“You pick up what comes to mind”. Connected motifs in the lullabies of the Russian North

Abstract

Traditional lullabies do not have a common plot – they are a bundle of a number of micro-plots that the performer “pulls” together, each time creating a new song. Each lullaby will be unique not only in the volume of the text, but also in the number of motifs, their coiled-uncoiled, their combination and sequence. Despite the improvisational nature of the genre, lullabies consist of motifs so stable and have such a rigid and clichéd rhythmic structure that these motifs can be called formulas. They can have both a rather capacious, brief form, and a more expanded structure – one of these forms of motifs the performer chooses during the creation, singing of the lullaby, and depending on the chosen form he chooses subsequent motifs belonging to the same “cluster”. Since the duration of the lullaby depends entirely on the addressee (i. e., on how long it will take him to fall asleep), there is no rigid order regulating the sequence of motif selection. Nevertheless, it is possible to trace some recurring “associations” – bundles of motifs that are more often next to each other.