This four-volume work is the most substantial and thorough analysis of Yugoslav folk music ever to be published in the English language. In addition to the editorially corrected reprint of the seventy-five Parry Collection transcriptions, first published in 1951, are the 3,449 facsimile reproductions from Bartók's collection of published and unpublished Yugoslav folk song materials. There are, too, instrumental transcriptions from the Parry collection and other sources, hitherto unpublished, and the prodigious Tabulation of Material, amassed from the data inherent in the source melodies, which appears in Vol. II also in facsimile form. Of equal importance is the reprint in Vol. I of the author's index of Serbo-Croatian refrains, which he originally placed in the third volume (Texts) of Rumanian Folk Music for comparative purposes.
The editor, Dr. Benjamin Suchoff, provides introductory narratives in which the historical aspect and the chronology of the various manuscript versions are treated. With the assistance of the foremost present-day Yugoslav ethnomusicologists, he has added detailed chapters on related materials that supplement and update Bartók's findings in Yugoslav Folk Music.
Dr. Suchoff has also constructed various tabulations, in accordance with Bartókian procedure followed elsewhere, as an aid to the reader. Of special interest will be the computer-derived lexicographical index of themes in Vol. II, which he prepared by extracting the incipits from more than 8,000 melody sections of different content-structure.
