Rhythm
As I walk through the landscape and sing folk songs, I observe their rhythm compared to the rhythm of walking, both myself and the group. Meditative and spiritual songs are often not bound by a fixed rhythm. The basis is a common tune and a phrase that has a certain dynamic. It is similar to the inhalation and exhalation. In the Gregorian chants, for example, it is the alternation of a pre-singer and a choir. In Moravia and Slovakia, there is a special phenomenon of singing “lawn songs” (trávnice) or “harvest songs” (žatecké písně) which are interconnected with the process of mowing. The special movement, often synchronised, influenced the rhythm of songs which were sang during that working process. As it often was a collective work (kept occasionally until these days) the musical form in which two choirs took turns was widespread. This makes these songs similar to an antiphonal chant (Štěpánek 2015). The mutual answering seems to mirror the essence of the living world.
Walking in a group is often synchronised to the common rhythms of steps or, conversely, antiphases. When singing and walking together, the group unites and synchronises. Bipedal movement translates into a double rhythm of folk songs, in which the rhythm is often a reflection of the activities with which they were connected. It is natural that the rhythm of most folk songs is divisible by two – walking is a basic movement, associated with daily life, characteristic of humankind: “Walking in phase or antiphase is likely to produce a general acoustical pattern and rhythm. These synchronous and antisynchronous patterns seem similar in humans, together with a few phylogenetically distant species” (Ravignani 2015, in Larson, Richter & Ravignani 2019: 4).
When walking together, we sing Czech, Moravian and Slovak songs. Their rhythm naturally flows with the rhythm of our steps. The bipedal movement brings a rhythm to the music, divisible by two. It seems that songs which were sang during walks were tended to be in double-beat, four-beat rhythm or rhythm divisible by two. As an example, I can mention a typical song of harpists from Nechanice, in which a young lassie sings about travelling around the world.
In Bohemia, the phenomenon of wandering harpists spread in the Sudetenland region from the late eighteenth century. Harpists, who originally often sang in the German language, moved around the mountainous regions of the borderlands with a folk hook harp and played at various social occasions and celebrations. Harpism first spread in western Bohemia around the town of Přísečnice (Preßnitz), which is today flooded by a dam. In the mid-nineteenth century, the town of Nechanice in eastern Bohemia became the focal point of harpism.
Harpists often came from weavers’ families who did not make a good living in this region, so playing the harp proved more lucrative for survival in this poor region. While the first song had a four-beat rhythm, another of their typical songs has a three-beat rhythm because it mimics the three-beat rhythm of the work on weaving loom. The local weavers from eastern Bohemia liked to have this song played by Nechanice harpists (Kleňha 1998: 135). The sound of weaving loom while working is expressed with the words ši-dla-ka ha-dla-ka.
A mental map by Veronika Chvátalová, 2023
The top video from performative walking practice by Alžběta Trojanová, 2023
The bottom video from performative practice - camera by Svatopluk Ždímal, edition by Alžběta Trojanová, 2023.
Breath
When we enter the landscape, we first observe our breath. Its connection to walking and to the landscape. The landscape, in its arrangement and functioning, contains principles that resemble breath. The rolling hills that we walk up and down. The stream of wind that passes through our body. The flow of a stream through pebbles and undulating meanders. The landscape breathes, there is a flow of energy. When we talk about the ecology of the landscape, we talk about the flow and transformation of energy and matter. The root of the word ecology is the Greek word "oikos" - home, dwelling (Škrdlant 1996: 26). The landscape in which energy flows and there is a metabolism, the landscape that breathes, is alive, it makes a sense of home. It is intertwined with inner boundaries, creating a context, a living tissue in which the whole community of the living and the non-living participates. Can one feel home where the landscape is clogged with concrete and the greenery is diminishing, which is the essential factor in the metabolism between what is below and what is above?
As we walk in the group, we experiment with breathing exercises, counting the steps, inhaling, stopping and exhaling. David Zelinka is convinced that when one consciously deepens the breathing and accepts some breathing rhythm associated with walking, it automatically sharpens the perception and senses. He applies the principles of breathing exercises from yoga to walking - the exhalation should be twice as long as the breath, the number of steps each one sets himself according to his or her possibilities. The length of the breath and exhalation increases during the walk and decreases with more difficult terrain. Between the inhalation and exhalation, we observe small stops. After a longer walk, the body and breath get into a regular rhythm that changes with the unevenness of the terrain. The vertical of our body connects what is below and what is above. We open our senses to the events around us, our connection with the environment. We listen to the music of the landscape, which is there continuously and accompanies us with its sounds.
