Ennio Stipèeviæ



Ennio Stipčević

The Present of the Past: The Earliest Musical Notations of

Folk Music in Croatia

1. The present of the past: music in context

Data about Croatian folk music go far back into the past, to the early Middle Ages, before singing in the vernacular, in or out of church, was recorded in musical notation. The oldest Croatian texts were in Latin, and the oldest liturgical manuscripts that include musical notation were in Latin and date from the end of the 10th century. In Roman Illyricum and in the sphere of Western-Roman political and cultural influence, Latin literacy was present for centuries before the coming of the Slavs. When the Croats arrived in their new homeland between the 6th and the 7th century and spread from the south-west Pannonian Plane to the east coast of the Adriatic Sea, they found themselves at the meeting place of the former Eastern and Western Roman Empires, of Byzantium and the new west-European kingdoms and principalities. In the 9th century they recognized Frankish sovereignty and became part of the west-European Christian cultural and political circle. In the early Middle Ages the heritage of Antiquity, of the Mediterranean spirit, and of west-European Christianity became the constants and coordinates of Croatian cultural and musical life, and determined its development during following centuries (Andreis 1982(2); Županović 1984-1989; Stipčević 1997).

In the early Middle Ages the position of the church in Croatia was also specific, because Croatian territory was located on the boundaries of three jurisdictions, Rome, Constantinople and Aquileia. Dependence on those three sources of church power was reflected in a variety of liturgies and the music that belonged to them. It is important to emphasize that from the early Middle Ages liturgy in Croatia was in Latin, but also in the vernacular, much before Luther’s reform. Croatian Glagolitic priests fostered and spread the Croatian Church-Slavonic language. They used liturgical books written in the Glagolitic script for rites of the Western Roman Church, and developed so-called Glagolitic chant (Kniewald 1963; Bezić 1973; Martinić 1981). Local folklore influenced this Glagolitic chant, especially after the 18th century. However, the course of folk influence on Glagolitic church singing is difficult to determine, because no old reliable notation of Glagolitic chant has been preserved. Instead, this kind of singing was carried down from generation to generation through oral tradition and was not systematically recorded until the early 20th century. Like in all other musical traditions that lived through the centuries and were carried down orally, it is impossible to establish what Glagolitic chant owes to local folklore, and what to links with western liturgy. Links between the past and present cannot be clearly discerned and defined (Bezić 1971).

Croatian folk music was recorded in musical notation for the first time in the Renaissance, a time when Europeans began to be clearly aware of concepts like the past and folk culture. However, this was also a time when Croatian lands were troubled by great political upheavals with far-reaching consequences. The Ottoman conquest of Croatia started at the beginning of the 15th century and Croatian territory became the site of bloody warfare. The predominant feeling that emerges from the extensive literary corpus at that time was that Croatian territory was the bulwark of Christianity (antemurales christianitatis), and books by Croatian humanists contained many records of Ottoman folk music (Cavallini 1986; Tuksar 1990). Contemporaries were especially interested in documentary information Croatian writers gave about the Ottomans. The popular and much reprinted travel books by Bartol Đurđević (De Turcarum ritu et ceremoniis, Antwerp, 1544) and Luigi Bassano (I costumi et modi particolari de la vita de Turchi, Venice, 1545) of Zadar included interesting paragraphs about folk music in Ottoman regions. It is not surprising, however, that most Croatian humanists wrote about the Ottomans and their customs in an exceedingly anti-Turkish note (Budiša 1988:265).

