Paper short abstract:

In 2018, Institute of Ethnomusicology ZRC SAZU has started with the project which places so-far overlooked bilingual and translated songs into the focus of interest. It denotes a turn in the folklore studies and questions disciplinary history through the concepts of its social role.

Paper long abstract:

In the time of coexistence of Slovenians with other nations of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, bilingual songs, or songs transferred from one linguistic community to others were strongly disturbing element in the conceptualization of the canon of national culture. In the search for national identity, Slovenian folkloristics has circumvented intersections between Slovene song creativity and the song creativity of neighboring nations. Despite these strivings, with the written folk song collections some bilingual songs came into the archive aimed for the representative collection of Slovene folk songs.

After the disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy, the majority of Slovenian lands were integrated in Yugoslavia. In Slovenia, German culture was no longer perceived as dangerous to the Slovenian national identity, therefore the need to collect bilingual songs and to discuss cultural intertwining in song creativity appeared. However, in the identifying role of folklore studies, the signs of disciplinary turn marked by the need of study of national intersections of songs were lost.

With the project of bilingual songs and songs transferred from other languages to Slovenian in the focus of research, these songs offer a new disciplinary challenge on two levels - as the cultural phenomenon and from the contextual point of view. For the revisiting non-realized insights, the testimony of existence of German songs in the institute's archive was extremely promising since the transcriptions were needed. The finding that a great number of transcriptions is missing posed a new insight into history of folklore studies: what is the message of the missing transcriptions?