What does the progress of the breath look like? In/raising, stopping, out/falling, a little stop. In a calm, meditative walk, this cycle is extended. When we work in a state of calming and meditative immersion with the voice, long tones come out. The tones naturally help to keep the exhalation long, which also corresponds to the yoga practice. We know similar tones from Gregorian chant, but also from folk music. Vocals are the carrier of such tones. Moravian and Slovak songs often begin with the cry “Ey”. The long vocal enters the space and is the initiator of the whole piece. In calm and meditative songs, a long phrase can persist for one breath, followed by a stop. Similar to a stop and rest while walking through the countryside.
The context of traditional songs
In our performative practice we sing traditional Czech, Moravian and Slovak songs. Our folk songs bear the imprint of the landscape where they originated. But we have lost everyday contact with the landscape and now we carry the song only as a legacy. We feel their beauty, their dynamics, we feel how they resonate in our body and the environment where we find ourselves. But we no longer know their context, which was interconnected with the lifestyle of the people who created them and obviously also with the landscape that was different. It was more varied, more diverse, there was more life in it. The water was not led into pipes and hidden under layers of concrete. One could see its flow, it clung to uneven depressions, people had to wade through mud. The landscape was not so urbanised and there were many more who experienced their daily life and their work right there. The people who created the folk songs were strongly connected to the landscape. They were peasants or artisans, but they had direct contact with where the raw materials they worked with came from. The songs often reflected the repetitive nature of the activities of those who sang them and sometimes were synchronised within the group.
Folk songs today have lost that context. But they are still the concentrated testimony of their creators, and they carry emotions that would have been difficult to pass on through the centuries using any other medium. We no longer know how it came about that some songs are elongated, and others are dynamic and rhythmic. We often no longer understand some of their words and hidden meanings, because they have disappeared from today's world. In fact, we may not even understand their language. Yet the emotional communication of their interpreter can reach us even when listening to a foreign language, all the more so if they are deeply connected with one’s life. One who can listen to the melody and gesture of language can understand much without knowing the meanings. On a generally human level, for example, emotions associated with the love or loss of a loved one are universal across cultures and ages.
David Zelinka, who artistically led the project walks, had doubts about the contemporary interpretation of folklore. According to him, the contemporary interpretation of old songs often derives from a “conserved” form, which is considered a testament to the former way of life and falls into interpretative stereotypes:
The essence of what used to be (in folklore) was a development and an awareness of some sense, of connection and depth, a conscious state of openness, receptivity and dialogue with the environment. When this is lost, that fixed, conserved form is not what it used to be.
David brings exercises that create random connections of the rhythm of authorial participants’ texts and steps. He is interested in what arises “when the group is not creating, but listening” – for example, when everyone has his or her own rhythm or text and listening to others subtly changes their own sounds, rhythm or harmony that arises from the group's shared work.
Although the songs have been no longer connected with the original way of life, they have been present in my life since childhood and some of them have been kept in our family oral tradition. Hence I have taught the participants some folk songs and have observed the difference of singing the songs alone, in a group or in the shared walking process.
One of the non-places on the edge of Prokop Valley where new blocks of flats are going to be build. The glass plate shows the projection of urban vision of the place in the future.
Photo by Alžběta Trojanová, 2023.
A mental map by Veronika Chvátalová, 2023.
The top video from performative walking practice by Svatopluk Ždímal, 2023.
The bottom video - camera by Svatopluk Ždímal (performative walking practice), edition by Alžběta Trojanová with the use of photos by David Bruner (exploratory walking documentation), 2023.
The rhythm, on the other hand, was used in a synchronized activity in which the members of the group alternated regularly. For example, if six threshers were to thrash the grain, the six-syllable sentence “Vez-mi cep pojď na mlat” (take the flail, come to thresh) was recited, each syllable being struck with the flail by one of the threshers in a given order. A similar principle is used in our art group when each of us recites in a given circle order a predetermined word from a personal sentence unknown to the others. A new poetry is created, a new haiku of the moment
.
In the walking process, it seems that the bodily process stimulates thinking and might thus bring new inspiration. As Rebecca Solnit refers, “the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking and a passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts, and that walking is one way to traverse it.” (Solnit 2022: 5–6). The mind and bodily movement are interconnected and the inner landscape is a tissue imprinting memories.