In the 16th century the only place to escape from Ottoman danger was the safety of well fortified castles and manors. At that time the words put into the mouths of Velebit shepherds from the surroundings of Zadar in Planine (Mountains), “We, too, would flee from here if love for our country did not hold us back”, belonged to the vocabulary of the pastoral idyll, not to reality. Planine (Mountains) by Petar Zoranić (1508-before 1569) was published posthumously in Venice in 1569, but the dedication is dated September 1536. This was the first printed Croatian novel, and was written in prose and verse (Novak 1997:328-341). It contains texts in a great diversity of genres, and although its content is inspired by the classical idylls and pastorals of humanism, it is nevertheless based most of all on the local traditions of folk storytelling and singing. The Arcadian beauty of the Zadar hinterland is enhanced by descriptions of shepherds singing and playing music, their laments, ganke (riddles), recitation of folk poetry to the accompaniment of the gusle (a folk fiddle) and other folk instruments. But Zoranić’s shepherds did not only sing folk songs. To the accompaniment of the citara (here this probably means the old Greek kythara) they also sang psalms in dialogue, freely translated into Croatian, and even passed thought-out esthetic judgment about singing and poetry in general. In this idealized pastoral world Zoranić described the situation in folklore and folk music in the Zadar and Velebit region quite realistically. He used music, various folk instruments and sound signals as a poetic topos, and the sound of songs “from some noble cities” also reach this pastoral idyll. This “adorned manner of singing”, a musically polished way of singing and playing music, is just as important as folk music in Zoranić’s pastoral. Mountains thus provides information about both written and folk music on the same level of validity, allowing contemporary readers to identify with the poetic messages and visions they found closer (Stipčević 1993a:28). Somewhat later Zoranić’s contemporary, Petar Hektorović (1487-1572) from Hvar, no longer asked his readers to identify with his characters, he demanded critical reading.

2. Notations of folk music: between fact and fiction

The long poem Ribanje i ribarsko prigovaranje (Fishing and Fishermen’s Talks, Venice, 1568) is Hektorović’s most important work, and in it he emphasized the importance of singing as an art of expression (Bujić 1982:65-68; Stipčević 1993:24-27; Novak 1997:313-327). In the Mannerist fashion, Fishing adopts diverse literary traditions, reflecting the experiences of Croatian idyllic poems, letters and travelogues, and contemporary Italian eclogae piscatoriae. It is unusual that the poem also contains musical notation for two folk songs: the bugaršćica (a plaintive song) “Kada mi se Radosave vojevoda odiljaše” (When Duke Radosav Was Leaving), and the pisan (a love song) “I kliče djevojka” (The Maiden Cries Out). These notes did not become part of Hektorović’s poem by chance, they were not placed in the margins but in one of the dramatically crucial places (Kekez 1978; Bezić 1981). Scholars disputed whether the notation of the bugaršćica and the pisan recorded melodies of folk songs of a kind that no longer exist in present-day Dalmatia, or whether they were the incomplete versions of parts of lost madrigals. In a long letter to the Honourable Mr Nikša Pelegrinović, Patrician of Hvar, Chancellor of Zadar, Hektorović wrote very clearly about his effort to record the texts and melodies of fishermen’s tales and songs as faithfully as possible:

“ (…) so you will (perhaps) (…) say to yourself: why did you not invent and compose a bugaršćica and song with your own mind, but instead started from things that others can do? For this reason I would like to inform you (…) that I always liked the truth in everything, all the more so as someone who realized, as he read, that the words were newly put together and invented, may on that basis also think and hold that the rest was put together falsely and invented, as well.” (Hektorović 1986:79)

There is no doubt that Hektorović really made an effort to write down the music of the fishermen’s songs as faithfully as he could. He used white mensural notation, there are not signs for the tactus, both melodies were written in the tenor clef. The bugaršćica is syllabic, declamatory, of small melodic range (f-c1), and the nota finalis is f. The pisan, however, has a more diverse rhythm, a somewhat greater melodic range (d-c1), it even has musica ficta in the concluding section, and the nota finalis is d. While the melody of the bugaršćica is reminiscent of folk singing, the pisan has elements of the more developed popular songs sung by people who lived in towns. There is another important difference between the songs: the bugaršćica is sung by Nikola, only one singer, but the poem says that the pisan was sung by both the fishermen in two parts, “one keeping lower, the other higher”. There is no indication which of the two voices the notation records. By analogy with present folk singing in Dalmatia, we might assume that the higher voice was recorded, while the lower voice had longer-lasting notes.

The musical notation in Hektorović’s poem is the oldest known record of Croatian folk music, which gives is special importance. This was the first time that notes were written to record singing in Croatian. The Venetian printer Gioanfrancesco Camotio, who printed Fishing, is known to have printed several other books in Croatian, but inserting the text under the notes must certainly have been a special printing problem. Thus it is not surprising that there are printing inconsistencies (in writing the text under the notes, recording pauses, the duration of notes), even obvious mistakes. This is probably the reason for recent different interpretations of why Hektorović included the music in his poem (Županović 1969; Bezić 1969).

