One of the most outstanding wandering singer-instrumentalists in the Western Ukrainian Polissya region was Andriyan Danylyuk (1929–2005), a native of the village of Hirnyky in the Volyn region. Equipped first with a reel tape recorder and later with a cassette recorder, he devoted significant effort to recording his repertoire, as well as collecting materials from his colleagues. In this capacity, he proved to be like a diligent and productive folklorist, whose primary professional goal was to compile and maintain a working collection of materials. As a result, his efforts left an invaluable legacy of numerous audio recordings and a few handwritten notebooks.

Andriyan Danylyuk himself was a remarkable wandering performer, distinguished by his vocal skill and mastery of the harmonica. His personal collection comprises 46 cassettes and 32 reels of various durations, primarily featuring religious and moralistic psalms, alongside occasional folk songs. Of these recordings, 212 pieces were performed by Danylyuk himself, while 44 were performed by other singers, including some prose genres. Particularly notable are his six meticulously filled notebooks, created with the assistance of his wife and children. These notebooks contain predominantly devotional texts drawn from the Holy Scriptures, which he used as a basis for crafting his repertoire, along with already composed psalms and prayers. The total number of works in these notebooks approaches 300.

Danylyuk’s repertoire can be categorized into several genre groups, with an emphasis on religious and moralistic themes: (1) church psalms and songs – reflecting biblical and devotional themes, including narratives about Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, saints, Christian virtues, and warnings about the Last Judgment and the afterlife; (2) christian carols (koliady) and New Year songs (shchedry); (3) folk ballads and songs – addressing themes such as family relationships, condemning immoral actions, and reflecting on war; (4) prayers.

At every level of his musical and poetic creativity, Danylyuk excelled. He absorbed the repertoire of his predecessors, the traditional hurdy-gurdy players, while preserving many stylistic traits in his musical manner. His song plots are highly developed and align with classical dramaturgical structures, with texts often spanning 40–80 stanzas. His singing and harmonica accompaniment are imbued with original qualities, marked by improvisation, rhythmic freedom, harmonic richness, and virtuoso interplay between the instrumental and vocal parts.
Based on the information provided about Andriyan Danylyuk’s creative style, one can appreciate the value and uniqueness of his artistic legacy. His performances skillfully combined individual and regional traits, evident in the masterful composition and nuanced interpretation of both traditional and innovative songs. Unfortunately, comparing him with other bearers of the same tradition is difficult, as evidence of such parallels is scarce today. For this reason, the name and work of this Polissyan harmonist deserve wider dissemination and recognition among scholars and enthusiasts of Ukrainian folklore.

Keywords: Andriyan Danylyuk, Western Polissia, wandering performance, blind harmonists, performance style.

This article highlights the key milestones in the creative biography of the prominent multi-instrumentalist, Honored Master of Ukraine, educator, composer, researcher, and collector of folk musical instruments, Mykhailo Tymofiiv (b. 1944). The analy­sis of the artist’s professional activities is framed through the examination of his scho­larly contributions, research, performing, reconstructive, and pedagogical achievements, ultimately defining his role in Ukrainian ethnoorganology. Special attention is given to the familial atmosphere and traditional environment in which the musician grew and developed. Mykhailo Tymofiiv refined and expanded the experience of a traditional pipe player and master instrument maker. His innovations regarding the tonal capabilities of the Hutsul traditional pipe „frilka”, particularly its chromaticization, were inspired by Tymofiiv’s deliberate effort to play this instrument in the academic concert and educational context.

Drawing on the repertoire foundation of arranged folklore, Mykhailo Tymofiiv nurtured a cohort of distinguished pipe players who have achieved prominence as concert performers. As a researcher, he conducts studies of musical instruments from the Hutsul and Pokuttia regions, focusing on their structural, tonal, acoustic, and technical and performance parameters, as well as their genesis, development, and contemporary functionality. The specifics and varieties of fingering techniques for playing Hutsul aerophones in relation to the music performed on them remain a constant theme in Tymofiiv’s conference presentations, lectures, and master classes. The scholar has made a significant contribution to the study of traditional Hutsul violin music. In 1975, he recorded, on his personal reel-to-reel tape recorder, solo and duet performances by the traditional violinist Ivan Meniv (“Meniuk”) from Kosmach (1910–1984). М. Tymofiiv has also gathered extensive materials on the traditional musicians of the village of Myshyn.

Today, the ethnoorganologist places particular emphasis on the following aspects of musical instrument research: 1) exploring the tonal and tuning possibilities of the most archaic aerophones preserved in the various folk traditions; 2) reconstructing bone flutes from the Late Paleolithic era, discovered during archaeological excavations in Molodovo, Chernivtsi region; 3) improving the system of fingering notation for pipe (sopilka/frilka) music.

Keywords: folk instrumental music, professional folk musicians, "trojisti muzyky", criteria for traditional musical professionalism.

