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Na dobro nam Bozic dojde: Croatian Traditional Christmas Songs

... every custom with local or regional tradition nurtured by any community or stratum whatsoever of the Croatian common man is a Croatian folk custom, being, at the same time, testimony to Croatia's place in Europe. And all individuals, male or female, living in Croatian communities remember the Christmas of their childhood. This is a lasting memory, retained as an inherent part of personal identity.
(Rihtman - Auguštin 1997:24)

The period from the end of November to the middle of January contained a series of holidays and the customs, and rituals and beliefs connected with them. Together they made up an integral whole with Christmas as the central religious and folk holiday (Vitez 2000:347). One cannot imagine the period of Christmas without music. The city streets at Christmas prove this claim: the posters invite you to Christmas concerts, the CD shops offer recordings with Christmas songs, and the street stalls resound with the sounds of lights for Christmas trees which “play” - Christmas melodies, of course. The programmes of Christmas concerts, melodies released on recordings, and even the "repertoire" of lights may induce you to ask yourselves which of these Christmas songs that can be heard on every corner are actually of Croatian origin. If you try to answer this question by writing down your own list of Christmas songs, you will surely not forget the songs such as Narodi nam se Kralj nebeski, U to vrijeme godista, Radujte se narodi, Kyrie Eleison, and Svim na zemlji mir, veselje.

Back in 1850 some of the songs were included in the collection Napivi bogoljubnih cérkvenih pisamah by Father Marijan Jaic, which is rather unknown today. The academician Jerko Bezic finds it particularly interesting that Jaic made efforts to achieve that Croats accept some melodies as common, regardless of differences in certain regions, so, "‘...if a Slavonian came to Croatia, or Dalmatia; or if a Croat, or a Dalmatian came to Slavonia, each of them would encounter the same church songs; the same melodies, or the same religious worship, and according to this unite even closer in the spirit of bonding truth and love" (Jaic according to Bezic 1995b:166). Some of the best-known Croatian Christmas songs had emerged from melodies that belonged to a wider circle of the Austrian church songs or melodies that were created in Croatia, but were mostly modelled on formally simple tunes composed in major (Bezic 1995b:167). These melodies have become a certain kind of standards, and due to the growing record production in the 1990s they have been presented in various arrangements and performances on many recordings.

The compact disc Na dobro nam Bozic dojde will try to offer a somewhat different sound of Christmas. However, we do not intend to provide an unambiguous answer to the question of Croatian Christmas songs. Moreover, the heterogeneity of songs presented on this album is supposed to demonstrate that the unambiguous answer to this question does not exist. "One of the composite characteristics of folklore and popular culture lies precisely in the fact that the symbols and motifs, rituals and ceremonial behavior, particularly oral literary creations, are never found repeated as an authentic imprint: each local, and even family performance, expresses the particularity of the environment, of the times, contacts with neighboring cultures and interaction between diverse social strata" (Rihtman-Augustin 1997:23-24). It was the absence of this authentic imprint that enabled us to select from the abundance of local practices the ones which will point to the outstanding diversity of musical repertoire and performing styles of traditional music through one segment of performance, the one related to the cycle of Christmas customs.

This CD was made as part of a years-long project with the aim to document the contemporary Croatian traditional culture and it is directly related to the 35th International Folklore Festival, which was held from 18 to 22 July 2001 in Zagreb. The project supervisor, professional and artistic director of the International Folklore Festival was Zorica Vitez, and her chief associate Vidoslav Bagur. The research and process of documenting the current situation in traditional music and dance also included the ethnomusicologists of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research - Naila Ceribasic, Josko Ćaleta and Mojca Piskor, as well as the sound engineer Vito Gospodnetic. Most of the audio recordings on this compact disc were produced in Zagreb during the 35th International Folklore Festival, while some of them were made during the visits to folk groups (nos. 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 29, 31, 33), or at specially organized recording sessions (nos. 6, 34).

The International Folklore Festival has been held in Zagreb since 1966 following the festivals of traditional culture which began in Croatia in the 1930s. For the past few years the Zagreb Festival has been defined in terms of central theme. The festival participants demonstrate their traditions related to certain dates or customs (weddings, carnival, Christmas, harvest), or the central theme is associated with a particular region, and tries to present its special folk features. Such an approach presupposes the preparations, which usually take a year or more, and search for locally specific music and dance traditions associated with the central theme of the Folklore Festival.