It is especially important that Hektorović’s fishermen do not only recount folk poetry, they also sing, and singing is an important mode of expression. Hektorović’s fishermen Paskoje and Nikola are simple shepherds, not “learned” shepherds like Zoranić’s, they know nothing of classical tradition. Nevertheless, just like the humanists of their time, they look nostalgically into the past, into the lost golden age, aurea aetas. What is more, one might say that their conversation reflects Ficin’s ideal of poetic inspiration, furor divinus. Expressing themselves in verse and song, Paskoje and Nikola seem to have adopted the neo-Platonic mode that became the standard humanistic belief about the role and strength of music and poetry after the Florentine intermedia at the beginning of the 16th century, and especially after Ficin’s discussions (Bujić 1990). This humanistic perception about the strength and role of music and poetry (both composed and folk), which Zoranić, Hektorović and other Croatian Renaissance writers indicated more or less openly in their works, was explicitly presented in Croatia only in the paper Irene, ovvero della belleza (Venice, 1599) by Miho Monaldi (1540-1592) of Dubrovnik. This treatise clearly expounds subjects from art philosophy and psychology, in the first place in connection with circumstances in Dubrovnik. One entire chapter (Dialogo ottavo) is devoted to music theory. Unfortunately, Monaldi’s Dialogo says nothing about the problems of musical notation for folk music at that time, nor does it have data about folk music in the Dubrovnik area (Tuksar 1977; Cavallini 1994:45-80).

Hektorović’s musical notation had a dual function. It is a relatively faithful record of two songs sung by Croatian fishermen, but at the same time the songs were creatively included in the poem as a whole. In other words, the songs and musical notation were certainly not “words newly put together and invented”, they were not the fruit of Hektorović’s poetic liberty. Nevertheless, their main function was to be part of a work of fiction planned on a broader scale. This shows the importance of Hektorović’s letter, in which he clearly defined his attitude to folk songs. This letter is important not only because of how he speaks of folk singing, but also because Hektorović found it important to give his opinion of folk singing and of problems involved with faithfully recording it. The main purpose of this specific metatextual intervention was to help the contemporary reception of the bugaršćica and the pisan, folk songs whose texts and music Hektorović tried to write down as faithfully as possible.

A year after Hektorović’s poem Fishing and Fishermen’s Talks came out, Giulio Cesare Barbetta, an Italian composer for the lute, published the oldest known musical notation of a Croatian dance in the collection Il primo libro dell’intavolatura de liuto (Venice, 1569) (Stipčević 1997:57). The dance is called Pavana sesta Detta la Schiauonetta, it is one of several pavanes with “national” characteristics (Fiamenga, Todeschina), but no melodic or rhythmic features distinguish it from other pavanes in that collection (Thomas 1973:142-184). Barbetta offered no additional information about it in the text of the dedication or at the beginning of the collection. In his other collections for the lute Barbetta published some other Slav dances (from Russia, Poland), but the fact that he published the dance Schiauonetta (the Venetian name for the Croats from Dalmatia; schiavo, schiavone = Slavo) should not be put down to his interest in the “exotic”. On the contrary, Barbetta could have seen Croatian dances almost every day in Venice, a city that was the administrative, economic and cultural centre for many of the Croatian coastal regions (Istria, Dalmatia). The Croats who lived under Venetian administration in regions that were the Venetian domini da mar had churches, brotherhoods and printing houses in the Serenissima, and one of the most beautiful Venetian waterfronts is called after the Croats - Riva dei Schiavoni (Riva od Hrvatov). The fact that Barbetta wrote down the dance Pavana sesta Detta la Schiauonetta shows the diversity of Venetian music life in the Cinquecento, a diversity to which their Croatian neighbours on the other side of the Adriatic also contributed (Stipčević 1992). Another interesting musical record from that time also testifies to the stratified musical contacts between the Croats and Italians.

