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Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música E-ISSN: 1697-0101 [email protected] Sociedad de Etnomusicología España Bielawski, Ludwik Ethnomusicology on the turn Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música, núm. 5, junio, 2000, p. 0 Sociedad de Etnomusicología Barcelona, España Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=82200501 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative Ethnomusicology on the turn Revista Transcultural de Música Transcultural Music Review #5 (2000) ISSN:1697-0101 Ethnomusicology on the turn Ludwik Bielawski (Warszawa) Professor Anna Czekanowska belongs to a generation of ethnomusico- logists educated after WWII who became specialists in this discipline, acquiring every possible research degree and establishing a position for ethnomusicology at Polish universities. Anna Czekanowska was the first to receive a Ph.D. and certification (1958, 1968) and become a professor of ethnomusicology (1976). Anna Czekanowska has engaged in many facets of scientific activity and organised co-operation with specialists from East and West, which has enhanced the international status of Polish musicology. Anna Czekanowska was born in Lwów on June 25th 1929, daughter of a prominent anthropologist and ethnologist, Jan Czekanowski. Her father, educated in Zürich, had begun a research career at the Ethnological Museum (Museum für Völkerkunde) in Berlin, from where he took part in an expedition to Central Africa. He continued his research in St Petersburg, organising the section of African Culture at the Hermitage Museum. He was then appointed a professor of anthropology at Lwów and the President of this university in 1934-1936. The mother of Anna, Elzbieta Sergijewska, was Russian; and her grandmother on her father's side, German. Such international and inter-denominational family connections and experiences shaped Anna's research work into a rare balance between Eastern and Western inspirations in humanities. Anna spent the war partly in Gluchów (Grójec district) on the family estate of Jan Czekanowski, and partly in the Kolbuszowa district and in other places where the family had to take refuge. In 1945/6 Jan Czekanowski was working at the Catholic University in Lublin, where Anna attended a music school (the piano class of Aleksander http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans5/bielawski.htm (1 of 8) [01/08/2007 11:42:08] Ethnomusicology on the turn Wielhorski). In 1946 Jan Czekanowski became Head of the anthropology department at Poznan University, at which Anna studied musicology in 1948- 1952. Her mentor was Adolf Chybinski, also a pre-war professor at Lwów University and the founder of Polish musicology. Although Anna is my age, she was already in her third year when I started my studies. The only lectures we attended together were those of Adolf Chybinski. At that time a star among students, or rather a fully mature research worker, was another contemporary, Tadeusz Strumillo. A great hope for Polish historical musicology, unfortunately he lost his life in the Tatra Mountains in 1956, aged only 27. Nevertheless he left considerable research. Ours was a unique class in the history of musicology, if we consider the future positions of the graduates. Zygmunt Szweykowski, music historian, the assistant of Chybinski, became the Head of the Musicological Department at the Jagiellonian University. Jan Steszewski, the ethnomusicologist, became the Head of the Musicological Department at the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznan. In those years (1948-52) musical ethnography was taught by Marian Sobieski, a pre-war assistant of Lucjan Kamienski, a founder of musicology in Poznan (1922). After WWII, Jadwiga and Marian Sobieski organised field recordings of folk music, thus continuing on a much larger scale the endeavours of the 1930s (original collections in Poznan and Warszawa were almost completely lost during the war). Anna Czekanowska from the very beginning specialised in musical ethnography. She took part in field research organised by Marian and Jadwiga Sobieski. The materials then gathered served as a basis for her M. A. and Ph.D. theses. Anna wrote her M. A. thesis about the region of Opoczynskie but she did not think of herself as a student of Sobieskis, because she herself had an everyday contact with a great authority in ethnography and was also absorbed in the research conducted by her father. Of the students of musicology, she distinguished herself because of her better preparation in ethnography. This was demonstrated in her overall ethnographic introduction to the M. A. thesis on songs of the Opoczynskie region. In her next monograph Czekanowska