Culture bearers, culture brokers: Ratilio and folk music in post-Soviet Lithuania

ENIn the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union, former republics now face the delicate task of creating themselves anew as independent, sovereign nations. Apart from transforming basic social, economic and governmental infrastructures, there are also concentrated attempts to fashion a collective sense of national identity, using history, literature and the arts as a means of identifying a common, shared culture. In the Baltic republic of Lithuania, traditional folk music has a long precedent of serving as an indispensable tool in the formation of national culture. Historically and currently, such use of this music is imposed from the top down, coming out of the activities of the intelligentsia who co-opt the music of das Volk in order to transform it for national, rather than individual, use. The music, thus transformed, comes to represent something larger than itself: an idealized national metaphor in sound. The dissertation looks at the role of folk music as a means of establishing national identity in post-Soviet Lithuania, focussing on the process by which songs become symbols. It is based on a recently completed field work conducted with Ratilio, the Vilnius University folk ensemble, which makes annual trips into the countryside in order to gather material so that they might later perform the rural repertoire in an urban environment, in contexts quite unlike those of the original. Centering on the process of collecting, rehearsing and recording, the dissertation traces the journey from countryside to collector to concert stage, examining the various ways in which the requirements of performance alter the primary tradition, creating a new urban repertory that serves to both consolidate and perpetuate a sense of Lithuanian identity.