In his collection Il secondo libro d’intavolatura di balli d’arpicordo (Venice, 1588), Marco Facoli included the Aria della Marchetta Schiauonetta, the aria of a Croatian courtesan (a marchetta was a woman of loose morals). The arias of various other ladies and courtesans that Facoli recorded in his collection are well known in professional literature as belonging to the earliest known examples of the aria as a musical form (here they were all published in instrumental form, without texts) (Apel 1960, 1963). These arias are also interesting testimony about folk singing in the Venetian lagoons. Facoli recorded the arias so that the first several measures bring the basic melody, probably in shortened and simplified form, and after that follows a short instrumental variation, often in the virtuoso toccata style. Facoli wrote these songs down in the style of a typical Cinquecento “intabulatore”. He continued the intabulation tradition for keyboard instruments inaugurated by Andrea Antico da Montona in the collection Frottole intabulate da sonar organi. Libro primo (Venice, 1516). Facoli rewrote the songs for the harpsichord, giving them his own recognizable stamp as a composer.

There is a lot of archival and literary documentation about courtesans who came to Venice from Croatia, and from other places, too, of course. Especially interesting is a story in Celio Malespini’s Bocaccio-inspired collection Duecento novelle (…) nelle quali si raccontano diuersi Auuenimenti cosi lieti, come mesti & strauaganti (Venice, 1609). Story no LV is entiteld “Come vno gode dell’amore di vna Mora (…)”, and in it Malespini tells how “una certa Marietta Schiauona”, a Croatian woman who used to be a “putana” and the proprietress of a brothel, entertained Venetian youths in her “casa” and organized real small musical programmes in their honour (Gardmone 1981:167). The explicit, almost Balsac-like description of the rooms in Marietta’s “casa”, and the relatively detailed description of the music making, suggest that Facoli’s marchetta Schiauonetta might be the same woman who was described less than two decades later on the pages of Malespini’s story. We may never know for sure whether Facoli’s and Malespini’s courtesan were the same Schiauonna, but reading Facoli’s musical notation and Malespini’s story convinces us that the person of the real Schiauone was equally hidden in both cases, and that both the authors left an equally strong mark on the way in which they showed her.

No reliance should be placed on the truth of Malespini’s story, not only because it is a work of fiction. Malespini’s contemporaries knew him better as a skilled forger of documents and spy than as a writer. It is also not surprising that Barbetta and Facoli gave no additional explanations about the folk and town songs in the supplementary texts (for example, in the dedication or the afterword). They simply made no difference between those few folk and town songs that they recorded and the rest of their collections. Their interventions as authors were indicated clearly enough in the titles as intavolatura/e so there was no need to give any additional explanation to contemporaries.

It is possible that there were books (or perhaps they were only publications of musical scores) that contained information about Croatian folk music. Their titles appear in 16th century publishers’ catalogues and they were printed in the macaronic literary language of Croatian immigrants in Venice, the so-called letteratura schiavonesca (Strambotti de misser Rado (…), s.n.t.; Lamento de Stana schiavona, Venice, Bindoni 1548; Frottole nuove de Lazaro da Cruzola (=Korčula): con una barzeletta et alcune stranze alla schiavona, s.l. 1547; Le canzonette de mistro Rigo forner todesco (…) et la stanze de un medico schiavon che se chiama mistro Damian, Venice, Bindoni 1547; Testamento de Zuan Polo alla schiavonisca, s.n.t.) (Cortelazzo 1971/2; Cavallini 1993). On the title page of his book Libero de Rado Stixuzo (Venice, B. de Viatali 1533), Zuan Polo, a professional comic who was born in Dubrovnik, is shown playing the lira da braccio. He signed himself as “Ivan Paulavichio (…) in schiavonisco cusi chiamado / in talian Zane Polo nominando”. Zuan Polo was a famous comic, improviser and musician in his time, but no musical notation of his playing has survived. What is more, it is not only information about the musical component of Zuan Polo’s comic acting that is missing, nothing is known about the entire corpus of popular schiavonesco literature.

