- Library Home /
- Search Collections /
- Open Collections /
- Browse Collections /
- UBC Theses and Dissertations /
- Living song : an intergenerational investigation of...
Open Collections
UBC Theses and Dissertations
UBC Theses and Dissertations
Living song : an intergenerational investigation of Moravian folk song Ulehla, Julia Theresa
Abstract
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, biologist/ethnomusicologist Vladimír Úlehla (1888-1947) transcribed hundreds of folk songs from Strážnice, his hometown in the rural region of Slovácko, which lies at the border of present-day Czech and Slovak Republics. For Úlehla, Slovácko songs were living organisms, intimately related to the landscape and carried through time by family clans. Some of his interlocutors were relatives. Others were relations forged by decades of friendship. Vladimír was my great-grandfather, and his monograph Živá píseň (Living Song, 1949) provided a means for me to enter into a musical-cultural heritage that was ruptured when my father escaped communist Czechoslovakia and entered North America as a refugee. Informed by song transcriptions, Vladimír’s ideas about living song, childhood experiences musicking with family members, and ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation seeks to address the life of song, even when hybridity, rupture, and transplant figure into that inquiry. Through a networked, rhizomatic framework and mixed-methods approach, this research brings a number of theoretical, historical and methodological contexts to bear on addressing the living nature of song. Family oral history, interviews with musicians, and folk song poetics gesture towards a Slovácko cosmology that inscribes a world co-inhabited by humans, ancestral spirits, birds, trees, waters, mountains, and storms, all of which are conceived as animate and interrelated. Participant observation, my own research-creation and subsequent song-bartering (Bovin 1988) offer glimpses into the powerful role that songs play in connecting people with one another and with their ancestors. I describe how during fieldwork, the cultural hybridity of my performing body called many complex and painful histories into question and disrupted folk song’s alliance with cultural purity, which was especially provocative in an era of heightened xenophobia. Weaving together a consideration of the formal qualities of songs, their affectual, emotional power, and the historical/political contexts in which they appear, Slovácko songs emerge as agentive entities with which a human might collaborate in a variety of culturally-specific performance ecologies, thereby opening possibilities for ethical, anticolonial research practices and interpersonal encounters within a heterogeneous, multicultural society facing crises of social injustice, the COVID-19 pandemic, and impending climate catastrophe.
Item Metadata
Title |
Living song : an intergenerational investigation of Moravian folk song
|
Creator | |
Supervisor | |
Publisher |
University of British Columbia
|
Date Issued |
2021
|
Description |
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, biologist/ethnomusicologist Vladimír
Úlehla (1888-1947) transcribed hundreds of folk songs from Strážnice, his hometown in the
rural region of Slovácko, which lies at the border of present-day Czech and Slovak
Republics. For Úlehla, Slovácko songs were living organisms, intimately related to the
landscape and carried through time by family clans. Some of his interlocutors were relatives.
Others were relations forged by decades of friendship. Vladimír was my great-grandfather,
and his monograph Živá píseň (Living Song, 1949) provided a means for me to enter into a
musical-cultural heritage that was ruptured when my father escaped communist
Czechoslovakia and entered North America as a refugee. Informed by song transcriptions,
Vladimír’s ideas about living song, childhood experiences musicking with family members,
and ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation seeks to address the life of song, even when
hybridity, rupture, and transplant figure into that inquiry.
Through a networked, rhizomatic framework and mixed-methods approach, this
research brings a number of theoretical, historical and methodological contexts to bear on
addressing the living nature of song. Family oral history, interviews with musicians, and folk
song poetics gesture towards a Slovácko cosmology that inscribes a world co-inhabited by
humans, ancestral spirits, birds, trees, waters, mountains, and storms, all of which are
conceived as animate and interrelated. Participant observation, my own research-creation and
subsequent song-bartering (Bovin 1988) offer glimpses into the powerful role that songs
play in connecting people with one another and with their ancestors. I describe how during
fieldwork, the cultural hybridity of my performing body called many complex and painful
histories into question and disrupted folk song’s alliance with cultural purity, which was
especially provocative in an era of heightened xenophobia. Weaving together a consideration
of the formal qualities of songs, their affectual, emotional power, and the historical/political
contexts in which they appear, Slovácko songs emerge as agentive entities with which a
human might collaborate in a variety of culturally-specific performance ecologies, thereby
opening possibilities for ethical, anticolonial research practices and interpersonal encounters
within a heterogeneous, multicultural society facing crises of social injustice, the COVID-19
pandemic, and impending climate catastrophe.
|
Genre | |
Type | |
Language |
eng
|
Date Available |
2021-08-23
|
Provider |
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
|
Rights |
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
|
DOI |
10.14288/1.0401497
|
URI | |
Degree | |
Program | |
Affiliation | |
Degree Grantor |
University of British Columbia
|
Graduation Date |
2021-11
|
Campus | |
Scholarly Level |
Graduate
|
Rights URI | |
Aggregated Source Repository |
DSpace
|
Item Media
Item Citations and Data
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International