Today's singing tradition of Lithuanian polyphonic songs sutartines: relations of western and eastern cultures
Lithuanian multipart songs sutartines inscribed in 2010 on the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Determination of features of vocal and instrumental polyphony, second accords, complementary rhythms and syncopation.
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Department of Ethnomusicology at Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre
Today's Singing Tradition of Lithuanian Polyphonic Songs Sutartinиs: Relations of Western and Eastern Cultures
Daiva Raciunaite-Vyciniene
Annotation
The dichotomy “East-West” is a philosophical concept of ancient origin. Despite the fact that East and West can be interpret and understood as a cultural hemisphere, it is necessary to talk about their commonalities and points of contact. In an article author notes, drawing on her many years of singing practice and scientific research, that the music of sutartines is understood not as a mix of different vocal parties, but as a sounding pulsating space. In this sense, sutartines are close to minimalistic--music and visual art--works which are characterised by the multiple repetition of elements, their severity and precision. In performing sutartines, just like Eastern traditional music, one characteristic is to, through controlled emotion, “enter” one certain state and remain in it for a long time. Speaking about sutartines, the author discusses old Lithuanian relations with the East, which are not so much a geographical, but more mental. It is known that the West in general is characterized by the propensity to search for manifestations of spirituality in the East. Therefore, the links of sutartines with the East may be the result of this search. The author raises the question of whether the modern tendency of young people to sing the sutartines may be the result of the search for spirituality in Eastern culture, or the spirit of the East rather than the West lies in the very nature of sutartines. Modern music projects, bringing together Western and Eastern cultures, helps to understand the original features of the sutartines and possibilities of “western” meditation.
Keywords: sutartines, Lithuanian minimalism, spirituality, Orient in Lithuania, the West-East, dialogue of cultures
Анотація
Дайва Рачюнайте-Вічінєнє
Литовські поліфонічні пісні сутартінес сьогодні: співвідношення Західної та Східної культур
Дихотомія «Схід-Захід» є філософською концепцією давнього походження. Не зважаючи на те, що Схід і Захід можна розуміти як культурні опозити, необхідно говорити про їх спільність у певних точках дотику. Спираючись на багатолітню практику співу і наукові дослідження, автор доводить, що музика сутартінес розуміється не як суміш різних вокальних партій, а як звуковий пульсуючий простір. В цьому сенсі сутартінес близькі до мінімалістичних - музичних та візуальних творів, які характеризуються багаторазовим повторенням елементів, їх строгістю і точністю. Під час виконання сутартінес, як і у традиційній східній музиці, характерною рисою є те, що за допомогою контрольованих емоцій, виконавець входить у певний стан і перебуває у ньому певний час (з власного співацького досвіду авторки). Говорячи про сутартінес, автор звертається до теми литовських стосунків зі Сходом, які є не так географічні, як психологічні. Відомо, що Захід у цілому схильний до пошуку насамперед виявів духовності на Сході. Тому зв'язки можуть розглядатися як одна з можливостей такого пошуку. Автор торкається питання, чи не є сучасне прагнення молоді співати сутартінес результатом пошуку духовності у східній культурі, тобто чи закладений в самій природі сутартінес "дух Сходу", а не "дух Заходу" ? Проекти сучасної музики, які об'єднують західну і східну культури, допомагають зрозуміти оригінальні риси сутартінес і можливості «західної» медитації.
Ключові слова: сутартінес, литовський мінімалізм, духовність, Захід-Схід, діалог культур
Аннотация
Дайва Рачюнайте-Вичинене
Литовские полифонические песни сутартинес сегодня: соотношение Западной и Восточной культур
Дихотомия «Восток-Запад» является философской концепцией давнего происхождения. Несмотря на то, что Восток и Запад можно понимать как культурные оппозиты, необходимо говорить об их общности в определенных точках соприкосновения. Опираясь на многолетнюю практику пения и научные исследования, автор доказывает, что музыка сутартинес понимается не как смесь различных вокальных партий, а как звучащее пульсирующее пространство. В этом смысле сутартинес близки минималистичным - музыкальным и визуальным произведениям, которые характеризуются многократным повторением элементов, их строгостью и точностью. Во время исполнения сутартинес, как и традиционной восточной музыки, характерной чертой является то, что с помощью контролируемых эмоций исполнитель входит в определенное состояние и пребывает в нем определенное время (из личного исполнительного опыта автора). Говоря о сутартинес, автор обращается к теме литовских отношений с Востоком, которые не столько географические, сколько психологические. Известно, что Запад в целом склонен к поиску прежде всего проявлений духовности на Востоке. Поэтому связи могут рассматриваться как одна из возможностей такого поиска. Автор задается вопросом, не является ли современное стремление молодежи петь сутартинес результатом поиска духовности в восточной культуре, не заложен ли в самой природе сутартинес «дух Востока», а не «дух Запада»? Проекты современной музыки, которые объединяют западную и восточную культуры, помогают понять оригинальные черты сутартинес и возможности «западной» медитации.
