Music History

Focusing on the region of the Baltic countries and other neighbouring countries in Central and Eastern Europe, this collection continues the discussion concerning the sociocultural crossings and borders within the musical practices and discourses from early modernity up to the present day. The publication comprises of texts that have been prepared on the basis of reports delivered at the international conference “Sociocultural crossings and borders: musical microhistories.” (Vilnius, 2013) They represent the cultural diversity of European musicological traditions, the interdisciplinary character of present-day musicology, as well as the methodologies and theories within musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory.

Monografijoje nagrinėjamas Lietuvos kompozitorių įsitraukimas į Europos
modernios muzikos sąjūdžius ir dalyvavimas Tarptautinės šiuolaikinės
muzikos draugijoje. TŠMD Lietuvos sekcijos ankstyvoji veikla (1936–1939), jos
priešistorė ir recepcija Šaltojo karo metais tiriama tarptautinių muzikinio
modernėjimo procesų ir sociokultūrinių lūžių aplinkoje atskleidžiant politinių,
kultūrinių, tautinių ir muzikinių tapatybių sąveiką ir prieštaras. Kauno ir Vilniaus
naujosios muzikos scenų formavimasis siejamas su nacionaliniais veiksniais
(moderni kultūrinė savikūra, kartų kaita) ir tarptautiniais postūmiais
(kova už modernios muzikos institucionalizavimą, intensyvėjantis tarptautinis
muzikų bendradarbiavimas kaip politinių ir kultūrinių priešpriešų įveika).

English summary of the book "Modernumo lygtys. Tarptautinė šiuolaikinės muzikos draugija ir muzikinio modernizmo sklaida Lietuvoje" (VDA, 2015). The subject of the present book is the activity of the Lithuanian Section of the ISCM, its pre-history (1936–1939) and reception, as well as the history of the Vilnius Chapter of the Polish Section of the ISCM (later renamed the Polish Society for Contemporary Music) which is seen as integral part of the modernisation of Lithuanian and international musical culture. With the aim of including the modern music movements in Kaunas and Vilnius in the international context, this book presents a critical review of ISCM strategies and a history of festivals in the interwar and early Cold War periods. In the said context not only the artistic, but also the political contexts of the Society activity are important. The Lithuanian Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music which functioned for only a short 4-year period (1936–1939) can be attributed to typical organisations of small countries stimulated by an international movement of modern music. For decades, the fact of Lithuanian composers’ participation in the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) in the period from 1936 to 1939 kept providing an influential story that consolidated the self-awareness of the involvement of modern Lithuanian music in the European music modernisation processes.  As early as 1940, Soviet occupation terminated the activities of the said organisation, as well as of numerous other artistic and cultural societies of independent Lithuania. After WW2, active members of the chapter, such as the composers Jeronimas Kačinskas, Vytautas Bacevičius, Vladas Jakubėnas, and others ended in emigration to the USA.

Straipsnyje gvildenama tautinių tapatybių muzikinėje kultūroje problematika. Tapatybės raiškai muzikoje nusakyti pasitelkiamos kultūros studijų ir kritinės muzikologijos išplėtotos apibrėžtys. Suprobleminama šiuose darbuose išdėstyta tautinės tapatybės samprata, pagal kurią ji apibūdinama kaip kultūrinės strategijos siekiant propaguoti lokaliai kuriamą muziką, susijusią su specifiniais žanrais ir tautinėmis muzikos ypatybėmis. Atramos pozicija išplėtojama, nagrinėjant įvairuojančias modernumo ir tautiškumo sankirtas populiariose XX a. dainose apie Vilnių – Aleksandro Olšanecskio „Vilne“ (1935) ir Miko Vaitkevičiaus „Vilniaus stogai“ (1966). Aptariant Vilniaus kultūrinį tekstą reprezentuojančias dainas, siekiama atskleisti tautinės tapatybės konstravimui pasitelkiamus kultūrinius išteklius, išryškinama sociokultūrinių ir muzikinių kodų sąveika. Sociokultūrinių atminties ir užmaršties strategijų kontekste apžvelgiami kai kurie dainų interpretacijos istorijos bruožai.

Straipsnyje gvildenami XX–XXI a. muzikos semantinio universumo tyrimo klausimai. Semantinei šiuolaikinės muzikos analizei pasitelkiama muzikos semiotiko Raymond'o Monelle'io išplėtota muzikinių topoi teorija. Plėtojant muzikos diskurso semantinių-stilistinių vienetų (topos) tyrimą, nagrinėjamos pastoralės parafrazės šiuolaikinėje lietuvių muzikoje. Straipsnyje siekiama atskleisti platų kultūrinių tropų lauką, pa-sitelkiamą perkuriant praeities muzikos semantines figūracijas. Gilinantis į pastoralės topos sklaidą daugiausia dėmesio skiriama reflektyvios nostalgijos raiškai lietuvių kompozitorių kūriniuose.

