Historical Skolt Sami Music and Two Types of Melodic Structures in Leu′dd Tradition
Historical Skolt Sami Music and Two Types of Melodic Structures in Leu′dd Tradition

Summary/Abstract: The Sami are an indigenous people living in Scandinavia, northern Fennoscandia, and the Kola Peninsula. The land of the Sami is located on the territories of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Due to the fact that the Skolt Sami have always lived in a multicultural environment, their musical tradition is inherently multi-layered and the Skolt Sami have adopted a significant amount of shared traditions from the northeast of Russia into their own musical culture. However, the Skolt Sami have an indigenous musical genre called leu′dd, which is used to describe and comment on Skolt Sami life, both as ‘history’ and ‘present’, so that the leu′dds form a bank of shared memories of the Skolt Sami society. In my analysis I have presented an idea that there are two different types of melody structures in the historical material found from the archives. The model of fragmentary phrase structure explains many of the features found in the ‘old type’ leu′dd melodies, while the ‘new type’ can be understood through the idea that Russian and Karelian song melodies were used as the model for leu′dds.

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