and ceremonies, at feasts and at funerals.
They also express feelings of joy and affection, and often the lilt resembles
the sound of simple, rustic musical instruments, like reed-pipes or flutes,
such as the gajda or the kaval. At wedding feasts and banquets the choirs
are usually accompanied by instruments, and although an oppressed people
cannot be merry, nevertheless there are some wan rays of light, some faint
gleams .of gaiety. Who composes them?No one and everyone, because by their
very nature they are always anonymous and oral.
These rhapsodies are handed down from father to son, from generation to
generation, from village to village, and they are often changed in the process,
becoming more and more the spiritual food and support of the whole people.
A characteristic of Macedonian folklore songs and Macedonian music is the
objectivity of their content; they mainly regard the unlearned masses, so
for the most part they lack the subjectivism of modern poetry.
Macedonian
folk-songs (Macedonian music) are lyric and epic, but the lyric ones are
the more original and interesting from the artistic point of view also,
because sentiment is particularly keen in the Macedonian poet.
The themes, as already mentioned, are generally supplied by the events and
solemnities of both individual and community life. They are, in short, the
spontaneous echo of what touches the heart of the poet or strikes his fantasy.
Macedonian folk-songs may be classified according to their content as follows:
-- ritual songs;
-- mythological songs;
-- songs about work;
--songs about family life;
-- songs about childhood;
-- humorous songs.
Popular epic poetry is also the essence of some historical, haidutic, heroic,
revolutionary and partisan songs.
Among these groups of folk-songs there are also the ballads, a real lyrico-epic
expression of
Macedonian life Macedonian popular stories, both in their number and for
their creative qualities, are a rich heritage of folklore. In the tales,
proverbs and riddles, the Macedonian people expresses it's wisdom and unlimited
fantasy.
Popular prose, which in the past was a medium for expressing public opinion,
comprises the following types: tales and fables inspired by animals, anecdotes,
fanciful stories, realistic tales suggested by traditions, legends, proverbs
and riddles.
Since they reflected the conceptual and emotional realities of life, in
remote times Macedonian popular lyrics were a constant interpreter of hardship.
In the lyric poem life appears as it really is; the themes are inspired
by the evening gatherings of girls in the villages, or by the reapers in
the fields, or the shepherds in the mountains, and so on. And although the
words were sung to mournful music, none the less Macedonian popular lyrics
kept a cheerful side which is quite evident. The songs are also characterized
by the rich variety of their poetic language, while the sentiment is expressed
in many different ways. Hence, the lyrics have a greater number of variations
than the epic songs.
The epic songs recall moments of the national life, deeds of heroes, old
legends, sacred and profane, events taken from real life, and the business
of the daily round, all usually distorted in the melting-pot of the lively
popular imagination. Sometimes they also have a patriotic content with a
historico - legendary basis, seeking to extol and perpetuate in the memory
of future generations popular heroes having real or imagined connections
with the national life.
The ritual songs are unquestionably one of the most important groups of
Macedonian popular lyrics, because they accompany various former rites of
this people, expressing them with a wealth of lively images. With the passage
of time the meaning of the rite and then the rite itself disappeared, but
the song remained intact in the poetic tradition, in the words and in the
melody.
The ritual songs are connected either with certain solemn feasts of a public
nature that come round every year (such as Christmas, New Year, St. George,
Easter, the harvest, etc.), or with private celebrations on the occasion
of weddings, christenings, funerals, etc. All these feasts, whose origins
went back to the times of paganism, expressed wishes for good health, good
luck, success and prosperity. These songs were often sung in recitative.
In the love songs chastity predominates: you would say that the singer sees
in the girl he loves only his future mate, the woman with whom he will share
his life and love; there is never a reference to sexual relations.
In the songs about family life the most frequent themes are the joys and
sorrows of motherhood and fatherhood, on a predominant grey background ,of
sadness, characteristic of the Macedonian soul.
The other songs, of an elegiac nature, may all be grouped together as mournful,
melancholy compositions, forming a single complex whatever the subject dealt
with.
The principal theme of the wedding songs was, as it still is today, the
most important moment in a man's life, namely, when he gets married, which
has been celebrated from the earliest times with suitable songs and rites.
In fact, these songs contain many references to former wedding customs,
such as the purchase and sale or carrying off of the young bride, recommended
by superstition and magic spells.
These songs undoubtedly derived from the view of life of the Macedonian
patriarchal families.
