Tel.: +7 (4112) 34-44-60
4, Ordzhonikidze str., Yakutsk, 677000, Republic of Sakha (Yakutiya), Russian Federation
Lecturer, department of Art History, researcher of the Laboratory of complex geo-cultural research
of Arctic, Arctic State Institute for Culture and Arts
Kardashevskaya L.: e-mail: kardmike@mail.ru
Tel.: +7 (4112) 34-44-60
4, Ordzhonikidze str., Yakutsk, 677000, Republic of Sakha (Yakutiya), Russian Federation
Lecturer, department of Art History, researcher of the Laboratory of complex geo-cultural research
of Arctic, Arctic State Institute for Culture and Arts
This paper is financially supported by the grant of the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 14-38-00031) “Creation of Laboratory of Complex Geo-cultural Research of the Arctic”.
Hunting signals and mocking of voices of birds and beasts have been and still remain an integral part of the Evenks’ everyday life. Such singing modes appear in song and dance folklore, even within epics and shamanic sessions, performed among this ethnos. An Evenk shaman imitates wild deer’s bell, voices of birds by means of his own voice, moreover, imitation of an elk (a male moose) when choosing its jacket as a skin for a tumbrel. Acoustic imitations and signals are divided into serving economic activities (hunting, deer herding, cattle-breeding) and aesthetic-cultural. The authors reveal several music and linguistic peculiarities of deer herding sound imitations and acoustic alarms depending on their functions. 1) Broad leaps of melody and such timbre features and specific modes of vocal sound delivery, as glissade sounds, hissing, “clip-clop”, are connected with exclamations used by the herder to drive the herd or to scatter the given individual straying the flock. 2) Narrow-range melodies and “growling” glottal phones appear in mocking, used to beckon, sooth or warn the deer. This article, based on works of researchers of the 20th century and our own field research. In it is given a musicological analysis of hunting and herding onomatopoeia of Evenks, and onomatopoeia found in song, dance folklore, shamanic sessions, epic legends of the Evenks. Hunting onomatopoeia is used for beckoning wild fowl (quail-calls), as well as either to scare off an animal or to drive it into a trap, sometimes with the use of noise instruments (a trumpet made of birch bark “orevun”, a willow whistle “kunis”, a squeaker made of birch bark pichavun and a frictional stick on an animal sinew with a resonating box horokodeyoron). Acoustic transformations of birds voices (recitative or singing types of onomatopoeia) are incorporated into different genres of musical culture. They are included into the traditional dance and even form an integral part of shamanic mysteries.
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