Vikár László: Chuvash folksongs (Budapest, 1979)

L. VIKÁR and О. BERECZKI CHUVASH FOLKSONGS Relying on their twenty years’ investigations into the folk-music and related text material of the Finno-Ugrian and Turkic nations living in the Volga-Kama region, the authors have started a serial publication of their ample re­sults, whose surprising freshness and authenticity are guaranteed not only by their scholarly ac­complishment in the fields of musicology and linguistics but also by their extensive field work in the Mari, Chuvash, Tatar, and Bashkir Autonomous Soviet So­cialist Republics. The present volume — second after the highly successful “Che­­remis Folksongs” — deals with the folk-music of Viryal and Antari Chuvash ethnic groups. The song texts, also translated into English and Hungarian, offer an approach to a uniquely beauti­ful folk-poesy, while the essays in English contain interesting in­formation on the history, lan­guage and folk-traditions of the Chuvash people. The tune publication is comple­mented by abundant notes and various indexes to facilitate orien­tation in the styles and types of an ancient musical heritage. Lin­guists, ethnomusicologists, liter­ary historians, folklorists, as well as those engaged in the more practical concerns of music (per­forming artists, composers, choir leaders, etc.) can draw profit from studying this musical tra­dition that has so far been hardly accessible to the reading public. AKADÉMIAI KIADÓ, BUDAPEST ISBN 963 OS 1460 S

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