Dovhalyuk I. Phonographing Folk Music in Ukraine: History, Methodology and Tendencies

The given thesis deals with the phonographical period in the history of sound recording of folk music in Ukraine. On the background of phonographical achievements of renowned world ethnological research centres in the USA and Europe (i.e. Vienna, Paris and Berlin phonographical archives) and, first and foremost, central and eastern European peoples (namely the Polish, Hungarians and Russians) the author has analyzed how recording musical folklore was carried out in Ukraine. The history of phonographing folk music may be considered to undergo the following three stages: the trial stage (presupposed testing the potential of technology, recordings of folk melodies that were hard to transcribe during their performance, for instance recitations, instrumental as well as vocal and instrumental music), the theme-based stage (involved finding a particular solution to a certain ethno-musicological problem, recording significant phenomena of national folk culture, namely melodies of heroic epic songs, polyphony, as well as collecting material from a certain area), and the representative stage (meant carrying out large-scale research on folk music culture of a certain dialect, region or the country on the whole). The given research also represents phonographing folk music in the historical context, i.e. from early interest in recording sounds to after-life of cylinders.