Tradycyjne pieśni poranne i wieczorne żyjące w pamięci cieszyńskich ewangelików
Traditional morning and evening songs remembered by the Evangelicals from Cieszyn

Author(s): Arleta Nawrocka-Wysocka
Subject(s): Music, History of Art
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Summary/Abstract: The phenomenon of singing morning and evening prayers is inscribed into theProtestant tradition. The section of songs assigned to day-time appeared for the first time ina German-speaking song book of Czech brothers published in 1531 by Michael Weisse.From that time he was given a special place in subsequent cantionals and Protestant songbooks. The oldest morning and evening songs, likewise the ones connected with the calendarand church festivals, were maintained in a hymn style, but gained a more sophisticatedform with time. Despite the fact that they were played during church services, their mainpurpose was a private prayer at home. Performing a function of a private prayer, the verysongs became more sensitive to the influence of a folk performing style and diverged fromcanonic versions adjusting to the records in song books and chorale books. Thus, theyshould be perceived as a repertoire shaped and modified by an oral tradition to a greater extentthan for example songs connected with a church calendar. Meanwhile, the 19th and20th century chronicles, memoires, and works published in Cieszyn Silesia contain little informationon a daily singing at home. The lack of the research material on the performingpractice of the Evangelic song, strongly evident especially in the light of dynamically developingstudies in Scandinavian and Baltic countries, gave rise to the need of conducting terrainobservations, the aim of which was just a registration of traditional, old songs, includingmorning and evening ones.In the course of research as many as 130 songs, morning and evening prayers, out of500 registered altogether, were recorded. The biggest collection of texts involving 68 items,created for the purposes of performing them during morning prayers (37 songs) and eveningprayers (31 songs) contains a cantional by Jerzy Heczko. A comparison allows for makinga statement that Heczko took many of these texts from the subsequent editions of theCzech cantional by Jerzy Trzanowski.

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