Music entitled Intavolature del Violino del Sigr. Gabriele Peruaneo di Lesina belongs to the class of improvised popular town music, played during carnival festivities or dancing on town streets (Plamenac 1941). These are violin tabulations, a very rare type of musical notation in world proportions, dating from about 1625. Musical life was rich in Dalmatia at the beginning of the 17th century, and resulted in a relatively large number of musical compositions (Plamenac 1944, 1954; Stipčević 1987). Gabriel Pervaneo (Prvan, Prvanić) of Hvar, about whom very little is known, wrote down several international dances (Bergamasca, Forze d’Ercole, Rugiero, Del frate fra Iacupino, Pass e mezo, Spagnoletta). In this tabulation four lines denote the wires of a violin, numbers denote the fingers, the transversal lines that are reminiscent of bar lines in fact signalize particular melodic phrases, and the rhythm is not fixed, but was implied according to the rhythm and melody of each of the dances. This kind of notation could only have served as a mnemonic aid to the person who wrote it down, and it is practically impossible to offer a reading that would solve all the rhythmic problems. In a paradoxical way its very imprecision shows Pervaneo’s attempt to record dance music faithfully, i.e. his wish not to intervene in the notation as an author (composer). This musical notation functioned in a fundamentally different way from Hektorović’s. While Hektorović used musical notation and all the supplementary comments in the text to clarify the circumstances of the musical performance as much as possible, Pervaneo had no such intention. What he wrote was a kind of draft that was not intended as communication with another musician.

3. The wish to communicate: from using history to retouching it

In the middle of the 16th century folk music began to enter liturgy and paraliturgical religious songs. In the Reformation movement the church made use of folk songs and many folk melodies were incorporated in the Protestant liturgy. The publications of Croatian Protestants usually included religious songs from German, Hungarian, Bohemian and other central-European song books. The clash between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, which shook Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, did not have such a strong impact in Croatia. The Reformation only touched the north-western edge of Croatian territories and it mostly came to expression in increased interest for liturgy in the vernacular language (which Glagolitic priests had nurtured in Croatian regions since the Middle Ages) and in printing liturgical books. In Istria Protestantism was more present among the Glagolitic than among the Latin clergy: from 1555 to 1568 they printed more than twenty-five publications in a total of about 25,000 copies. These books were almost exclusively printed in Urach near Tubingen, in the Glagolitic, Cyrillic (an attempt to spread Protestantism deeper into Balkan regions) and Latin scripts (mostly in Croatian, but also in Slovenian, and in Italian for the Italians in Istria). This was an unprecedented number of printed books, and most of them were written for the market in Croatian lands. Traces of Protestant songs are difficult to recognize in Croatian folk music today. As time passed the texts of the Protestant songs were “cleansed” of theological teachings that were not acceptable for the Counter-Reformation, and the melodies themselves were strongly coloured by local folklore (Bučar 1910; Stipčević 1997:62-63).

At the beginning of the 17th century the Jesuits opened grammar schools in several towns in Croatia and began to put their extensive plans for reorganizing church schooling and administration into practice (Korade - Aleksić - Matoš 1992). They also showed an open interest in religious folk songs (Stipčević 1993). Practicing contrafactum, they “cleansed” folk songs of texts they considered “impure and shameful” and wrote new, theologically approved and tried texts. Later, thanks to the work of Jesuits and some other church orders, like the Franciscans and the Paulines, the melodies of some folk songs (but not their original folk texts) were written down in a large collection of liturgical songs called Cithara octochorda seu Cantus Sacri Latino-Sclavonici in octo partes, pro diversis anni temporibus distributos (Vienna, 1701, 1723; Zagreb, 1757). Some folk songs from this collection were copied in manuscripts and reprinted in later editions, they were accepted by the people, and are practically still sung.

This “long life” of some folk songs shows that church orders were interested in using collective memory for missionary and pastoral work. The utilitarian reason came first, other criteria were less important, however much they were declared. In the Baroque period church orders wrote down religious folk songs and then adapted them to their own theological views, explaining their interventions as care for the folk heritage. In his book Pervi otca našega Adama greh (The Original Sin of Our Father Adam, Graz, 1674), the Jesuit writer Juraj Habdelić wrote a separate chapter called “Pesme od ljubavi” (Love Songs, meaning “secular songs”), in which he explained why he was against “pagan, shameful and unclean” folk songs:

“But who would chase music or singing from feasts and the field etc.? Not me. What is more, I advise both master and peasant to sing happily, to sing songs at feasts, but to sing the kind of songs that have been sung by honest and God-fearing people since ancient times, honest songs written to the glory of God. You may gladly amuse yourselves with such songs and make your work easier. That is what the Early Christians did during their suppers and meals (…)” (Bartolić 1985:293)

When they replaced the texts of secular folk songs with new ones, Habdelić and other Croatian Jesuits (like Nikola Krajačević-Sartorius, Juraj Mulih) firmly believed that their contrafactum was justified, i.e. that when they reconstructed folk music according to their world view and theological beliefs they were actually keeping it alive and guarding it from bad influence (Kos 1972; Stipčević 1993b). This does not change the fact that contrafactum in the Counter-Reformation was in the service of retouching history. However, not all musical notation of folk music in the Baroque period was encumbered by ideology.