The 35th International Folklore Festival in Zagreb, held in the summer of 2001, was dedicated to two themes: Christmas and harvest traditions. In addition to considerable diversities of these traditions among Croats, the festival also tried to emphasize certain overlaps, similarities, as well as differences between the traditions through the performances of foreign artists and ethnic minorities that live in Croatia. A segment of Christmas tradition of the Slovak ethnic minority in Croatia is also presented on this CD with the song Slisite li pastuskovia performed by the female singing group of the folklore group Braca Banas from Punitovacki Josipovac (no. 7).

The usual concert of popular church music in that year was dedicated to Christmas songs, and it was held on 20 July 2001 at the Church of St. Catherine in Zagreb. It gathered the singing groups from Dreznik Grad, Murter, Rama, Slobodnica, Supetarska Draga, and Sv. Kriz Zacretje. The concert programme, which aimed to present the diversity of their repertoire and stylistic approaches, followed the chronological concept according to the calendar of events in the Christmas period: from the Advent songs (Dreznik Grad, Slobodnica), over the performed fragments of a service at the Christmas morning mass (Murter) and local varieties of Christmas songs (Supetarska Draga, Murter), to songs of Epiphany (Sv. Kriz Zacretje). The concluding part of the concert presented the locally specific melodies of the popular Christmas song U se vrime godisca performed by the singing groups from Dreznik Grad, Murter, Rama and Supetarska Draga, as well as the melody of this song, which is very common today (with the initial descending fourth), in the joint performance of the concert participants.

The order of songs on the CD partly draws on the concept of the concert programme at the Church of St. Catherine. The entire CD was intended as a short display of diverse ecclesiastical and secular musical traditions related to Christmas time and divided into three sections.

The first section (nos. 1-11) represents a selection of the local varieties of traditional Christmas songs ordered to form a geographical circle starting with Murter over Supetarska Draga, Cetingrad, Sv. Kriz Zacretje, Slobodnica, and Klakar to Punitovacki Josipovac, and then returning back through Dreznik Grad, Posedarje and Veli Iz to the island of Murter. The selected audio recordings represent the fundamental areas of the popular church singing among Croats - in the north (Dreznik Grad, Cetingrad, Klakar, Slobodnica, Sv. Kriz Zacretje) and in the south (Supetarska Draga, Posedarje, Veli Iz, Murter). In the south the church service was performed in Old Church Slavonic and partly in the old living Croatian language (scavet), which enabled the population to sing the regular, liturgical parts of mass. In the north the liturgical language was Latin, and people were not able to take part in the liturgy because they did not speak the language. So, the liturgical chants were sung by the priest and church choir to the accompaniment of the organist. In order to include the people more actively in the service, they were allowed to sing other parts of the mass in the national language. This is why the north (the Zagreb Diocese and Đakovo-Srijem Diocese) had more paraliturgical songs in the national language than the southern regions of Croatia.

The distinctive feature of the popular church singing in Croatia is a specific symbiosis of ecclesiastical and traditional music, which influences the existence of traditional and church singing at the same time. The folk singers took over the basics of choral psalmody, but manners which they employ to transform the church melodies are almost always related to the stylistic features of traditional music in the region where they live. The ancient layer of the Croatian traditional and popular church musical practice is marked by the abundance of various styles, heterogeneous repertoire, which was the consequence of different living conditions, turbulent historical events, and the location of Croatia at the geographical, political and cultural meeting point of the Central European, Balkan and Mediterranean area (Ceribasic 2000:27 and Marosevic 2000:413).

Although most people are familiar with the standard melodies of at least some Christmas songs in this section, our intention was to present the less known melodies of these songs from various parts of Croatia. Most of these songs are performed on Christmas day or immediately after it. Exceptions are the songs O slavna betlemska ti si stalica (no. 5) and Poslan bi arkandjeo svet (no. 8), which are performed during Advent, and the song O sveta Tri kralja (no. 4) sung on the eve of Epiphany.

The centuries-long presence of some of these Christmas songs in northern parts of Croatia is also witnessed by the two most significant songbooks of the 17th and 18th centuries - the Pavlinska pjesmarica (Paulist Songbook) from 1644 and the tree editions of Cithara octochorda, which date back to 1701, 1723, and 1757. The songbooks documented the melodies of Narodi nam se Kralj nebeski (published in the Pavlinska pjesmarica and Cithara octochorda; on the CD performed by the mixed singing group from Posedarje; no. 9) and Poslan bi arkandjeo svet (published in Cithara octochorda; on the CD performed by the female singing group from Dreznik Grad; no. 8).

