Collector`s Works of Nina Kerimova
Authors: Tereshchenko Olexandr 
Published: December 2021

Documentation of ethnomusic (which is at the same time the first stage of its research) forms the base of sources of musical folklore (ethnomusicology), which creates the very possibility of all subsequent explorations.

Ethnic music, as a whole, is formed by the totality of its regional manifestations, each of which must be recorded in sufficient completeness. However, some territories for various reasons even at the end of the twentieth century, were represented on the Ukrainian ethnomusical map very sparsely. It’s a paradox, but Kirovohrad region, located in the center of Ukraine, remained one of the least explored regions. Being a region of relatively late settlement, it was practically ignored by researchers (including ignored by the relevant scientific institutions) as an uninteresting periphery.

One of those who in the late 1980s gave the start of the modern stage of documenting the musical folklore of the Kirovohrad region, its systematic professional recording, was a graduate of the Kiev Conservatory Nina Kerimova. For ten years of active field work, the collector has recorded nearly 7000 units of musical and ethnographic information from 80 settlements. These materials today make up nearly one third of the twenty-thousand regional audio archive, collected over the past 35 years by the joint efforts of folklorists, professionally engaged in field survey of the presteppe Right Bank and its adjacent steppe and eastern Podolian territories within the Kirovohrad region and the border areas of Cherkasy, Vinnytsia and Dnepropetrovsk regions.

The purpose of this article is to summarize and make public the information about the nature and results of N. Kerimova’s collector`s activity. A systematized, meaningful, structured, concentrated and formalized approach makes it possible to include materials from her archive into the all-Ukrainian ethnomusical and ethnomusicological information field. Methods used in the article correspond to its set goal: factographic and factological, statistical, analytical and synthetic (the latter reveals patterns in the correlation of elements of an integral system).

The article provides:

a brief overview of the history of collecting musical folklore in the region;

basic biographical information about the researcher;

statistical data on the number and geography of her expeditionary records, specified to the culture-genre content of the materials recorded in each locus; data on respondents (their number, age, origin).

The methods and preferences of the field work are described.

The professional level of the work is attested, the high degree of scientific value of the collected materials is argued. The audio and musical publications, which include materials from the archive of N. Kerimova are listed.

The materials collected by N. Kerimova are characterized (a) as a separate hermetic collection-archive, (b) as an important component of the cumulative array of records made in the region and (c) in the context of a holistic view of the region's traditional ethnomusical culture that has been effectively formed nowadays.

Along the way, the author of the article deals with the issues of cultural-genre classification / attribution of folk musical works, archiving field materials (in particular, methods of passportization and codification of records), as well as the problems of documenting and statistical processing of materials recorded from migrants (local, intraregional, interregional), that were incorporated by the new folklore environment to a greater or lesser extent