In his book Nuova e Curiosa scuola di balli theatrali (Nuremberg, 1716), Gregorio Lambranzi included pictures of and music for the dance Schiauona (Darra de Moroda 1972; Lambranzi 1975; Dahms 1990). The drawings were by Johann Georg Puschner, and Lambranzi himself wrote the music. This book, which was very popular and widely read in its time, was organized so that a short introduction was followed by illustrations of the balli theatrali, above which the music was written in short. Vignettes at the bottom of the picture held short descriptions of the dances. Some of the dances (including the Schiauona) had additional, long and precise musical notation, which came after the illustrations. The text accompanying the Schiauona says: “Here a gondolier and his wife dance an old Venetian dance; they change dance figures and steps by alternately making a pas, and when they have danced the tune twice, they will both go away.” There is no doubt that the pictures and descriptions of the dance in Lambranzi’s book Scuola are very faithful, and show that he wanted to demonstrate and describe the dance Schiauona as faithfully as possible and in great detail. That is why a separate page was added with the exact dance music. Thanks to this carefully written score, the ethnomusicologist B. Širola recognized in the Schiauona dance some melodic and rhythmic formulas that lived in Croatian folklore almost until the present (Schneider - Širola 1926).

Whereas Hektorović had considered it necessary to write a letter, i.e. a separate text, to explain how he had written down the singing of the fishermen in the poem Fishing and Fishermen’s Talks, Lambranzi did not feel that he had to point out possible weaknesses or the unfinished nature of his musical notation. The Baroque age had already come to terms with the fact that it was impossible to fix all the elements of musical folk practice in musical notation, so he did not consider this a particular problem (Taruskin 1982/1995). Especially as he did not think that what he had recorded had to have an utilitarian importance.

Members of the Enlightenment and Encyclopaedists who wrote down folk music or wrote about it had a different approach. Perhaps one of the best-known commentaries about Croatian folk music was written in the second half of the 18th century by the learned Abbot Alberto Fortis in the travelogue Viaggio in Dalmazia (Venice, 1774) (Fortis 1974). Fortis’s text is richly documented, the fruit of a well prepared trip and good prior knowledge, but Viaggio in Dalmazia is not important only because of what he says about the history and everyday life in Dalmatia; it is also important because of what he leaves out. In descriptions of everyday life he left out almost everything that would point to the very developed cultural, and also musical, life in Dalmatia. Fortis learned about the cultural and art life of Dalmatia at first hand, from his friend Julije Bajamonti (1744-1800), polyhistor and one of the most highly educated Croats of his time, doctor, historian and composer (Kečkemet - Stipčević 1997). Musical life in Dalmatia and the mountainous Dalmatian interior could certainly not have been limited only to folk dances and playing the gusle. Towns like Trogir, Split and Dubrovnik had a developed musical life, both among the clergy and in patrician salons (Katalinić - Tuksar 1990; Katalinić 1993). Fortis’s Viaggio in Dalmazia had a strong echo in Europe, at the end of the 18th century the book was entirely or partly translated into many languages, but it also caused heated polemics among Croatian intellectuals (Lovrić 1876). Fortis showed the Morlacchi (the Venetian name for inhabitants of the interior from the Kvarner to Bar) as primitive and patriarchal peasants, and thanks to his book they soon became heroes of romantic mystification in European literature. Thus Fortis’s idealizing on one hand, and on the other his mystification of folk customs, all in the service of enlightenment and physiocratic concern and care for the “unhappy people” of Dalmatia, clearly shows how validity and ideology exclude one other.

