The experience of analyzing of the pitch organisation of Mansi zither tunes

Mansi (Voguls) is one of the Ob-Ugric peoples of Western Siberia. Mansi have a lot of phonoinstruments (including folk-music instruments): string (zither, lute, harp), shaman’s drum, hunter’s whistles, reindeer herder’s and household’s sounding items, children’s sound toys, etc. The most popular of them is the zither named saykvaltap. This instrument is tuned over the diatonic pentachord: c-d-e-f-g or c-d-es-f-g, and there are other variants of tuning. When the traditional lifestyle still remained, the zither was played during rituals (such as a bear-feast, sacrifice ceremony, shamanic rite) and in other situations, accompanying dances and singing. Currently, the zither is played mainly by young musicians during the concerts. The purpose of the article is to describe the principles of the pitch organization of Mansi instrumental music. The author had made recordings of playing of several old musicians, then the note transcription of that melodies has been made. The algorithm for the analysis is shown on the example of a single piece that is the personal melody of the deity in the image of a bear (“The Melody of the Clawed Old Man”). In the collection of analyzed tunes the following types of scales were found: 1) frequent: c-d-e-f-g, c-d-es-f-g, (c)-d-e-f-g, (c)-d-es-f-g; 2) rare: (c)-d-es-e-g, c-d-es-(f)-g, c-(d)-es-e-g. The tone functions can be such as a supporting tone, a semi-supporting tone, a non-supporting tone, an auxiliary tone. The tone functions are determined in each segment by the following signs: 1) accentuation; 2) location on the strong beat; 3) appearance on the boundaries of the composition units; 4) length of sounding; 5) multiple or frequent repetition. Semi-supporting tones are identified by the same criteria as the supporting ones, but they must have less ways of marking than the supporting tones. The auxiliary tones are rare, they don’t enter into the frame of melody and they are used only for variation. As a result of the analysis of the collection of tunes, the following patterns of the pitch-sound organization of the instrumental music of Mansi are defined: 1) both of quarta and quinta modes are frequent; 2) the number of mode supporting tones is two or three, rarely - one or four, the semisupporting tones are frequent; 3) the main supporting tones are at the highest and the lowest step of the scale. There is no strict correlation between the type of mode and the genre of the tune, but the following trend is noticeable. Melodies of deities and men’s dances in the modes of a quarta volume are performed more frequently. The epic or the song melodies and the melodies of women’s dances mainly sound in the modes of the quinta volume. On the basis of a comparison of several of the same name tunes (“Melody of the Old Man the Owl”), the following conclusion is drawn. The most important parameter of a pitch organization is the correlation of supporting tones and the sequence of appearance of typed intonational moves.

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