Ключевые слова: сутартинес, литовский минимализм, духовность, Запад-Восток, диалог культур
The main text
lithuanian vocal instrumental polyphony
The subject of my papers - Lithuanian multipart songs sutartines inscribed in 2010 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Features most characteristic of vocal and instrumental polyphony, second accords, complementary rhythms and syncopation, indicate a powerful, unique musical system of thought per sutartines Sutartines, Lithuanian multipart songs http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/sutartines-lithuanian-multipart-songs-00433 1 Русское географическое общество (Archives of the Russian Geography Association in St. Petersburg), 1, nr. 31, p. 89. (Ex. 1. Du Dobileli Trys Ratileli.wawe).
Sutartines were part of the old belief system and its rituals, and undoubtedly represent the sacred part of the sacrum/profanum duality. According to the old sources, sutartines were sung by none other than sprites and witches. This lets us surmise that the singers of sutartines were important participants or organizers of rituals. The sacredness of sutartines as well as the extraordinary status of the singers is revealed by several factors. Nineteenth century linguist Mykolas Miezinis wrote down the testimony of one singer who claimed that “their mothers knew such songs, which they kept secret and sang very rarely;
the words were held in high esteem, and were considered unalterable” Translation: These are your eggs, these are mine. We'll put them together, and they will be ours.
~ The “cackling like hens” description regarding sutartines may have several meanings: 1) a reflection of key sutartine performance practices: the rapid “hopping” from one pitch to another, the accentuation of selected pitches, the simultaneous sounding of different texts and melodies - the general clamour; 2) an indication of changes in twentieth century music aesthetics, a different view of sutartines among the rural population.*. Keeping them in secret, and the honor bestowed on those unalterable words indicated their special significance and the sacredness of the sutartines. This peculiar fear is also mentioned by researcher Mykolas Birziska who wrote down these comments: “For people of our times sutartines sometimes appear mysterious and it is said that they come to us through sprites and fairies, (initially the Goddess of Birth and Earth in Eastern Baltic mythology) Afterwards, when people had become Christians, they only referred to them as witches” (Birziska, 1921, 31).
We have several documented tales about sprites who were the singers of sutartines. In one of them (written down in 1968 from informant Ksaveras Ilgevicius at the age of 75) three sprites who lived several kilometers one from the other would sing a sutart- ine (Dovydaitis, 1987, 474). The fact that laumes or sprites sing the sutartines is important evidence of just how exceptional these songs were.
Accoring to folklorist Norbertas Veliaus, the word ragana or witch is quite old, related to the words for oracle or sorcerer. The word ragana has its origins in the word regeti - to see. She can see into the future, she is clairvoyant; the expert on things unseen (Velius, 1977, 128). Of course, we might question whether tales and testimonies can be firm proof of the social and religious status of sutartine singers of the past. In this case we might rely on the opinion of semioticist Algirdas Julius Greimas, who has said that, “even the seemingly most stupid idea or tale has its grounds and can be explained. The object of mythology is not the world and its things, but that which a person thinks about the world, about things, and about himself' (Greimas, 1990: 29). On the one hand we might surmise that those specializing in the singing of sutartines were witches, sorcerecces or oracles according to the conception of that day. On the other hand, these women might have been labeled witches as the sutartine tradition was beginning to wane (as keepers of the old traditional hymns, which were now incomprehensible to others; the experts on mysterious matters). Folklorist Brone Kerbelyte holds a similar view of witchery. “First there came a change in the conception of magic. It diminished in the everyday lives of most people and more conservative people were made fun of or they were considered dangerous witches and warlocks” (Kerbelyte, 1999: 246). However, as time went on, sutartines lost their connection to ritual. We can note changes in both the worldview and the aesthetics as regards sutartines (Raciunaite- Vyciniene, 2002; 2005; 2010; 2012a, etc).
