The Yakut Folk Song: A Brief Ethnographic-Musical Sketch

Abstract

The author reviews the many genres of Yakut (Sakha) folk music, arguing that its richness is illustrated through the vitality and adaptability of song [toyuk], epos [olonkho], prayer [algys], and improvisational circle dance chanting [okhuokhai]. Some traditionally multi-media and multi-vocal forms, such as shamanic dramas and full-length epic singing, have been rechanneled, with their creative spirit being inherited by the most varied manifestations of Yakut artistic culture—words, painting, and music.

Notes

^1. The warlike Kurykan people (tribe) are mentioned numerous times in L.N. Gumilev’s fascinating Drevnie tiurki (Moscow, 1967).

^2. A.P. Okladnikov offers linguistic and folkloric corroboration of the southern origin of the Yakuts (1949, pp. 266–98).

^3. Aside from Russian borrowings, an approximately equal number of Turkic, Mongol, and Paleoasiatic roots co-exist in the modern Yakut language.

^4. In the present publication, the Yakut spellings of individual words, song titles, and the like are given in italics.

Yakut script, switched from a Latin graphical foundation to a Cyrillic one in the 1930s, uses five special letters that convey specific phonemes:

Ğğ—guttural [grassiruiushchee (like the French “r”)—Trans.] “g” (of the Ukrainian type);

Ññ—uvular nasal “n” (like the German “ng”);

Öö—deepened [oglublennoe] frontal “о” (like the German “ö”);

Üü—deepened frontal “u” (like the German “ü”);

Hh—exhaled light “kh” (like the German “h”).

[Several other special Latin letters are used here to convey distinctive Turkic phonemes:

Çç—equivalent to the English “ch” sound;

Iı—equivalent to the Russian sound written “y” in English transliteration;

Qq—equivalent to the sound written “x” in Russian (like the Scottish “loch”).]

In Russian transliteration of Yakut special terms, it is customary to transform the letter h into an “s,” although this does not fully correspond to actual Yakut pronunciation. In addition, the letter combination d’ approximately corresponds to a soft “dzh”. One must likewise take into account the existence of diphthongs (ie, ıa, uo, üö). Stress in Yakut words (weakly expressed), as a rule, falls on the last syllable. Considerably more significant is the distinction between long and short vowels (length is conveyed in writing by doubling the letter).

^5. About twenty instruments are described in M.N. Zhirkov’s unpublished research Yakutskaia narodnaia muzyka, a two-volume manuscript held at the Institute of Language, Literature, and History of the Yakut Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences Siberian Division [today’s Institute of Humanities, Russian Academy of Science, archive].

^6. Enormous changes occurring precisely in the field of choral, instrumental, and dance Yakut culture interest us in the present work to the extent that they exert an influence on the newest stratum of folk song craft. In the years of Soviet power, the intensive development of polyphonic singing began, various instrumental ensembles were formed, in particular ensembles of khomus players and orchestras of reconstructed folk instruments. In addition, distinctive dances with instrumental accompaniment appeared. All these new phenomena of everyday musical life unconditionally impact on contemporary song intonation.

^7. Yakut kylysakh has not been studied yet, and the term’s origin is not clear. Hence, no unanimity exists with respect to their notation. The previously accepted provisional depiction of kylysakh as crossed-out grace-notes (often [at musical intervals of] thirds or fourths) was based on the opinion that kylysakh represent a special kind of fast grace-notes. However, the continuity of the main melodic line, the abundance in it of actual grace-notes, and—the main thing—the timbral hallmarks of kylysakh often cast doubt on such a method of notating them. In the present work, strongly pronounced kylysakh are indicated with diamond-shaped (harmonic-stop [flazholetnymi]) signs placed where the actual note sounds. The given method was proposed by the author with A.V. Rudnevaia in 1957.

^8. The cieretii style is not infrequently called “cie-buo” songs in everyday language because of this most widespread initial exclamation.

^9. A direct-to-disk recording was made in 1946 by N.M. Bachinskaia and K.G. Svitovaia in the folklore cabinet of the Moscow Conservatory (inv. no. 1133). The notation, as in all cases unless specifically indicated otherwise, was by the author of the present work.

^10. According to ancient cosmogonic notions, the universe in the olonkho is divided into three worlds. In the Middle World under the sun live the legendary ancestors of the Yakuts—the ayıı aymağa tribe. On seven of the nine circles of the Upper (Southern) World and in the forbidding Lower (Northern) World dwell various other mythical tribes, friendly, or more often hostile, to the ayıı epic heroes. The central idea of the Yakut epos is the triumph of the arduous and just struggle of the people of the earth for freedom and happiness. Lyrical and humorous narratives exist in the olonkho along with this.An exhaustive examination of the narrative aspect of the olonkho and its personages is in I.V. Pukhov’s monograph (1962). The brilliant essay “Yakutskaia skazka (olonkho), ee siuzhet i soderzhanie” was penned by the poet-revolutionary Platon Oiunskii, himself a distinguished olonkhosut (see P.A. Oiunskii, Soch., vol. 7. Yakutsk, 1962).

^11. Materials of the folklore cabinet of the Moscow Conservatory, inv. no. 1135.

^12. In 1958, over nearly eight hours I was able to record from A.G. Agapov (village of Amga) an abbreviated variant of the two-evening olonkho Altan Sabaray buqatır—a variant containing forty song episodes. In 1970, the firm «Melodiya» released a set of nine long-playing records with a recording (likewise abridged) of P. Oiunskii’s famous olonkho Niurgun Bootur Stremitel’nyi as performed by the Yakut Dramatic-and-Musical [muzykal’no-dramaticheskogo] Theater actor G.G. Kolseov.

