20th-century music evolved through contradictions and oppositions. It oscillated between the avant-garde, which sought to radically break away from the past, and modernism, which attempted to preserve the continuity of certain traditions. It was concerned alternately with the historical subordination of sound and the abstraction of the inquiry into the latter’s internal qualities. At times it pursued an absolute structural integrity of the sonic material, and occasionally rejected any integrity whatsoever.
The post-WWII rethinking of the entire phenomenon of music was not so much an analytical as it was a conceptual, perhaps even strategic endeavour. New Western European forms of creative collaboration had to serve postwar reconciliation, and thus called for a new musical language not rooted in any national traditions. For composers in the occupied Lithuania, however, the postwar context meant completely different challenges. They became concerned with issues related to tradition, society, and politics: retaining the foundations of the national tradition, the role of an artist in a changed social system, and the possible forms of creative work in a situation of political oppression. Hence continuation of the pre-war aesthetic was impossible in Western Europe and in Lithuania alike, but for entirely different reasons. We needed to foster a memory of the past in the framework of an ideological system, and defend the present from falsification, i. e. from an imposed, compulsory, banal, and degraded musical language.
I. Individual Style and Collective Belonging
In the postwar years[1], Lithuanian composers tried out almost all of the 20th century Western musical styles available to them. They did so in quite basic, timid forms that did not require specific means (such as those used in electronic music or musique concrète). Rather than being a theoretical inquiry reflective of aesthetic choice, this was a practical reconnaissance of the compositional field.
If we put aside the minimal manifestations of dodecaphony, sonorism, and aleatoricism, perhaps inspired by mere curiosity or brief fascination and too often misused, i. e. employed formally as unrelated inserts in contexts foreign to them, we could inquire what the major criteria for identifying with a particular musical trend were for these composers. Since natural aspirations for composing modern music appropriate for its epoch were forbidden, the stylistic field of postwar Lithuanian music should be assessed only through the prism of bigger or smaller resistance to the prohibition. Nevertheless, certain forms of authentic musical thinking managed to emerge even in this distorted historical context, using borrowed musical tools.
The neoromanticist trend proliferated in Lithuania most probably due to a desire for political neutrality, expressionism due to the influence of the compositional style of Russian composers at the time, and hybrids of neoclassicism and neoromanticism due to a striving to go back to a kind of non-coflicting thinking that would have more affinity with the Lithuanian mentality than neoexpressionism. Only the 70s’ minimalism could be treated as a real autonomous determination to return to the origins of the national culture – repetitive and minimalistic folk music. In a situation of uncertainty, where individual musical inclinations, collective ideas of tradition, aspirations of belonging to the present age, and political interests all intertwined, minimalism emerged as the trend that triggered the least internal and external conflicts.
In the political situation of that time, the preservation of the national identity was obviously more important than a desire to establish a firm foothold in a particular contemporary aesthetic. Musical forms of such identity preservation should be considered (metaphorically, needless to say) the dominant stream in Lithuanian music of the Soviet occupation period. Harmonizations of folk songs using forms ranging from the classical harmonic and the more authentic modal to the pointedly piercing, dissonant, and atonal ones, not to mention abundant straightforward citations of folk melodies in academic scores, would make up a separate distinctive category of Lithuanian music. Thus, for Lithuanian music as a whole the postwar period was a time of explorations and conformations, at times rather conforming explorations, perhaps. For instance, Algirdas Ambrazas noted that “Montvila and Bražinskas [...] drifted away from modernist aspirations [...]. Montvila unexpectedly switched to lucid, consonant music [...]. The turning point in A. Bražinskas’ work was even more abrupt and radical [...]. He began composing pieces for unsophisticated listeners and did not shun commissions for all kinds of mass events [...].”[2]
The balance between permanence and novelty was the vital axis around which all of 20th-century Lithuanian music revolved. The composer Juozas Gruodis, who unfortunately succumbed to the early postwar repressions both spiritually and physically, had been searching for the most ideal forms of this balance back in the interwar years. It thus seems natural that his student Julius Juzeliūnas emerged in Lithuanian music as a successor of his Teacher’s concern for embodying the national origins in contemporary musical language, rather than of his actual compositional approach.
II. Theory and Practice
If we follow the Western practice, the key 20th century ideas were formulated theoretically. This not only facilitated a better understanding of certain emerging phenomena, but also made it possible to determine their meaning and importance in the general context of the search for new musical expression. Almost all of the major Western European composers who shaped the contemporary musical language, such as Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and Helmut Lachenmann, wrote theoretical or essayistic texts which substantiated their musical ideas, explicated the subtleties of their compositional techniques, or systematised certain broader trends of musical practice. For them, creative work was inseparable from a critical, analytical perspective, which in a sense is a companion and warrant of authentic thinking.
To some extent, we could justify the fact that Lithuanian composers’ postwar stylistic forays were generally unaccompanied by any substantial verbal grounding by the totalitarian regime’s pervasive censorship, which discouraged public expression of one’s thoughts. Hence we should treat these composers’ stylistic explorations not as manifestations of authentic musical thinking and musical acts commanded by individual artistic convictions or inner intentions, but rather as an empirical ambition to inscribe themselves in the Western context, a desire to touch the most progressive musical streams of the time, and fear of appearing infantile and retrograde, which the entire political environment was pushing them towards.