In the middle of the 20th Century, the natural transmission of sutartines from one generation to the next has ceased for all practical purposes in the rural areas of Lithuania. Before the group performance tradition finally died in the rural areas, the sutartines were widely misunderstood by the beginning of the 20th century; its practitioners were viewed negatively and were mocked. At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a marked change in musical aesthetics - a general tendency towards romanticism, the rapid spread of so-called literary songs and ballads known as “romances,' folk song arrangements for chorus, polished vocal performances - the antithesis of the open-throat, chesty manner of singing. All of this altered the common folks' perception of sutartines. The singing of these archaic songs provided less and less aesthetic satisfaction, and the sutartines themselves were mocked. Elzbieta Janaviciene, born in 1841 stated, “When they would make fun of us, saying that that we cackle like hens, then we would sing them in one voice” (in other words - not poly- phonically). Another singer of sutartines, Elzbieta Bratenaite, born in 1852 sang a sutartine parody for Stasys Paliulis, an expert on sutartines. According to the informant, this parody of cackling hens was sung by young men who would make fun of the female singers (Paliulis, 1959, 413):
Cia tavo Cia mano,
Sudesim abiejц,
Bus tik musц dviejy.1
It would be difficult to trace the origins of the sutartine “ViStela karke” (SlS 621), which contains a refrain imitating the “language” of hens: kudi kudi, kudi-ka-ka (instead of traditional vocables such as tatato, lingo rita, which are found in other versions of this sutartine):
Vistela karke,
Zirnelius tarpe.
Kudi, kudi, kudi kaka,
Kudi, kudi, kudi kaka...
The hen crackled, taking care of the peas,
Kudi, kudi, kudi kaka,
Kudi, kudi, kudi kaka...
Is this the work of those who were not fans of sutartines? A parody of the singing style? Or was this a case of autoirony in which the singers themselves made fun of the strange cackling that their singing emitted? 2
We see a similar transformation of a traditional vocable into a hen imitation in another case, further demonstrating the derisive attitude towards the singing of sutartines. Singer M. Juknys (from the region of Utena) recalled how the “old women would cackle as they harvested rye. One old woman or girl would repeat only one phrase: Who sowed the rue? The other would answer: Sister sowed the rue. The third one would say: Ku de ka ka ka!” (2 times.) <...>. Sometime a fourth one would join in but with no words, just a drone: U-u-u-u-u... That kind of singing would make us laugh a lot. Then we would say `The old women have started to cackle like hens'” (LTR 1948(195)). Therefore, in the beginning of the twentieth century the comparison of sutartines to the cackling of hens is no longer a melodic or articulation characteristic, but a reflection of the attitudes of listeners, who considered this type of singing to be unattractive, incomprehensible, a chaotic clamour. 1
So many folklorists of the first half of the twentieth century spoke of the complete disappearance of sutartines. However, in the 1960s they were being performed in the larger cities of Lithuania, attaining a different and new meaning (RaCiunaite-Vycimene, 2012b).
Today sutartines are as exotic to young people as the musics of other cultures. They have numerous characteristics that are atypical of the remaining repertoire of Lithuanian folklore - bitonality, bitextual- ism (when meaningful texts as well as vocables are simultaneously performed), the dominance of the interval of a second, complementary rhythm, syllabic articulation, and a rich vocabulary of vocables Sutartines texts contain an abundant number of archaic refrains: linago, taduvo, ciuto ruto, tatato, siuli siulingela, siudijo, duno, rititatatoj, minagaucio, dautuvo, ritingo, tuto be tuto, judabro and others; the meanings of these words, these days, are indecipherable. These refrains, devoid of any semantic meaning, generally consist of interjected onomatopoeic sounds that are especially important to the rhythm of the sutartines. [Fig. 1].
Figure 1 Kas tave, sesiule. Wedding sutartinй sung by Ona Smilgiene, age 74, Papilys district, Birzai region (Slaviыnas 1958 II, 408, nr. 842)
Yet this exotic and barely understood vocal form is the place where they go to find spirituality. How can this be explained? Is this the trend of the day? What draws young people to sutartines? When I perform in other European countries with my group of sutartines singers Trys Keturiose I see that they leave an impression on non-Lithuanians as well. One possible premise is that this corresponds with the general tendency in the West to search for spirituality in the East (Deschenes, 2005; Keister, 2005; Genzelis, 2005; Beinorius, 2011, and others).