^13. According to eyewitnesses, attempts at collective performance of olonkho have been undertaken since time immemorial: several singers distributed the roles of individual heroes among themselves and acted out something akin to a theatrical presentation. In our time, stage play productions of olonkho through the efforts of participants in amateur artistic performances are widespread.

^14. All kinds of shamanic singing exist that cannot in their essence be regarded here as phenomena of folklore; nevertheless, individual examples of oyuun ırıata (the songs of shamans), just like imitations of them (oyuun ütüktüü), are sometimes referred to in the present work, in the context of lad intonation. I direct those interested in information on Yakut shamanism to I.A. Khudiakov’s publication (1969) and N.A. Alekseyev’s Traditsionnye religioznye verovaniia Yakutov v XIX—nachale XX v. (Novosibirsk, 1975).

^15. Singing in one’s sleep is encountered quite often among the Yakuts. The example cited, sung in 1969 by the singer Luka Nikolaevich Turnin from Alekseyev region [renamed Tatta in 1990], is a simulation of the night singing of an elderly woman.

^16. Chant for an Olëkma dance, as performed by U. Nokhsorov (materials of the folklore cabinet of the Moscow Conservatory, inv. no. 1140).

^17. The Viliui okhuokai is not infrequently preceded by a slow introductory part, performed in the cieretii manner and called a “toyuk.”

^18. The qoñsuo ırıata example cited was recorded from a singer from Megino-Kangalas region, Aleksei Leont’evich Popov.

^19. Recorded on the Amga expedition of 1958, for example, were several variants of the Sétéké-sotoko spring bird calls, the ritual meaning of which is hidden from the children singing it.

^20. Variants of such a tune were recorded during the Tatta expedition of 1967. For the song of a carpenter recorded on the Viliui in 1954, see Grigorian 1956b, p. 74.

^21. It should be pointed out that only those genres of everyday singing that were not directly connected with shamanic activity are enumerated here.

^22. A recording of Dıgın made in the [19]20s by I.P. Iaunzem [Jaunzeme] was released in an arrangement for voice with orchestra by Maksimilian Shteinberg [Maximilian Steinberg] (Shest’ narodnykh pesen, Series 2, op. 22, Moscow, 1932, p. 16). In 1927, the Yakut party-member G.N. Emel’ianov, sent on assignment to Kzyl-Orda (Kazakhstan), communicated the melody of this song to A.V. Zataevich, in whose archive the corresponding notation has been preserved (Zataevich 1971, pp. 214–17).

^23. Recorded in 1969 from T.I. Doidukov from Verkhneviliuisk Raion. The whole-tone tetrachord in the given case conveys only a very rough approximation of the peculiarities of the intoning: the C#’ here is low everywhere, while the G is constantly high.

^24. It is already hard to establish to whom the original melody of this Martha’s Song (Mappa ırıata) to the words of E. Sivtsev (Tallan Biure) belongs, despite a significant number of publications. The fully folkorized variant of it cited here was communicated in 1962 by the singer N.G. Alekseyev from Suntar Raion, who arbitrarily changed the universally known rhymed text of the song.

a. Writing in the Soviet period, the author used the accepted Russian term for the “Yakut” people, although increasingly in the post-Soviet period their self-designation “Sakha” is used.

b. The crucial term lad in Russian is difficult to translate, and appeared in the title of Eduard Alekseyev’s book excerpted here. In an abstract for that book, Valery Erokhin explained the difficulties (pp. 284-5): “the Russian musicological term “лад” (literally: in the first place, “concord”, “harmony”, and secondly, “manner”, “mode”)… is virtually not to be rendered by means of any single English (or German, or French, etc.) word, so the common way to translate it — as “mode” — is far from providing a really exact equivalent of the notion… [it] often implies the idea of organic coherence of the sound-material employed… One or other form of modal organization determines the obscure remote past of the human “sense of music” and its crystal yesterdays, its turbulent present and its vague and novel future.” I am grateful to Eduard Alekseyev (email December 15, 2016) for pointing out the difficulties in lad translation.

c. “C’ie-buo!” is a drawn out welcoming exclamation that signals the beginning of both epics and important songs. It is rarely translated, but the author’s “Come Now!” or “Nu, Vot!” provides colloquial context. In this transliteration, its first letter is “c”, using a Turkic Latin alphabet for spelling Yakut words. In the Russian original, the letter combination d’ was used, approximately corresponding to a soft “dzh”.

d. Olonkho epics in their complete form are rarely performed in the post-Soviet period, although increasingly parts of them are performed, including by younger generations, in efforts to recover and valorize the richness of Sakha folklore roots. Numerous conferences of folklore studies have been held in the republic, and an Institute for Olonkho studies has been established at the main university in Yakutsk, Northeast Federal University named for Ammosov. Competitions for the best epic singers are regularly held.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eduard E. Alekseyev

Eduard Efimovich Alekseyev, renowned fieldwork-based ethnomusicologist born in Yakutia, today’s Sakha Republic, was chairman of the Folklore Commission of the Union of Soviet Composers from 1972 to 1992. He was director of the department of the General Theory of Folklore at the Moscow State Institute of Art Studies before retiring. His extensive collected materials are in Yakutsk, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Harvard University. E-mail: [email protected]