did not write this sort of introduction and concentrated on musicological questions. However, she was always conscious of ethnography, physical anthropology and historical linguistics and valued achievements in these fields. An absolutely new element introduced by Anna Czekanowska into Polish ethnomusicology was the quantitative method of organising folk melodies, first http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans5/bielawski.htm (2 of 8) [01/08/2007 11:42:08] Ethnomusicology on the turn in the form of Jan Czekanowski's diagram, then in the form of the taxonomy dendrite worked out by a group of mathematicians led by Hugo Steinhaus, former professor at Lwów University. Common features of these procedures is a formalisation of melodic analyses, computation of the extent of differences, and then grouping of the melodies according to their numbered similarities. This created a formal classification of folk melodies within the collections analysed. The diagram by Jan Czekanowski was used by Anna in her M. A. thesis (1952, published in 1956) but not published later, because it could arouse suspicion of "formalism," which could cause serious consequences in those times. It is a pity that in her Ph.D. dissertation (1958, published in 1961) on songs of the Bilgoraj region Anna did not publish the diagram, although it was commented upon in later theoretical contributions. Nevertheless, the adaptation of Jan Czekanowski's method into musical ethnography is her achievement. Anna Czekanowska's Ph.D. dissertation described in detail morphological features of the Bilgoraj region's songs and showed the peculiarities of these songs in the general context of the Polish-Ukrainian musical heritage. A consideration of the East-Slavonic literature is valuable, but the most important results are the stylistic stratification of the repertoire, an attempt to put in chronological order stylistic strata, and the inclusion of musical data in a discussion on the ethnogenesis of Slavonic and Polish folk culture. Anna Czekanowska received her Ph.D. in 1958, a year after her father published his basic work on the ethnogenesis of the Slavs. The certification work of Anna (1968, published in 1972) on narrow-range Slavonic melodies has similar ethnogenetic perspectives. This vast study was carried out with the help of mathematicians guided by Hugo Steinhaus. The tables of similarities were computed, but the graphs of the dendrites had to be drawn manually. A geographic differentiation of styles and scarce data on music history were confronted with the history of settlements and migrations. The conclusions refer to the difficult question of how historical causes influenced contemporary differentiation of styles in musical folklore. Before Anna Czekanowska published her monograph on Slavonic narrow- range melodies, the Ukrainian folklorist Vladimir Hoszowski published a book on the origins of Slavonic music (1971). Unlike Anna Czekanowska, who concentrated particularly on the tonal aspects of the songs, Vladimir Hoszowski, following the traditions of Ukrainian folklore studies, was looking for characteristic rhythmic features. This obviously led his analyses to other conclusions. However, this discrepancy was never resolved, either in an http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans5/bielawski.htm (3 of 8) [01/08/2007 11:42:08] Ethnomusicology on the turn international forum or personally by these researchers. Boguslaw Linette (1981) reduces the problem of Polish-Ukrainian borderlands and Slavonic sources to mutual and rather recent inter-relationships of Ukrainian and Polish music. The Slovakian ethnomusicologists Jozef Kresánek (1951) and Alica Elschekova (1966, 1978) explained in another way differentiation from older styles in folk music. They singled out a stratum of melodies based on formulae with intervals of the fourth and second and defined it as the stratum connected with an agrarian culture, and then accordic melodies with the prevailing interval of the third as the stratum connected with a shepherd culture. In the 1960s computers offered fascinating possibilities of ordering folk melodies. Bertrand Bronson in the late 1940s had already formalised a method for analysis of melodies of Anglo-American ballads and encoded his results in a computer system. Similar studies were conducted later by Oskar and Alica Elschek in Slovakia and Vladimir Hoszowski in the Ukraine and Armenia. Open databases were created for thousands of folk melodies prepared for various classifications. However, the way chosen by Anna Czekanowska differed: it consisted of a kind of closed song collection which has determined criteria for analysis. Since the 1960s ethnomusicologists have tried to code whole melodies