Musicologica Olomucensia

The paper reminds us that the area of spiritual lyrics for one voice has played a significant role in the process of the circulation of musical repertory and concerns itself with several sociological aspects of this phenomenon.
It calls attention to the fact that in the course of studying spiritual songs we come across two rather sharply divided phases of development differing in their functionality and in the character of the movement of their repertory. It familiarizes us with the processes which occurred in the background of changes of nontyped repertory of manuscript collections into typed repertory, presented in a songbook as a collection of collectively distributed and individually edited content. Finally it draws our attention to the change in social status of creators and users of the spiritual song repertory as the main cause of the transformation of spiritual song from an elite to a public matter.