Every moment of a popular wedding was followed by a song. The words are
highly lyrical because they tell of the separation of the young bride from
her parents:
O, my dear brother,
Let my hand go
That I may look back
And commend myself to my mother.
0 my dear mother,
I will leave you
Two sprigs of basil
And one of carnation,
That you may sprinkle them often
In the morning and evening with water,
With tears in the afternoon
.The secret songs show that death, too, was the subject of just as many
ritual songs, in which the meaning was undoubtedly esoteric because it was
believed to have been expressed by the dead person. In the singing of these
songs great importance was given to improvisation, and they were also characterized
by a strong emotional tension in the expression, in which the predominant
part was executed by various comparisons and by words that are often untranslatable.
The Macedonian people have created an equally large number of songs with
a mythological content, which are wonderful artistic evidence of primitive
popular beliefs. Nymphs, enchantresses and dragons on the one hand, and
the shepherd and the peasant maid on the other, are the principal heroes
of these songs; other themes are the meeting between the sun, the moon and
the stars, and also the personification of the terrible diseases (plague,
malaria and others) which the Macedonians had often suffered from during
the period of Turkish rule.
O mother, my old mother,
You ask me and I'll tell you:
I'm walking in the wilderness, mother;
There I love a sister, A sister, Samovilla.
World,
too, is a subject of Macedonian folksongs. Songs were readily composed about
toil so that, because of the social conditions of the people, these verses
are about the basic activities of the remote past: farming and stock-breeding,
or else they draw their themes from handicrafts and, more recently, from
the trades of those who go abroad to earn a living. In short, all types
of work are celebrated by these songs. Sometimes, too, they are about love
and rivalry between a young man and woman:
If I manage to beat you,
I shan't ask you for a fast horse,
But, my fine young man,
I'd like to marry you.
In their songs the peasants told of the hardships of having
to toil for a master, so that we have a poetic description of the hard life
in the country of most Macedonians, who had to earn their bread by looking
after the flocks of others. Far from home in the mountains, alone with the
animals and their copper pipes, the shepherds felt a strong desire for a
gay life instead of having to wander about exposed to wind and cold and
often plundered by Turks and brigands.
IIn the most pathetic songs of those who, at the end of last century and
the beginning of this, were forced (as indeed some are still) to go abroad
in search of work, there is always present the note of nostalgic longing
for their native land and a desire to return to a better life at home, and
the bitterness of the separation of young men from their wives and sweethearts:
Weep, young girl, let us weep together,
For we must leave each other.
How happy we were as sweethearts!
And now we must part.
0 my darling,
I shall be far from you and you from me;
I have to go abroad, my sweet,
Abroad in order to work...
These love lyrics are pervaded by the soundest ethical principles
of the Macedonian people, past and present, and in countless poetic images
they crystallize the politico-social situation.
It is worth pointing out again that these love songs are governed by the
strict morality of the patriarchal family, which excludes any erotic reference
and links physical to spiritual beauty through metaphor and idealization:
My beloved is like spring dew,
Everything she touches blossoms.
The songs about marriage extol and spiritualize the complex
relations of married life, between parents and children, brothers and sisters,
daughter-in-law and mother-in-law; they raise to a purity, unsullied by
discord, the connective tissue of the family which remained unrent , despite
the fruitless attempts of the oppressors during the long period of bondage
suffered by the Macedonian people. Indeed, this servitude had the effect
of strengthening the family, which was made intentionally large because
thins was the only way to oppose a greater resistance, and for this reason
a barren wife was condemned.
The songs about childhood mainly take the form of lullabies, but those about
animals and plants are quite different, with a style all their own.
In the humorous songs the aim was to amuse the people and at the same time
to satirize failings, chief among which were laziness, pride and drunkenness,
with acute critical observation, as in the following lines:
0 restless wine !
You have sold my oxen,
My two dear brothers,
And my uncle's cart.
In his poetic creation the Macedonian expresses the collective way of thinking
and feeling, showing their interdependence and uniformity.
Patriotism and optimism are the clear, explicit expression of Macedonian
epic poetry, which reveals an unshakable faith in a better future and in
freedom that must be won with arms and the sacrifice of one's life. These
.epic songs fostered the collective determination to keep alive the combative
spirit during the centuries of oppression. They are not only valuable for
the rich popular fantasy
with which the heroic themes are handled, but also because they provide
a historical reconstruction of a past full of noble deeds done for Macedonian
freedom…
Giorgio Nurigiani - 1972
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