A mental map by Olga Svobodová, 2023.
The top video - camera by Karolína Alvarez, edition by Alžběta Trojanová (exploratory walkings practice), 2023.
Memory and figurativeness
During the walking excercises with the group each one of us invents a sentence of seven syllables and pronouncing the syllable with each step we create a dynamics of five steps forward, two backward. It appears to be very difficult to get the rhythm of seven in our body, but the syllables of the sentence help us to automate it. When we stop and ask others, what was their sentence, some of us are not able to answer without getting back in the movement. One of the participants reported:
We stopped and we were supposed to say what words we'd connected to the steps, and it didn't come to me. I was in a completely different state of mind because I'd developed a connection between words and the rhythm of that walk.
The memory is obviously strongly interconnected with the whole bodily movement. This can be one of the reasons why the extinction of some traditional activities had impact on the loss of the songs that were intertwined with them.
Another aspect that keeps a message in memory is conserving it in the form of melody and rhythm. Ancient and medieval epics and sagas used precisely this characteristic of rhythmized and possibly set-to-music text in order to be memorable and to be spread among people more easily. If we are not the bearers of these traditions, we can never fully understand them – they are deeply embedded in the cultural context of a given ethnicity. But when we listen to old songs, whether they are singing epic stories associated with a particular cultural tradition, ballads or love songs, we are approached by images of the old world and the secrets of what we can no longer understand. As in poetry, songs crystallised into metaphors and images that resonate within us with the very thing that is hidden between the lines, the imprint of interplay of different circumstances pressed into their tissue, just as the bodies of already extinct trilobites and lilies are pressed between sediments of rock. They stimulate our imagination and it is through their incomprehensibility that they draw us into ancient stories.
In Czech, Moravian and Slovak folk songs, this imagery is often associated with the landscape or natural motifs in which the line of a personal story or narrative is set. Here is an example of the opening stanzas:
Don't set the sun, My sweet love dwells
don't set yet among the mountains, valleys
my love is gone no one will believe
on a faraway journey. what is between us.
(South Bohemian folk song Nezacházej slunce sang in the video essay)
Echo
When bringing songs into the landscape, their key aspect is their echo. Echoes are an essential part of them, and their form is influenced by the way they resonate in the landscape. As we walk, our art group passes through different places – the urban landscape and the natural landscape. The songs find a different path in each landscape, stirring up places of echo. The time of day and the weather also have a substantial influence on their resonance with the landscape. In the damp air at dusk and in the quiet night, the echo is more powerful. Darkness and resonant space make places where some of us otherwise feel unwell more acceptable. One of such places might be a bridge close to Prokop stream which one would pass under on the way to Prokop Valley. In our landscape interpretation this could be called one of the non-places – transient place with no identity on the suburb. The concrete columns, muddy path and graffiti on the walls create a raw atmosphere which some of us might find unpleasant. But the darkness and echo make them a mysterious place that resonates through dialogue like a temple space. One of the participants who lives in the area referred she had always felt this ambivalent atmosphere of the place – in the dirty and unpleasant she had felt something of “sacramental”. Another participant mentioned the darkness under the bridge and the singing dialogue was “measuring the place” in her mental map, adding the comment: “Why to be afraid?”
The ethnographer and musician Karol Plicka found in Slovak and Moravian songs the fundamental influence of being sung in nature. These are field, mowing, meadow, hay-seed, forest, strawberry, raspberry and other songs. According to him, these songs have a “genius sense of nature's acoustics”, they are “directly set in nature and calculated for acoustic effect” (Plicka 1961: 34). At the beginning of a song there are usually syllables that have the space to “break, cut an imaginary spatial screen, fly forward, followed immediately by long-sustained tones that are meant to vibrate the distance and fill it with sound” (Plicka 1961: 34). Their basis are straight, clear tones. The songs, according to him, are free of gravity and have an almost spherical sound, echoing the living nature. These songs should be sung “into the distance”– with the nature’s imagination, with the idea of free space. Many composers (such as Leoš Janáček, Alexander Moyzes and Eugen Suchoň) or folklorists were enchanted by these songs. One of them was Vladimír Úlehla, who recalled hearing the singing dialogue of a male and a female voice in the countryside during the mowing period (Štěpánek 2015).
