Recordings of Twentieth Century Serbian Church Chant

Abstract

This paper discusses representative examples of audio recordings of traditional Serbian church chant, an important testimony to Orthodox Serbian cultural and spiritual heritage, as well as the characteristics of this oral musical tradition in the twentieth century. My focus lies not only on the most important published audio recordings, but also on the collection of the unpublished audio recordings from the field work on the wide territory of Serbian cultural space, that is: in Serbia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Hungary during the last three decades of the twentieth century. All of the examples mentioned in the text represent traditional Serbian church chant in its original, unison version, sometimes also as two-part singing. Taking into account the ethnological and anthropological perception of the multi-generational transmission and concurrent adaptation to the cultural, historical and societal changes, as well as the link between the heritage and the cultural uniqueness of its creators and carriers, these recordings were approached as the authentic trace of a live tradition, and a key to the assessment, study and preservation of the Serbian church chant, as an element of the intangible cultural heritage.