This article focuses on the specific features of ideological control and censorship in Lithuania’s musical culture of the late Soviet period. There is a prevalent view in post-Soviet cultural studies that after 1960 the influence of political authorities on the Soviet Lithuanian musical culture was insignificant and ideological restrictions were of little consequence. Such attitude is supported by the musicians who opposed the official Soviet cultural doctrine, while the documentation of repressive authorities that is accessible to researchers contains few documents associated with the sphere of music. Within this context, the wave of ideological tensions and music censorship phenomena that arose in Soviet Lithuania in the 1980s (prior to Perestroika) shall be regarded as a sociocultural dissonance that requires further exhaustive analysis. The author discusses current theoretical approaches to relationships between music and politics through analysis of four cases that illustrate ideological and administrative regulations of the time: the denunciation of music critics organised by the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party (1980); the ideological critique of Feliksas Bajoras’s opera Dievo avinėlis (The Lamb of God, 1981–1982) during an official audition and the ensuing ban on its production (1983);the disapproval expressed at the party meeting of the Lithuanian Composers’ Union concerning the promotion of modern mainstream composers in the media (1984); and public condemnation of four young Lithuanian composers for being interviewed by a Polish magazine, which took place at the Rector’s Office of the Lithuanian State Conservatory (1984).
Published in: Sociocultural Crossings and Borders: Musical Microhistories. Eds. Rima Povilionienė, Rūta Stanevičiūtė-Kelmickienė. Vilnius: VDA, 2015, pp. 231–250.

Musicology Today. The Journal of University of Warsaw. Volume 14, Issue 1 (Dec. 2017), pp. 76-90.
This article aims to offer a broader understanding of the Lithuanian reception of the Warsaw Autumn festival in relation to the modernisation of national music in Lithuania since late 1950s–early 1960s. Based on a micro-historical and comparative approach to the network of individuals and events, it is intended to explore the shifts of reception through analysis of musical criticism, composers’ work and discourse, and artistic exchange between Lithuanian and Polis new music scenes. The author discusses the cultural and political factors which affected the changing role of the Warsaw Autumn festival and its impact on the modernisation processes in Lithuanian music. In addition, the asymmetries of mutual understanding and interests between Polish and Lithuanian musical cultures have been highlighted both during the Cold War and the post-communist transformation periods.

This article aims to give a broader understanding of Lithuanian music’s contribution into the formation and transformation of historical and cultural images of and narratives about European identities after the end of the Cold War. Based on a new post-historical approach to the description of history and culture ‘in many different voices’, it is intended to explore post-communist musical imagination in Lithuania and its international reception through analysis of assembled case studies and musical criticism. In addition, it is aimed to discuss how individual artistic expressions of belonging to or exclusion from the European past and present were included or rejected into artistic discourses and cultural exchange on both sides of the ‘Velvet Curtain’, a metaphor for the post-communist state, that is, an invisible yet palpable divide, which separated “Old Europe” and “New “Europe” in the period of eastern enlargement of the European Union at the turn of the 21st century.

The article focuses on two war compositions written in two geocultural spaces representing ideological confrontations, viz. Sinfonia della Guerra (1940) by Vytautas Bacevičius, composed in Buenos Aires, and the oratorio Don't Touch the Blue Globe (1969) by Eduardas Balsys, composed in Lithuania. The two compositions that appeared under very different socio-political circumstances differ not merely in the changes of the conception of musical modernism and its practice, but also by their position with respect to the history of WW2 and its later reception (e.g. the time of composing of those works and the cultural experience and memories of the war). After a discussion of the musical stylistics and the sociopolitical subtexts of the compositions of Bacevičius and Balsys, the article highlighted the controversies in the national and international reception of the two compositions in the period of the Cold War and after 1990. Selective analysis of Lithuanian war compositions proves that the processes in question are affected by a broader range of intramusical and extramusical factors.

In the Lithuanian music of the 20th century, one can clearly notice a caesura drawn by sociopolitical events which split the national culture in two parts both in terms of time and space. In the 40s, most of the pre-war modernist composers appeared in exile. Graduates of the Paris, Berlin, and Prague Schools and founders of the ISCM Lithuanian Section who mainly settled down in the USA tried to adapt to the different musical and sociocultural reality which strongly affected the change in their creative orientations. Due to the broken relations with European centres of modern music, the conservative cultural environment of Lithuanian emigrants and subsequent unsuccessful attempts to participate in the influential American music scene resulted in cultural isolation that significantly influenced the post-war music development, among others, that of composer and pianist Vytautas Bacevičius (1905–1970), the most prominent figure in Lithuanian emigration. An offspring of a mixed Lithuanian-Polish family and a representative of the Paris School moved to New York in 1940 and lived there as a refugee almost till the end of his life (he was granted citizenship as late as in 1967). Like many other European emigrant composers, being brought up in the cult of elitist art, he perceived egalitarianism of the American art as a personal menace. Since late 1950s, Bacevičius abandoned the strategies to adapt to American cultural environment and turned towards a unique conception of cosmic music, thus rethinking his early experiences of atonal music during the era of second avant-garde inspirations. The opus magnum of his late creative period – Graphique for symphony orchestra (1964) – is an emblematic composition devised as the first opus of the never-completed  series of nine symphonic compositions entitled Sahasrara Chakra. The article focuses on the discovery of the conceptual and sonic analogies of the late cosmic music developed by Bacevičius in the pursuits of the 20th-century musica mundana, obviously associated with Olivier Messiaen and Edgard Varèse, the figures venerated by the Lithuanian composer. In addition, Bacevičius’ late cosmic music is discussed as a cultural strategy of escapism symptomatic of European emigrant composers of the same generation settled in USA.