Slovak songs

Slovenské spevy (Slovak Songs)

Slovenské spevy (Slovak Songs) – the largest and most significant collection of Slovak folk songs to date, published from 1880 over a period of nearly three decades – attracted extraordinary attention from the cultural world already at the time of its creation. It represented the culmination of almost a century of efforts by Slovak national activists to permanently preserve Slovak folk song heritage. Several decades later, the distinguished Slovak ethnomusicologist, conductor, educator, organizer, and publicist Ladislav Galko (1916–1987), a researcher at the Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, devoted more than twenty years to preparing the second expanded, critical, and documented edition of Slovenské spevy.

This monumental collection contains more than 5,000 folk songs and was published in seven volumes by OPUS between 1972 and 1989. Although individual volumes were reprinted, the complete work gradually became difficult for the general public to obtain. Galko’s editorial achievement, regarded as a significant contribution to preserving the “golden treasure” of Slovak musical culture, deserved to be made accessible once again.

The second edition of Slovenské spevy consists of two main parts. The first three volumes present a revised reissue of the original printed collection. The following three volumes, entitled Supplements, contain songs that remained unused in the original edition despite having been collected as manuscript contributions during the song-gathering campaign for Slovenské spevy.

The seventh volume contains indexes and surveys that can be divided into two groups. The first group covers only the songs from Slovenské spevy, while the second includes songs from all sources used in the collection. Their purpose is to provide comprehensive lists of the information contained in the individual volumes, offer basic biographical information about the collectors, and highlight the characteristic features of folk songs.

Since preparing a new critical edition of Slovenské spevy would require substantial financial resources and considerable staffing, while yielding relatively limited additional content, the Music Centre publishing house decided to make the title available in the form of a reprint of the second OPUS edition.