performed by Ansambl Biljana
key: A hijaz
mode: A Bb C# D E F G A
melody: T R m f si l (li) t d r
form: dance AABBCC
meter: mixed
English function names: tonic subtonic
Tagg (modified): home counterpoise (away)
Riemann: T ???
Scale degrees: I vii
Chords: A Gm
A Gm A
|:/ / / /. |/ / / /. |/ / / /. |/ / / /. :|
A Gm A
|:/ / / /. |/ / / /. |/ / / /. |/ / / /. :|
A Gm A
|:/ / / /. |/ / / /. |/ / / /. |/ / / /. :|
In the course of looking for a recording for a totally different devetorka (which I did not find), I came across this recording. Lose some, win some.
Ohrid is a city in North Macedonia.1 Oro is a circle dance, related to hora in other cultures. The word is related to ancient Greek khorós/khoreía for dance.2 Devetorka is a dance form. It's an exonym from researchers and not from the Balkan peoples dancing these dances. "Devet" means 9 and refers to the number of microbeats. Interestingly, folk dancer Don Buskirk writes that folk musicians often did not really count the microbeats; they simply stayed longer on some beats by feel. I don't doubt this, but at the same time, thinking about the busyness of many melodies, they probably could feel things from that, even if they weren't consciously thinking about quantities of pitches going by. I am guessing that the numbers came up once people starting transcribing the music into staff notation.
So we have a nine-microbeat circle dance from Ohrid. I would guess this isn't the only nine-microbeat circle dance from that one town. I wonder if the naming situation is similar to klezmer practices in which there weren't really any song titles, originally — you figure out which song it is from the first phrase the leader plays.
The first and third sections have the same chord progression — the punctuation kind; the middle section mixes it up a little. We also have in this recording another example of heterophonic playing between the clarinet and violin, each ornamenting the melody in their own way. But despite the speed, mixed meter, and ornamentation, the song is not that complicated. A bit hard to parse everything on the first listen, perhaps, but a few melodic ideas go a long way.
Remember when the country had the incredibly unwieldy name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia — abbreviated FYROM — because Greece was mad at them for "stealing" the name Macedonia? Crazy pants. I'm glad they all came to a reasonable compromise, because FYROM is a terrible fate to place on a country.
Not oros, which means mountain, similar to some Slavic words for mountain, e.g. hora in Czech.