The audio recordings of music and speech in the second section (nos. 12-26) follow the chronological order of customs and rituals in Christmas time (from Advent to Epiphany). The selected examples are integral parts of local varieties of Christmas customs. The period of Christmas (from late November to mid-January) abounded in numerous events throughout Croatia, which would usually culminate in numerous songs and dances. This combination of customs provides an example of the interwoven various traditions, ranging from the elements of the old Slavonic religion and mythology over antiquity to the Christian, that is Roman Catholic tradition. In the past the Christmas customs were characterized by “putting up of green garlands and other decorations, carrying hay into the house and preparation of the Christmas table, burning of the Yule-log, saying greetings and spoken formulas for the well-being and prosperity of the household and its members, as well as a visit from a person (polaznik) with good wishes for the household and farm” (Vitez 2000:348). “Similarly to everything else in human life, customs continue to exist by changing themselves. Just as social, political and economic currents influence human life, so they frequently shape and reshape customs" (Rihtman-Augustin 1997:16). The comments of examples contain short descriptions of certain customs and rituals.

The third, closing, section (nos. 27-35) consists of nine different melodies of the wide-spread Christmas song U se vrime godisca. The origin of this song is a medieval Latin hymnody with the first line In hoc anni circulo / vita datur seculo, “which spread through southern Italy and the Czech Republic in the late Middle Ages, where it had become a part of the popular repertoire of Christmas songs, first the Latin cantiones, and later the church songs in national language" (Kos 1991:388). Text of the melody had already been translated into Croatian in the 15th century as U sej vrime godisca / mir se svitu navisca (Mencik according to Bezic 1995b:163). One of the melodies with the text U se vreme godista had been documented in the Pavlinska pjesmarica (1644), the most comprehensive Croatian collection of church melodies from the 17th century in manuscript. The best-known songbook of the 18th century, Cithara octochorda, in all of its three early editions (1701, 1723 and 1757) also presents the varieties of this melody with the Croatian text. The editors of the latest critical edition of Cithara octochorda (1998) also give in the comments of individual songs a list of editions which contained melodies or texts from this collection after 1757. According to the editors’ information, the melody U se vreme godisca appeared in the period between 1891 and 1983 in thirteen songbooks, and notes on twelve of these songbooks are accompanied by the comments that they are related to the melody published in Cithara octochorda only in terms of content and text, and not in terms of music (Milanovic 1998:72).

In spite of numerous and indeed diverse melodies of this song, the 20th century "standard" became the version with the initial descending fourth, which is today well-known in almost all parts of Croatia. Professor Franjo Dugan Sr. claimed that the melody was similar to an instrumental pastorale by the Italian composer Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583 - 1643). In an attempt to answer the question how the melody reached the coastal region of Croatia, Jerko Bezic drew on a paper on the Christmas melodies from the island of Losinj which was published in the early 20th century by the Austrian musicologist Robert Lach. In this paper Lach introduces notations of the pastorales written by the organist Marko Letic from Losinj in 1830. The documented instrumental melodies also contained double four bars of the Frescobaldi’s pastorale, under which Letic had written the first two lines of the song U se vrime godisca (Bezic 1973:211).

In addition to two melodies with the initial descending fourth, the Croatian liturgical songbook Pjevajte Gospodu pjesmu novu (Zagreb 1983) also introduces five melodies of different melodic lines from various locations of the Croatian Littoral (Omisalj, Bakar) and Dalmatia (Murter, Trogir, Dalmatinska zagora), as well as two melodies from Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is also a certain reflection of the recent situation in the field. In the early 20th century U se vrime godisca was the most popular, and in some places of Dalmatia the only Christmas song, according to the documents of Antonin Zaninovic (Zaninovic according to Bezic 1995b:163). Jerko Bezic noted down that in some places of the Ravni kotari region U se vrime godisca was the only paraliturgical text sung at Christmas mass until the 1960s (Bezic 1973:210).

The nine audio recordings with various melodies of the song U se vrime godisca, which are presented on this CD, provide a brilliant display of a wide variety of the local distinctiveness in forming of the melodies and texts of Christmas songs. A series of audio recordings starts with the melody from Dreznik Grad, which is the most similar to a melody written in 1644 in the Pavlinska pjesmarica (no. 27), to finally reach the most frequent melody with the initial descending fourth performed by all the participants at the concert of the Croatian Christmas songs which was given at the Church of St. Catherine in Zagreb in 2001 (no. 35).