Cultural identity, nationalism and changes in singing traditions

Abstract

In the following an attempt is made to describe some alterations in singing traditions from the aspect of sociocultural context and viewed from the Estonian perspective. As particular occasions, where singing traditions in relation to cultural identity are studied, two types of festivals have been chosen: a large national festival and a small community festival. Festival is observed here as cultural performance, charac terized by periodicity and recurrence, by impersonal and predictable movement of time (Stoeltje 1983:240). A festival provides an opportunity to study the external ori entation of customs, folkloristic phenomena, transformations in the sociocultural con text, organized performance and the functional context of singing.