Kogoj's Views on the Slovene Folk-Song

Abstract

Marij Kogoj, the most famous Slovene expressionist composer, occupied himself throughout his life, although he had his own well defined outlook in music, with the problem of Slovene folk-songs. Considered from a scientific point of view, his ideas are an incomplete and undocumented collection of general elucidations and his own assumptions, yet they are interesting and valuable because they contain statements arising from intuition, later confirmed by ethnomusicological research. Kogoj's main achievement in his occupation with folk-lore was the raising of the Slovene folk-song to the full artistic standard of the concert hall. As a composer he himself was not generally very active in this field and his two main projects: piano variations on the song »Oh, this Military Drum!« and the opera »As You Like It« in which he abundantly used folk-song material, remained unfinished. Nevertheless, his choral arrangements of folk-songs such as: »There Lies, There Lies a Field«, his suite »Suffering Hearts«, and »A Folk-Song« are a sufficient proof of how far, in his artistic views on folk-lore and particularly in his own compositions, he rose above the Slovene milieu of that time which still conceived the essence of the problem in terms of Romanticism. Kogoj discovered by means of his inventive solutions (arrangement, variation, paraphrase, fantasy with a free employment of motifs) and particularly by his rich harmonic idiom and his lovely contrapunctal treatment new content dimensions of the Slovene folk-song and so he proved its parity with other folk-lore material. In his compositions of this kind the stylistic development from expressionism to neoclassicism can be very clearly perceived.