According to the rules established by the classics of Ukrainian ethnomusicology, bar lines in music-ethnographic transcriptions of folk songs with a time-quantitative rhythm are strictly placed at the points of structural caesuras in accompanying syllabic verses. A fundamental drawback of such measuring is the denial of the inherent internal organizational system (meter) and the natural musical-syntactic segmentation of this type of musical rhythm. This often leads to its inadequate representation in musical notation.
The recent discovery of immanent laws characteristic of this rhythm (Lukaniuk B., Musikal Quantitative Rhythm, Lviv, 2017) allows for the development of fundamentally new principles for measuring of folk songs, fully aligned with the nature of their quantitative rhythm. This presents an urgent task for Ukrainian ethnomusicology (and perhaps not only Ukrainian). There is simply no other way to overcome the current issue of unjustifiable barline placement, traditionally used up to now.

Keywords: time-quantitative musical rhythm, musical-ethnographic transcription, differential principle of measuring.

In 2021, the folk songs collection of ethnographic Volhynia in the recordings of 1934–1935 Volhynian Folk Songs from the Archive of Filaret Kolessa was published in Lviv. The collection was compiled and prepared for publication by Lviv ethnomusicologists Viktoriya Yarmola and Yuriy Rybak on the basis of archival materials found in the archive of F. Kolessa by professor Iryna Dovhaliuk.

The book contains a detailed preface and an analytical article by Yuriy Rybak, which outlines the principles of compiling the oldest layer of melodies associated with the ancient rituals of the annual agricultural cycle (carols, shchedrivkas, kolodka’s songs, spring songs, hayivkas (spring dances), spring games, kupala songs, songs of the summer season, and harvest songs). Yuriy Rybak explains the principles of genre division of songs into groups according to their functions, and within the groups – the principles of their typological ordering, based on the methods of national ethnomusicology (Filaret Kolessa, Stanislav Liudkevych, Klyment Kvitka, Volodymyr Hoshovsky, Bohdan Lukaniuk) about the primacy of verbal-rhythmic and musical-rhythmic structures (formulas) in determining morphological types of songs.

Contemporary melotypological schools in Ukraine are concentrated in two centres: research ethnomusicological laboratories at the Kyiv and Lviv music academies. Although both centres build their strategy on the rhythmotypological foundations of Klyment Kvitka, there are still noticeable contraversions between them. It provokes a number of questions about Rybak’s system. These questions are discussed in this article, which focuses on a critical analysis of the principles of arranging musical pieces in the ritual part of the collection.
The author of the article has her own field experience in collecting folk music in Volhynia and the neighbouring region of Volhynian Polissya (more than 80 villages were investigated). There are also numerous publications of Volhynian musical folklore. All of this information was accumulated in a special database, the Register of Ritual Melodies of Ukrainians (RRMU), and later mapped onto special typological maps that made up the Atlas of Ritual Melodies of Ukrainians by Iryna Klymenko (published in Kyiv in 2020).

On the basis of these studies, the author of the article suggests alternative approaches to the ritual melotypology of Volhynia, namely its western and middle segments. The main differences in the approaches to the ordering of melodies and their theoretical description are caused by the ‘alphabetical ordering’ applied by Yurii Rybak in ascending numerical indexes of syllabic formulas (a formal approach formed in the early twentieth century). Instead, the author of the article uses morphological ordering based on musical and rhythmic models combined with variable silabics (this approach was formed at the end of the twentieth century). This second method has been practiced for over 30 years in the works of researchers of the Kyiv school (Laboratory of Ethnomusicology of the National Music Academy of Ukraine).

Keywords: Volhynia, Filaret Kolessa, Lviv melotypological school, Yuriy Rybak, typology of ritual melodies, Kyiv melotypological school, carols, schedrivkas, kolodka’s songs, spring songs and games.

The folk ballad, one of the most popular genres of folk music of many traditions, is presented in the article through the prism of the studies of two pioneers of national ethnomusicological schools: Ukrainian in the study of Klyment Kvitka and Slovenian in the study of Zmaga Kumer. The comparative analysis of approaches is based on the example of two works by these authors dealing with the ballad/song about a child murderer. The analysis also includes works by representatives of other disciplines investigating folk music, such as folkloristics, ethnology, etc., because of the specifics of the genre, which is complex in historical, geographical, and functional terms, and because of the considerable time gap between the studied works.

The article consists of two parts. The first is devoted to a critical review of folkloristic, ethnological, and ethnomusicological works of studies of the folk ballad in Ukraine and Europe. The history of recording and publication of ballads, scholars’ hypotheses about the genre’s origin, the principle of plot migration, function, regional peculiarities of performance, etc., are briefly discussed. Among the authors of the reviewed works are both Ukrainian folklorists – O. Dei, K. Kvitka, V. Hoshovs’ky, S. Hrytsa, N. Khomenko, and others – as well as foreign authors – F. J. Child, B. Bartok, including Slovenian authors – Z. Kumer, V. Vodušek, M. Golež Kaučič, and others.
The second part is devoted to a comparative analysis of approaches in two works on the song/ballad about a child murderer, by K. Kvitka and Z. Kumer. The structure of the works, the sources, the main methods, and the purpose of both studies are analyzed. The specifics of each author’s approach and the factors that determined it are outlined. For clarification, a table is presented comparing the types of sources, the geography of the variants and sources mentioned by the authors, the structure of each research, analytical approaches, the objectives of the studies, etc.