The oldest musical notation of Croatian folk music dates from the mid-16th century. Already in the Renaissance diverse intentions came to expression: some people wanted to record folk music as faithfully as possible, others wanted to intervene as authors. In the church, under the influence of the Reformation, there were tendencies to single out the components of folk music that could be used for missionary and pastoral work. The Counter-Reformation tried to make even greater use of these utilitarian potentials of folk music. On the other hand, in the Baroque period people who recorded Croatian folk music were no longer engrossed in the need for precision and faithfulness, they made free use of folk music adapting it to their own esthetic or composing criteria. The Enlightenment could no longer reconcile the principles of faithfulness and its ideology. Thus Fortis’s travelogue showed the inhabitants of Dalmatia and their folk music as something unusual to Italian and other European readers; these were no near neighbours. This “myth of otherness” is still paradoxically and ahistorically present in the attitude to the oldest notations of folk music, and especially in the attitude to the folk history of “small nations” like the Croats. However, more recently a change can be felt, and there are attempts to prove that a search for common features, more than emphasis on differences, can help us understand musical cultures, however historically or geographically distant they are. (Tomlinson 1993:1-43). Thus the oldest musical notation of Croatian folk music - presented here in only the most basic lines - shows it not only as a cultural phenomenon that is inaccessible or difficult to understand, but as the reflection of a rich musical tradition whose traces in everyday life can still be discerned even today.

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Cortelazzo, Manlio

1971/2 "Il linguaggio schiavonesco nel Cinquecento veneziano." Atti dell'Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti CXXX:113-160.

Dahms, Sibylle

1990 "Gregorio Lambranzi di Venetia" e il ballo d'azione a Vienna." In L'opera italiana a Vienna prima di Metastasio. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 251-269.

Derra de Moroda, Francesca

1972 New and curious school of Theatrical Dancing By Gregorio Lambranzi. A fascimile of the original in the Bavarian State Library, Munich. New York.

Fortis, Alberto

1974 Viaggio in Dalmazia I-II (1774). Peter Rehder, ed. Munchen: Verlag Otto Sagner.

Hektorović

1986 Djela Petra Hektorovića (In Stari pisci hrvatski XXXIX) (= Works of Petar Hektorović, In Old Croatian Writters XXXIX), Josip Vonviča, ed. Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti.

Gardmone, Donna

1981 The canzon villanesca alla napolitana and related forms 1537-1570. Ann Arbor - Michigan: UMI Research Press.

Katalinić, Vjera

1993 "Croatian Musical Culture Between 1750 and 1820." International Review of the Aesthetisc and Sociology of Music 24/1:3-12.

Katalinić, Vjera - Tuksar, Stanislav

1990 "Presenza italiana negli archivi e nelle raccolte musicali a Dubrovnik: un panorama generale (manoscritti e stampe, 1600-1900)." Le fonti musicali in Italia 4:7-30.

Kečkemet, Duško - Stipčević, Ennio

1977 Julije Bajamonti, Encyclopaedist and Musician. Zagreb - Split: Croatian P.E.N. Centre.

Kekez, Josip

1978 Bugaršćice, starinske hrvatske narodne pjesme (= Bugaršćia's, Old Croatian Folk Songs). Split: Čakavski sabor.

Kniewald, Dragutin

1963 "Altslawische und kroatische Sprache im Gottensdienst." Liturgisches Jahrbuch XIII/1:33-42.

Korade, Mijo - Aleksić, Mira - Matoš, Jerko

1992 Jesuits and Croatian Culture. Zagreb: Croatian Writters Associations - Croatian P.E.N. Centre.

Kos, Koraljka

1972 "Volkstumliche Zuge in der Kirchenmusik Nordkroatiens im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert." Musica Antiqua Europae Orientalis, Acta Scientifica III:267-292.

1982 "Style and Sociological Background of Croatian Renaissance Music." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 13/1:55-82.

Lambranzi, Gregorio

1975 Neue un curieuse theatralische Tanz-Schul, Tel I und II. Kurt Peterman, ed. Leipzig: Editions Peters.

Lovrić, Ivan

1776 Osservazioni di Giovanni Lovrich sopra diversi pezzi del Viaggio in Dalmazia del signor abate Alberto Fortis coll'aggiunta della Vita di Socivizca. Venezia.