The Lime Tree Song
1. Lime Tree, Lime Tree, I like drinking your tea
When a winter gale outside roars
Lime Tree, Lime Tree, I like drinking your tea
When sometimes my voice gets hoarse
CH 1: Now I am sitting near your strong trunk
Now I am sitting below your branches and leaves
Whispering in the summer breeze
Feeling your powerful roots
2. Lime Tree, Lime Tree, my thanks belong to thee
For sharing thy power with me
Lime Tree, Lime Tree, thou charges no fee
From birds, from bees, from me
CH 2: Now I am sitting near your strong trunk
Now I am sitting in the shade of your branches and leaves
Whispering in the summer breeze
Listening to the hum in your crown
3. Lime Tree, Lime Tree, I feel so free
At the place for ages you’ve been
Lime Tree, Lime Tree, your scent reminds me
Of what I’ve heard and smelt and seen
CH 3: Now I am sitting near your strong trunk
Now I am singing and playing for your branches and leaves
Whispering in the summer breeze
Adding my small voice to yours
CH4: Now I am singing near your strong trunk
Now I am singing along with your branches and leaves
Whispering in the summer breeze
Being a part of your song
Two songs by Jana Bauerová
Cold wind is blowing, clouds are heavy, a rainy day
Where do you take me, path, which way?
Cold wind is blowing, clouds are heavy, a rainy day
When do you, path, become my way?
I'm writing verses on the surface of the stream
Ships in the distance may be real or a dream
Just writing verses on the surface of the stream
Ships in the distance may be waiting for my dream
These traditional songs, which were heard in the landscape during daily activities, have already disappeared from the landscape. Their special chapter was pastoral songs, which in eastern Moravia and Slovakia (as in other areas of Carpathians) were often accompanied by simply portable musical instruments – traditional overtone flutes without finger-holes. These flutes, due to the special technique of playing aliquot tones achieved by overblowing and covering and opening the end of the flute, had a limited melody only on the lydic scale, thanks to which they have an unmistakable melody (Gondová, Friedl 2021). Similarly specific, though not so easily recognizable, according to historian Václav Štěpánek (2015) are songs from different landscapes depending on the landscape character – the songs from the valley are more tender, while the mountain ones bump roughly into their peaks. It is as if the song had been imprinted with an inner movement, a hidden processuality of the seemingly motionless external world.
During the performance Cesta - ozvěny I. (2022) with the Węgajty Theatre, one of these songs came from the Starodubsky District in the Bryansk region on the Russian border with Ukraine. The song, like Moravian and Slovak songs of this type, is accompanied by a typical whoop.
When we found places in the landscape with a strong acoustics during our walks – whether hills or bridge arches, I automatically come up with this kind of songs, which themselves ask for embodiment in these spaces. No matter where the place is, echo creates space for resonance of traditional songs or spiritual songs, that can bring a new quality to abandoned, temporal or industrial places which we might call non-places. Thus, the musical aspect might make them more acceptable and related to the local inhabitants, who experience this musical aspect of the place.
Landscape in authorial songs
Some members of the group bring their own author’s lyrics or songs, inspired by the landscape, for our common work. Although each of us invented them independently under different circumstances, they all have a common denominator – they lead an inner dialogue with the landscape, addressing its elements (water, rocks, roads, forests, mountains, valleys), seeking answers to their visceral questions or celebrating them. Another shared aspect is that the melodies are tuned in minor scales and have a melancholy character. It seems as if the landscape is a living being, comforting on the journey of life. Poetry that works with natural motifs seems to be deeply rooted in us, and that is likely to be from folk music.
A song by Alžběta Trojanová
Oh hey, where are my footsteps taking me?
To the horizon, to the horizon, to the horizon...
To where the clouds intersect
up the hill, up the hill, up the hill
Hey, mountain, mountain, you're tall mountain
brush and rocks and drunken trunks
swinging in the wind of your hair
I hear your voice in the branches
Oh, tell me mountain,
tell me your secrets.
(…)
A song by Kamila Kutálková
Hills, meadows, hillsides, thorny roads,
where are you going and which way are you floating?
Tell me, tell me,
tell me what you know.
A poem by Svatopluk Ždímal
Water,
you give life, sometimes you take it away,
you hit the banks, then you smooth the wounds,
you fill the inequalities, you create a calm surface.
You cool and warm, you rise and soak,
you show balance and flow,
you inspire purification and embrace.
Water,
thy imbrace movement and peace of the Divine Balance.