Lithuanian collections of traditional music in the nineteenth century
ENThe aim of this research was to show Oskar Kolberg's significant impact on the development of Lithuanian musical folkloristics. Lithuanian traditional music was of profound interest to Kolberg throughout his life. Starting with his collaboration with Lithuanian helpers (collectors, translators, language consultants) in preparing his first collection of Lithuanian songs (1847), through the fieldwork expedition to Lithuania (1860), the preparation of Pieśni ludu litewskiego [Lithuanian folk songs] (1879) and the long-term collecting of Lithuanian ethnographic materials and work on the Lithuanian volume in the series Lud [The common folk] (Dzieła Wszystkie [Complete works], vol. 53, 1966), to his editorial work on the materials collected by Antanas Juska, he significantly contributed to the collecting and publishing of Lithuanian musical folklore, alongside Juska and Christian Bartsch, the most significant collectors of the mid nineteenth century. Bartsch and Juska both had direct and indirect relations with Kolberg: Bartsch republished Kolberg's Lithuanian collection in his comprehensive volume of Lithuanian tunes Dainu Balsai, and Kolberg's last unfinished work was editing Juska's collection Melodje ludowe litewskie [Lithuanian folk tunes] (1900).The two collectors complemented each other, living in different locations: Bartsch in Prussian Lithuania (now Kaliningrad oblast), Juska in various districts of Lithuania. Both of them tried to represent the local musical traditions, including through ethnographic materials. Juska was closer to Kolberg in his holistic understanding of music as an inseparable part of traditional customs and in the scope of the materials he collected (7000 song texts and 2000 melodies). Their ideologies of collecting differed somewhat: For Juska, it was a kind of cultural resistance; for Bartsch, it was scholarly interest and a concern to safeguard disappearing cultural heritage.
