<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The article presents the greatest Polish ethnographer, who was
also a professionally educated musician. He concentrated his
activities on the oral musical culture, still vital in the 19th century
but liable to changes. Culture studies by Kolberg concerned
mainly rural communities, statistically dominating in those times.
He planned to edit 60 volumes geographically covering the first
Polish State from before 1772; he managed to print 33 of them in his
lifetime and prepare many further anthologies for editing. Up till now,
the editorial work is still in progress. The already edited 80 volumes
show us an old social culture, folk ceremonies, musical repertoire
including ritual singing, songs and instrumental pieces. Kolberg’s
printed monument is a source of reflection on the past and can
inspire social studies, ethnomusicological research as well as musical
ensembles performing traditional ethnic music of peasant origin.
The size of Kolberg’s documentation means that a special Institute
of Oskar Kolberg had to be established to continue editorial and research
work.
In spite of his positivistic and empirical attitude, Kolberg
still kept a romantic faith in the significance of folk songs and
singing for the preservation of national components in cultural
consciousness. Simultaneously, he developed a model for structural
analysis of popular/folk culture and intended to build a cultural atlas
of the country, building on the work of his father, professor of the
University of Warsaw, an outstanding cartographer. But the core
of Kolberg’s programme, its “planetary centre”, was always music.
It was music that gave him the stimulus to interpret the culture of
Central-Eastern Europe. To preserve regional diversity, he wrote down
more than 20 thousand vocal melodies, song texts and instrumental
pieces, paying special attention to variants and ornamentation.
For the contemporary composer, Kolberg’s volumes are a useful
musical reader. These huge anthologies of elementary but highly
integrated musical concepts demonstrate the collective creativity and
a fascinating prefiguration of mass culture, still open to symbols
and to poetry. Kolberg’s music transcriptions, catching music in the
process of performance, should not be treated as unchangeable patterns
for copying, but rather as a source that helps understand creativity
in traditional oral culture. </abstract>

Oskar Kolberg (1814–1890) the Founder of Musical Ethnography in Poland

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In the second half of the 19th century, when Oskar Kolberg conducted
his folkloristic and ethnographic work, folk song and music were still
alive and, to a great extent, functioned in their natural culture context.
However, already at that time, and especially in the last decades of the
century, gradual changes were taking place within folk tradition. Those
changes were brought about by industrialization and factors in the
development of urban civilization, which varied in intensity depending
on the region. Folk music was also influenced by those changes and they
themselves were further fuelled by the final (third) Partition of Poland
by Austria, Prussia and Russia, declared in 1795 and lasting till the end
of World War I.
Oskar Kolberg noticed and described changes in the musical
landscape of villages and little towns of the former Polish Republic
in the 19th century, as well as in the choice of instruments. To be quite
precise, musical instruments are not featured as a separate subject of his
research, but various references, though scattered, are quite numerous,
and are presented against a social, cultural and musical background,
which provides an opportunity to draw certain conclusions concerning
folk music instrumental practice.
However, changes in the makeup of folk music ensembles resulted in
the disappearance of traditional instruments, which were being replaced
by the newer, factory-produced ones. This process worried Kolberg
and he noticed its symptoms also in a wider, European context, where
bagpipes or dulcimers were being supplanted not only by “itinerant
orchestras” but also by barrel organs or even violins. Writing about
our country, Poland, he combined a positive opinion on the subject
of improvised and expressive performance of folk violinists with
a negative one on clarinet players and mechanical instruments.
Summing up, the musical landscape of Polish villages and both
small and larger towns was definitely influenced in the 19th century
by the symptoms of phenomena which much later acquired a wider
dimension and were defined as globalization and commercialization.
Sensing them, Oskar Kolberg viewed the well-being of the traditional
culture heritage with apprehension.</abstract>

Kolberg’s opinions on changes in the choice of instruments in 19th century folk music

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The mainstream fields of Polish dance research were defined
in 1818–1847 by Józef Elsner, Kazimierz Brodziński, Łukasz
Gołębiowski and Karol Czerniawski, who broadly characterized some
elements of the dances considered as national (the polonaise, mazur,
krakowiak and kozak). Oskar Kolberg knew very well the works of all
these authors and referred to them many times. However, he was unique
in his extensive documentation of dance melodies, information about
their geographic origin, and local terminology. He also characterized
the dances with regard to their sequence in the traditional context and
described the dance technique in an instructive manner.
Oskar Kolberg’s documentation for quite a long time remained
outside the scope of mainstream research and publications about
dance in Poland. In the 1930s Polish representatives of the newly
defined field of ethnochoreology were the first to include examples
from Kolberg in their works on the ritual dances, regional dances
and characteristic dance behaviour types and forms. Kolberg’s works
increased in popularity after the World War II. Today the materials left
by Oskar Kolberg allow us to establish to a large extent the geographic
range and perspective on the changes of dance repertoire, both with regard
to choreographic technique and dance types, or a more detailed and critical
perspective on the problems of folk terminology in dance phenomena.
It may also serve as the point of departure for wider retrospective
or comparative studies – which may not be very fashionable today, but
which have never been adequately conducted in Poland. </abstract>

The Importance of the Collection of Oskar Kolberg for Contemporary Choreological Studies

