Military Folk Songs

After all the battles, upheavals, drumming from the fronts and marking new borders, this time in the First World War we will also look at the intimate feeling that accumulated and thickened in the then emerging songs among people. The lecture of the Military Folk Song will be based on the audio recordings, along with songs and photographs, highlighting some experiences and events that have been preserved in the images of Slovenian folk military songs, including some heroic ones; and will present a new interpretation of these songs. In the past, the conviction that the melancholy of Slovenian folk military songs stems from the fears of Slovenian soldiers. Taking into account the everyday singing habits of Slovenes, the transfer of these habits into military life and the testimony of the cameraman of singing the soldiers of various nations during the First World War dictates a different view of the evaluation of Slovenian folk military songs, and at the same time the role and attitude of Slovenian soldiers.

In 1982, dr. Marija Klobčar graduated from Slavic and Ethnology. From 1998 she worked at the Music Institute of the ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana. As a textologist, with the interweaving of ethnological and folkloristic aspects, she reveals various images of the poetic tradition, with a special emphasis on ritual, narrative and military poems, and the song of some landscapes. Lately, she is devoting attention to the study of traveling singers and song leaflets and their influence on the folk song, and gave testimony to clarify certain issues of Slovene history.