Sound instrumentation in Lithuanian multipart music practice: the relationship between the individual and the collective in music-making processes
ENLithuanian sutartinės reflect a complex system of polyphonic music. Its syncretism is testified to by intertwined practices of singing, instrumental music making and dancing. This archaic polyphonic music is undoubtedly related to the ancient world’s outlook and emotional attitude. In itself it can be considered as soundation – a sound world of the ethnic human being of a certain time period – “a world listening” – a relation of human sound with the environment (world audition, cosmoaudición – the terms introduced by Abraham D. Caceres) as a part of the fundamental cultural texts. The polyphony of sutartinės, as a sound expression of archaic culture, is based on a cyclical conception of time. The music reflects the principles of horizontal voice organization (following, imitation) and their vertical coordination. In sutartinės one can see very distinct manifestations of a dualistic world outlook. The dualism manifests itself at various levels : the level of form, of poetic text, of mode, etc. So it is not a coincidence that terms such as bitonality, polytonality, polymodality, diaphony, bitextuality, polytextuality, complementarity, inversion, mirror symmetry and others are used for the characterization of the polyphony of sutartinės. An important and meaningful term in this context is binarika (binarus means “double” in Latin), meaning “twofold, binomial, made of two parts, with these parts (members) being compared, confronted, contrasted”, which was proposed at the beginning of the 20th century by the composer Rimantas Jeneliauskas.The polarity of binary functions in sutartinės music is in line with complementarity and the inversion of sound structures. It is of great importance that sutartinės are performed on the basis of relations that are opposite, such as individual/group, subject/object, as well as the fact that the sutartinė is an expression of principled incompleteness, continual formation and processuality. So the duality of subject and object disappears in the boundless space of polyphony, as cultural text. Both elements intertwine with each other. And the individual singer, as a creator of signs and symbols, appears to have melted into the all-embracing textual space.