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The world of the Jews must have attracted Kolberg, who as an educated
member of the intelligentsia must have been conscious of what was
happening in Judaism in his times. The nineteenth century was
indeed a time of the flourishing Hasidism, the travelling hazanim, the
development of the Jewish Enlightenment movement (the Haskalah),
a great numbers of Jewish Tanzhaus openings. Jewish themes also
appear in almost every volume of Kolberg’s Complete Works. However,
Jews only formed the backdrop for the events taking place among
Poles. Only in the case of a few records left by Kolberg can we surmise
that the musical performers were themselves Jewish. This is most likely
true of five songs with texts in the Yiddish language. More melodies
set down in writing from the Jews or from the repertoire taken over
by Polish musicians are probably to be found among the pieces without
verbal text or referred to by Kolberg as ‘dances’. It is unknown whether
Jewish musicians played Jewish melodies for Kolberg, but we cannot
exclude the possibility of their performances constituting a basis
for some transcriptions of pieces that were not marked as Jewish.</abstract>

Kolberg and Jewish Music

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The article examines the subject of Belarusian musical and
ethnographic materials collected by Oskar Kolberg. The materials
on Belarusian folk culture, which were collected by the researcher
throughout his whole life, were published almost 80 years after his
death in Volume 52 Belarus–Polesie, while some of them are also
to be found in Volume 53 Lithuania. Thus, the geography of these
materials extends far beyond the borders of contemporary Belarus.
However, individual regions of the country are not equally represented.
Using the works of his predecessors, Kolberg compiled information
about the culture and ethnography of Belarus and supplemented
it with his own research. The author of this article divides the materials
used to compile Volume 52 into two unequal groups: publications
of other authors and the personal field notes of Kolberg (together with
the materials sent to him by correspondents). The latter group, which
constitutes more than a quarter of all the materials and is essential
for assessing the Belarusian achievements of the Polish ethnographer,
has been analysed in the article. The abundance of Kolberg’s own
transcriptions of music in the volume makes his work into one
of the key sources in 19th-century Belarusian musical historiography
The author also puts forward a hypothesis concerning the Belarusian
beginnings of Kolberg’s entire collecting activity.</abstract>

Belarusian Traditional Culture in the Legacy of Oskar Kolberg

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Henryk Oskar Kolberg (1814–1890), a musician, composer,
the greatest Polish ethnographer and one of the fathers of European
ethnomusicology, collected over 20,000 folk songs, dances, and
instrumental melodies from the territory of today’s Poland, Belarus,
Ukraine and other Slavic countries. The musical culture of the Hutsuls
was an object of Oskar Kolberg’s interest in the late 1870s and early
1880s. The research material related to this region was collected
by Kolberg, similarly as in other regions, from two different types
of sources. The core of his work consisted of field notes written down
during his few trips to that region. Another way of collecting information
for Kolberg’s publication included an extensive study of already
published resources – historical and ethnographical works, collections
of songs, short articles, etc. Kolberg’s study of the musical culture of the
Hutsuls is a very valuable source for the history of the culture of this
part of Europe.</abstract>

Oskar Kolberg’s Study of the Musical Culture of the Hutsuls

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Oskar Kolberg never visited Lusatia, and did not come
in direct contact with the Sorbs. Still, hoping to carry out his original
project of a collection of melodies from all Slavic nations, Kolberg
could not ignore Lusatian songs and dances. The volume Materiały
do etnografii Słowian Zachodnich i Południowych, Part 1: Łużyce is made
up of three sections. The first one contains Kolberg’s translations to the
Polish language and excerpts from Jan Arnošt Smoler’s monumental
work Volkslieder der Sorben in der Ober- und Niederlausitz / Pěsnički
hornich a delnich Łužiskich Serbow. The second part includes Sorbian
materials from the collection of Andrzej Kucharski, who in the years
1826–1827 studied the history, literature and language of Lusatians.
The third part contains Kolberg’s own rather scarce lexical and
bibliographical notes. The aim of this article is to take note of a not-sowell-
known volume of Kolberg’s folk-musical collection and to discuss
the meaning of this publication nowadays. </abstract>

Oskar Kolberg’s Volume on “Łużyce” [Lusatia]

AHEAD OF PRINT

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Volume 17 (2020): Issue 1 (December 2020)

Volume 16 (2019): Issue 1 (December 2019) Women-Composers in Poland

Volume 15 (2018): Issue 1 (December 2018) Deconstructing the Myth of Polishness in Music

Volume 14 (2017): Issue 1 (December 2017) ‘Warsaw Autumn’ International Festival of Contemporary Music

Volume 13 (2016): Issue 1 (December 2016) [Polish] Musicology Today

Volume 12 (2015): Issue 1 (December 2015) The Musical Languages of Contemporary Polish Composers: Self-Reflections

Volume 11 (2014): Issue 1 (December 2014) Oskar Kolberg

Volume 10 (2013): Issue 1 (December 2013) Musical Historiography in Poland. New Sources – New Methodologies

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Volume 11 (2014): Issue 1 (December 2014) - Oskar Kolberg

Musicology Today

Volume 11 (2014): Issue 1 (December 2014)

Oskar Kolberg