Chant — constitutive features of the genre
The presented analysis is aimed at determining constitutive features of ditty as a genre of Polish folklore. The study is based on a collection of about 1500 ditties published in a volume Polska pieśń i muzyka ludowa. Źródła i materiały, part 4. Lubelskie Lublin 2011. The material has been juxtaposed with similar collections so. Nowego Kolberga?, and also with the nineteenth-century collections of Oskar Kolberg. The comparison resulted in establishing several features that are essential for the genre: relation to the music culture of a region and the kind of music popular in the area, which reflects the geography of ditty.
The constitutive features of the genre were established by a textological analysis conducted according to the eight-point model of genre description by J. Bartmiński and S. Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska. Ditty as a genre of Polish folklore is characterised by: resulting from intentions making humorous/malicious/instructional comments addressativity and dialogism; cyclical nature; describing the real everyday life both from a perspective of “here and now” and in the omnitemporal perception; thematic and melodic easiness for adapting to a situation adaptive potential; multiple variability at both text and music planes; diversity of stylistic registers occurrence both in the high and low style; formulism; loose assigning of text to melody and short form.