The landscape has changed radically since the time of our ancestors, for whom folk songs were a daily part of life. The insensitive interventions due to the use of the land and its resources and the effects of increasing urbanization, together with the change in lifestyle, have led to the disappearance of the living tradition of singing. Along with the disappearance of traditional crafts and jobs, one of the lost aspects of the singing tradition was the interconnection with physicality and with the landscape. Many traditional Czech, Moravian and Slovak songs are formed by the landscape of their origin, with which people were routinely confronted during their daily activities and singing practice. A typical example of songs, apparently influenced by the acoustic properties of the landscape, include mowing songs, which have elements in common with liturgical antiphonal singing.
When the songs were created, they were imprinted with the soul of their creators and their lives, but also with the influence of the outside world – the landscape, its mountains, hills or plains, and the shapes of natural raw materials that could be revived by sound. When we sing these songs today, we discover not only the inner world of their creators, but through the sound form, we can also get to know what the place of their origin looked and felt like. Because a significant part of the life of their creators was the movement in the landscape, singing in a similar environment where they originated returns them to a dimension, that was lost when reproduced in completely different conditions and cultural contexts. The synergy of the fact that it is a processual medium, which, for example, compared to a painting or sculpture, is based on the action in a certain period, the imagery imprinted in an easily memorable meter of words, and the resonance that points to certain properties of matter, although it is itself intangible, makes the song an interesting tool for discovering the landscape of our ancestors and how they inhabited it. The song itself is a kind of inner landscape. It is interconnected to the immaterial, processual dimension of the outer landscape, which we feel in our physical movement through the landscape. It connects the outer and inner world with its resonance, its vibration.
To this day, the physical experience that influenced the form of folk songs can be explained by walking. Regular bipedal movement is a possible explanation for a rhythm divisible by two, just as the three-beat rhythm of a weaver's song is clearly explained by the three-beat movement when working with a weaver's loom. Even though we no longer understand many aspects of folk songs, we are struck by their beauty, harmony, imagery and emotional charge, which have a transcultural overlap. Yet without knowing the context of the songs, their character itself invites communication with the landscape in which they originated. This applies especially to songs that work with echoes. The assumption of the vast space on which these songs are built can even be found in the changing landscape, the new form of which the old-timers find difficult to get used to. In fact, the properties of the rocks from which the concrete was made were transferred into the new concrete structure. The transformed matter, which was taken out of the context of the original landscape, thus gives new echoes, new words. The musical experience in some places, which we call non-places in the context of this article, can create a new cultural dimension of abandoned, transient or industrial places and make them more acceptable to the local inhabitants. As one participant pointed out, she believes the creative process accelerates acceptance of the visited sites. In addition, the focus on breath and rhythm brought sharpened attention to the essential qualities of the surroundings - not only to the obvious phenomena of the surrounding nature, but also to the essence of the perception of space and time through the production and listening of sound.
The common feature of participants’ experience was a responsiveness to details in the landscape, a heightened perception. As the most beneficial in their joint work, they evaluated the importance of community and experience of the landscape in a group, united by a common singing. The participants' authorial songs and poetic works, inspired by the landscape, showed many similarities, both in the melody of the songs, the melancholy mood and the direct addressing of the natural elements, which, like traditional folk songs, became a solace on the pilgrimage of life.
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This exposition was created at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague as part of the project "Walking as a liquid constant in urban space and landscape" with the support of the Institutional Endowment for the Long-term Conceptual Development of Research Institutes, as provided by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic in the years 2022 and 2023.
Thanks to all the participants of the project, namely:
Wacław and Erdmute Sobaszek, David Zelinka, Jana Bauerová, Veronika Chvátalová, Sofie Johnson, Magdalena Kovářová, Kapitolina Kolobova, Anna Kopeć, Kamila Kutálková, Jana Kožnarová, Margaryta Lebedzeva, Darya Muhaka, Bořivoj Putna, Lenka Sabolčáková, Olga Svobodová, Svatopluk Ždímal
The materials provided to the exposition from others than the main author (photographs, audio and video recordings and mental maps) were published on the basis of written permit from the other authors.
