The Ninth Garland (1896) combines four songs from Montenegro. Except for the melodious Swaying Field, all the others are ascetically brief in their and melodic range, this being a characteristic of the folk idiom of this region, yet intense in their condensed expressivity. The songs therefore required simple treatment, though with unusual harmonies; echoes of the archaic are heard in Rose Plaits Her Hair and Folk A-hunting, and especially in the final song At Prince Ivan’s whose melodic range does not exceed a third and the unsymmetrically developed phrases keep ending in a dissonant second chord rather like two-part folk singing (here Mokranjac adopted the harmonization of the same song used by Czech Ludvig Kuba in his collection of Montenegrin songs).
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