Martinić, Jerko

1981 Glagolitische Gesange Mitteldatiens. Regensburg: Gustav Boose Verlag. I-II.

Novak, Slobodan Prosperov

1997 Povijest hrvatske književnosti. II knjiga: Od humanjstičkih početaka do Kašićeve ilirske gramatike 1604 (= History of Croatian Literature. Vol. II: From Humanistic Beginnings up to Kašić's Grammar of Illirian Language from 1604). Zagreb: Antibarbarus.

Plamenac, Dragan

1941 "An Unknown Violin Tablature of the Early 17th Century." Papers of the American Musicologicasl Society, Annual Meeting 1941. New York, 144-157.

1944 "Music in the 16th and 17th Centuries inDalmatia." In Papers Read by Members of the American Musicological Society 1939. New York, 21-51.

1954 "Music in the Adriatical Coastal Areas of the Southern Slavs." In Gustave Reese Music in the Renaissance. New York: Norton, 757-762.

Schneider, Artur - Širola, Božidar

1926 "Najstarije zapisano hrvatsko kolo." (= The Oldest Notation of Croatian Dance) Sv. Cecilija XVI/2:48-56.

Stipčević, Ennio

1992 "La cultura musicale in Istria e in Dalmazia nel XVI e XVII secolo. Principali caratteristiche, storiche, geopolitiche e culturali." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 23/2:141-152.

1993a "La Serenissima, l'Istria e la Dalmazia - contatti e interferenze musicali nel Cinque e Seicento." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 24/1:23-44.

1993b "Counter-Reformation, Jesuits and Music Culture in Croatia of the 17th and 18th Centuries." In The Musical Baroque, Western Slavs, and the Spirit of the European Cultural Communion / Glazbeni barok i zapadni Slaveni u kontekstu europskog kulturnog zajedništva. Stanislav Tuksar, ed. Zagreb: HAZU-HMD, 85-90.

1997 Hrvatska glazba, povijest hrvatske glazbe do 20. stoljeća (= Croatian Music, History of Croatian Music up to the 20th Century). Zagreb: Školska knjiga.

Taruskin, Richard

1982 "On Letting the Music Speak for Itself." Journal of Musicology 1(3):338-349 (reprinted in Text & Act, Essays on Music and Performance. New York - Oxford: Oxford University Press, 51-66).

Thomas, Benjamin W.

1973 The Lute-Books of Giulio Cesare Barbetta: A Polyphonic Transcription of the Composer's Complete Works and an Analysis of the Fourteen Fantasias. Ph.D. North Texas State University, Denton, Texas.

Tomlinson, Gary

1993 Music in Renaissance Magic, Toward a Historiography of Others. Chicago - London: The University of Chicago Press.

Tuksar, Stanislav

1977 "Bedeutungstheorie von der Musik in Irenne ovvero della bellezza (1599) von M. Monaldi." International Review of the Aesthetics and Socilogy of Music VII:262-272.

1990 "On Early Raports About Turkish Music Culture in the Writing of Some Late-Renaissance Humanists." In Atti del XIV Congresso della Societa internazionela di musicologia. Bologna: EDT, 17-26.

1992 "Sixteenth-Century Writers on Music: a Bridge Between East and West." InEssays in Honor of Claude V. Palisca. New York: Pendragon Press, 129-142.

Županović, Lovro

1969 "Napjevi iz Hektorovićeva Ribanja u svjetlu suvremene muzikološke interpretacije" (= Song in Hektorović's Ribanje in the Light of Modern Musicological Interpetation). Zvuk 100:477-496.

1984-1989 Centuries of Croatian Music. Zagreb: Music Information Centre. I-II.

Pictures:

1) Petar Hektorović: "bugaršćica" Kada mi se Radosave vojevoda odiljaše (When Duke Radosav Was Leaving) from the poem Ribanje i ribarsko prigovaranje (Fishing and Fishermen's Talks), Venice 1568.

2) Marco Facoli: Arie della Marcheta Schiauonetta from Il secondo libro d'intavolatura di balli d'arpicordo, Venice 1588.

3) Dance "Schiauona" from Gregorio Lambranzi, Nuova e curiosa scuola di balli theatrali, Nurnberg 1776.

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