Bővebb ismertető
In spite of certain initial results achieved in comparative songresearch anyone who has a try at it, will find the lack of musicallyarranged collections a great setback to his work. The research workermust rely on his memory alone and this is known to be likely to fail.Even comparative philology would not have developed had there beenno alphabetically arranged dictionaries.The first arranged collections of songs not mentioning such earlierattempts as, for instance, Zahn's monumental collection of German ritualsongs (see Gy. Kerényi's treatise in this volume, page 443) are theFinnish collections edited by IlmaryKrohn and his successors, A. Launisand A. O. Váisánen and the Batororaanische Volkslieder, vols, iii,(Basel 1945) by Maissen, Schorta and Wehrli.It is astonishing, indeed, that so few have followed the exampleset by them. Even in our days collections are being published withouteven trying to arrange systematically the musical part. The text is,in some of them, arranged one way or other, reflecting a biased literaryconception according to which the text is the important part, whereasthe melody is considered an incidental addition only.Even in such collections it would be easy to make a survey of themelodies by means of a musical index or else, at least, to point out whetheror not the variants are to be found within the collection in question.And what is going to happen with the older editions containinga valuable but often inaccessible material? Now and then anastaticreprints are being published (such as Volkslieder der Sorben by Haupt andSchmaler, 1953, or the exemplary reprints of the Rupin, Lvov-Pratch, andTrutovsky collections by Beliaev) which ought by no means be shortof an up-to-date index of variants. Yet to republish everything wouldbe impossible and superfluous.Each language community ought to publish its own complete anduniform "Catalogue raisonné", covering all printed collections andpossibly manuscripts, and stating the full data of each song. Thereprinted edition of G. Raynauds' Bibliographie des altfranzösischen