The article shows that the works of K. Kvitka and Z. Kumer, although different in many traits, are similar in some approaches. This is because both authors refer to common predecessors (e.g., B. Bartok, G. Adler, and others.). The research identifies the basic tasks of the respective national scientific school at that time, some of which remain relevant in modern science. For Ukrainian ethnomusicology, it is a so-called method of “melogeography”, considering the distribution of rhythmic/strophic patterns in different regions of the country, with hypotheses about the origin and tracing of the principle and process of song migration and transformation. These methods are developed in the experimental work of K. Kvitka. In Slovenian ethnomusicology, it is an important issue to distinguish the national style of those musical patterns that have emerged under the influence of other national traditions and have received their specific appearance in the Slovenian territories. Z. Kumer accomplishes this by combining classical methods of analysis with the interdisciplinary approach and conducting a comprehensive analysis of songs.

By reviewing and comparing the ideas contained in the studies, the urgent need for the development of methods and approaches to the study of late genres of the oral and semi-oral tradition, as well as the tradition belonging to both urban and rural areas in Ukraine, is considered. To address the issues of genre classification and belonging of the ballad, it is proposed to apply interdisciplinary methods such as sociology, music anthropology, etc. In contemporary European research, the folk ballad is considered an important genre of national cultural heritage, which, according to some authors, has become a precursor of modern media in its functionality. The principle of dissemination of this genre, the selection/adaptation of melodies at the regional level, the modification of the plot according to local needs and the adaptation of the plot to make it more realistic (making the ballad similar to the urban myth) indicates the important role of the ballad both for the tradition itself and as a subject of ethnomusico­logical research. The correlation between accented and time-quantity types of rhythms in folk music, which K. Kvitka identifies as one of the most important issues of musicology, can be further explored in future research through a more active inclusion of the ballad genre in ethnomusicological studies in Ukraine. Additionally, comparative studies of different approaches open new perspectives for Ukrainian ethnomusicology.

Keywords: Ukrainian pop music, folk elements, cultural resistance, imperial narratives, Ukrainian language, national identity, war, collaborations, performance style, ethnic minorities.

Due to the extraordinary value and uniqueness of folklore materials in the Ukrainian archives and private collections of scholars, preserving these materials is an extremely important task, especially in the context of Russian aggression in Ukraine. Modern digital technologies open up new opportunities for the preservation, research, and dissemination of Ukrainian musical folklore. However, in order to effectively utilize these opportunities, it is necessary to develop completely new approaches to the creation of digital audiovisual archives. Despite the fact that the possibility of fully implementing such projects in the future is rather difficult due to limited technical and financial resources, the possibility of easy access to the materials of folklore collections can be organized using existing approaches by optimizing them.

The article analyzes the current state of the analog and digital collection of Ukrainian musical folklore in the Kyiv Laboratory of Ethnomusicology (officially known as the Problematic Research Laboratory of Ethnomusicology of the Ukrainian National Music Academy). The article also highlights the main features of the musical folklore collection organization and the problems that arise when working with them. Author proposes the idea of introducing a transitional stage in the organization of musical folklore collections, which would allow to prepare more effectively the transition to the new type of archives and solve a number of existing problems in the current challenging conditions.

Keywords: folk ballad, ballad about a cruel mother, methodology of ethnomusicology, national school of ethnomusicology, the legacy of Klyment Kvitka, the legacy of Zmaga Kumer.

The model curriculum for the subject "Folklore of the Peoples of Ukraine" was developed by a group of ethnomusicologists — Halyna Pshenychkina, Hanna Pelina, and Anna Kolomytseva — in accordance with the requirements regarding scope and learning outcomes. It defines the general normative content, volume, and expected outcomes of student learning in this discipline, and outlines recommended approaches to planning and organizing the educational process in the musical folklore class.

The curriculum is intended to provide basic knowledge and skills in the subject "Folklore of the Peoples of Ukraine" within art schools (music schools and music departments of schools of arts), and may also be used by other educational institutions delivering extracurricular arts education programs. The course "Folklore of the Peoples of Ukraine" is closely connected with other components of the musical folklore class curriculum ("Folklore Ensemble", "Singing (Solo)" — solo folk performance), and serves to consolidate theoretical and practical knowledge and skills.

The curriculum is designed for two years (15 modules) and is accompanied by an extensive list of recommended literature, informational sources, and illustrative materials for each module.

Keywords: folklore of the peoples of Ukraine, musical folklore, traditional music, ethnic groups of Ukraine, model curriculum, primary arts education.