As is widely known, the Western world turned towards the East in the 19th and 20th centuries, when Europe became spiritually vulnerable. For several centuries a stereotyped distinction has endured, stating that the West is dominated by the active, rational, material side of the human psyche, while the East represents its passive, contemplative, spiritual side. It is still generally thought that the source of true values may be solely found in the East, which is defined by its oral culture and belief in the magical power of words.
As maintained by French philosopher Renй Guйnon (1886-1951), some common features have been preserved in the Eastern civilizations, which might be subsumed under the term `traditional civilization' and which have been lost in the Western civilization. There was no reason for opposition between East and West as long as there were traditional civilizations in the West as well as in the East. This opposition, in the philosopher's opinion, has meaning only as far as the modern West is concerned, for “it is far more an opposition between two mentalities than between two more or less clearly defined geographical entities.” The lost tradition, according to Guйnon, “can be restored and brought to life again only by contact with the living traditional spirit, and, as we have already said, it is only in the East that this spirit is still fully alive” (Guйnon 2002).
However, the real cultural and geopolitical East, as pointed out by literary scholar Regimantas Tamosai- tis, displays such great diversity that may not necessarily correspond to the stereotyped vision of the East. The latter appears to be merely a figure of speech, an ideological construct of language. Then the East may be regarded as a transcendental ideal, wealth of spiritual life that lies beyond the bounds of our world (Tamosai- tis, 2012, 8-9). Carl Gustav Jung was of similar opinion, claiming that it is not a geographical category but rather a spiritual or psychological idea, a repressed and frustrated part of our consciousness [Jung 1970]. Therefore the Eastern world is not only located in a different realm, but is also essentially different in terms of quality and time, which might be described as archetypal, mythical. Such vision of the Orient was adopted by the romantics, which became successfully revived in the context of 21st-century non-traditional cults and cultures.
Speaking of the Lithuanian culture in particular and its ties with the East, one may conclude that these ties are not entirely superficial or influenced by the general tendency to look for spiritual values in the East, which is prevalent in the West. Many Lithuanian cul- turologists point to the fact that the issues of interaction between Eastern and Western mentalities have never lost their significance in the context of Lithuanian culture. It is generally accepted that the ancestors of Lithuanian nation moved to Europe from Asia and for this particular reason the archetypal forms of Lithuanian traditional culture preserved many bonds with the eastern world (Andrijauskas, 1991, 255). For example, Lithuanian philosopher Stasys Salkauskis (1886-1941) argued in the beginning of the 20th century that Lithuania cannot restrict its relations to maintaining contacts only with the Western culture, simply because Lithuanian people have `Eastern blood' in their origins (Salkauskis, 1991, 153-154). Comparative culturology has shown that there are many vestiges of eastern origin in the constituent elements of Lithuanian culture, such as language, folklore, mythology and indigenous religion - in other words, everything that had shaped a distinct type of Lithuanian ethnicity. The large portion of the linguistic substrate of Lithuanians as a nation has the Indo-European foundation, which holds something that we now refer to as the eastern spirit and whose semantic content remains extant mostly in the language that is akin to the Indo-European protolanguage (Neimantas, 2002). It has been argued that Lithuanian and its dialects have an important role in the investigation of the prehistory of Indo-European languages and reconstruction of their protolanguages. Modern Lithuanian presents a peculiar phenomenon for comparative linguistics. It is related to Sanskrit (a classical language of India), Latin and Ancient Greek (Schmalstieg, 1982; Markeviciene, 2002; Baldi and Dini, 2004, and others). According to the Zaneta's Markeviciene's research, Hindi has unbelievably numerous loan words from Sanskrit, therefore, numerous common items among Sanscrit, Lithuanian and Hindi exist presently, e.g., Lith. smakras - Hind., Skr. smasru `chin'; Lith. medus - Hind. madhu - Skr. madhu `honey', etc. Another portion of the common lexicon embraces native Hindi words. It includes common items absent in Sanscrit, e.g. Lith, kulsis - Hind. kulha `hip'; Lith. kupra - Hind. kubar `hump'; Lith. begti `to run' - Hind. bhana `to run away'; Lith. kukurbezdalis, kukurdvelkis `puffball' - Hind. kukurmutta `musshroom', etc. (Markeviciene, 2002, 113).
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