THE VOCALITY OF TRADITIONAL CHURCH MUSIC FROM BANAT - CRIȘANA

Abstract

The Church music from Banat cannot be considered less valuable for the Church and the Romanian people, but on the contrary, richer in content and national substance. Church music from Banat, due to the fact that it visibly accepted popular influences, is closer to the soul of the people and the mental construction of the common man. Taking into account the hierarchical and musical Romanian-Serbian cohabitation, we must remember a particularly important fact, namely that at the altar in Sremski Karlovci (today in Serbia), the episcopal headquarters of the Orthodox Serbs and Romanians north of the Danube, it was practiced like this - the so-called popular church song (crkveno - narodno pojanje), both by educated people and even more so by the common people. The pew singers from there (but not only from there) came from the people, taking with them the native folklore dowry and transposing it into songs. The popular concept and the entire pew singing practiced in the churches of Banat starts from the eight voices existing in any corner of the world where Orthodoxy has preserved its origins. The Banat characteristic is the fact that here the voice is considered to be an entity made up of several melodies that are differentiated from each other and from the melodies of other voices, as a rule, by cadence, that is, by the melodic turn of the cadence or by certain inner melodic turns . Such a chain of influence, based most of the time on orality, we also approached in the case of the influence of Romanian popular music on Banat folk singing.