Juzeliūnas was the first in postwar Lithuania to not only theoretically reflect on his personal musical practice, but also propose a groundwork for a collective musical language – a broader musical tendency he imagined, applicable even to other nations’ music: “There is a lot of talk about present-day and future music, a lot of experimentation, but absolutely universal and consistent guidelines have not been found still”[3]; “unfortunally, theoretical articulation of how the specific national traits should be conveyed is still in short supply.”[4] Juzeliūnas criticised composers whose theoretical concepts were “created primarily for their own creative purposes rather than for broad and universal use”[5] (such as Hindemith, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Messiaen). He also lamented the “shortage of works that provide theoretical grounding for the folk origins of professional music.”[6] Perhaps this was the reason why he took it upon himself to fill this gap and create a theory based on universal principles, innocuous to the distinctive sonic nature of his native culture as well as any other culture concerned with its own survival. The composer strove to employ the language of modern music to preserve and foster the sense of collective belonging and ethnic communion, to find affinity while retaining the differences. Therefore his treatise On the Structure of the Chord, defended as a doctoral thesis, is the first real attempt at a practice-based theoretical inquiry into the possible forms of compositional thinking that would organically wed contemporary sensibility with the folk tradition.
III. Sutartinės and Dodecaphony Combined
Like his Western precursors, Juzeliūnas used the principle of combination. He conceived a new constructive principle by combining preexisting things. Just as Anton Webern had joined the horizontal with the vertical, proposing a “synthesis of all the preceding musical techniques”[7], Juzeliūnas combined the tonal system with the modal one on the grounds that “classical harmonic norms contravene specific manifestations of national culture.”[8]
The dodecaphonic legacy was undoubtedly important to Juzeliūnas. His entire theory seems to have been constructed in relation to the twelve-tone system, approving some of its structural laws and rejecting others. The composer found acceptable the possibility to freely manipulate the existing sonic models its provided; he likewise appreciated the idea of the twelve sounds’ autonomy, equal treatment of the melodic horizontal and the harmonic vertical, and “some of dodecaphony’s technological aspects, such as the methods of polyphonic rendering of the thematic material,” which “are widely used by contemporary composers and could well be useful in our work as well.”[9]
Juzeliūnas’ concept of dissonance, too, displays close affinity with the ideas of dodecaphony’s pioneers. One may recall that Webern’s stylistic point of departure was the proliferation of dissonance, which he perceived merely as consonance that had drifted further away from the natural triad: “One day it became possible to discard any connection with the tonic, as nothing remained that was consonant”; „Now you will understand how the style arose. Not only from the fact that we’ve lost tonality, but in a quite matter-of-fact way, from the point of view of unity“; „We wanted to achieve unity, a coherence of the elements, and it is evident that there can be no greater coherence than that ensured by all of the parts of the work, from the beginning to the end, expressing the same single Idea”[10] (series – author’s note). Similarly, Juzeliūnas argued that “the structure of the natural scale features no objective limit that would divide the intervals derived from the overtones into two qualitatively different categories.”[11] However, he found it unacceptable that the dodecaphonic system “essentially rejects tonality and tonic centres. Such a theoretical platform is foreign to the nature of Lithuanian as well as perhaps any other nation’s folk music.”[12]
The abolition of the tonic supports was a major aim for dodecaphony, which combined the polyphony originating in the church modes with homophony, while Juzeliūnas’ model, a cross-linking of the constructive elements of ancient Lithuanian monody, polyphony of the multi-part sutartinės songs, and dodecaphony, retained the principal importance of the tonic gravitation. It might even be the central element of this theory: the composer doubled it by using the structural principle of the sutartinės – “the melodic cells of the individual voices in sutartinės develop in different diatonic scales,”[13] hence “sutartinės are based on unified dualism, and contain no transition to a single tonal centre.”[14] As “the structures of the vocal sutartinės melodies constitute complexes of supporting tones, and each sutartinė has two such complexes”, the composer concluded: “both supporting tone complexes interact to produce a bitonic (twin tonic) phenomenon. Thus, with regard to the relationships of the vocal sutartinės’ melodic lines they should be properly called bitonic, rather than polytonal or polyharmonic.”[15] This binary construct discovered by the composer, the bitonic principle, became the pivot of his entire theory. He perceived it as shaping the structure, logic, and dynamic of the sonic material. Juzeliūnas treated the supporting tone complexes as independent structural “moduses” which “help organize the tonic centres and retain close ties with modal thinking.” They provide the base for the whole thematic material: “the order of the moduses’ shifts, used according to the principle of non-repetition, becomes the driving force of the harmonic sequence. This moment is functionally crucial, as it enables the formation of a large-scale musical canvas.”[16]
As we can see, Webern pursued coherence of the musical material by obliterating the tonic gravitation, while Juzeliūnas sought the same by doubling the latter. This doubling had a twofold meaning – it both reinforced and, in a sense, eliminated – that is, dismantled – the tonic hegemony. The vertical multiplication of the gravitation/support points became for Juzeliūnas not simply a compositional pattern, but a precondition for ensuring the unity of the material in its entirety: the supporting tone structures characteristic of the archaic Lithuanian modal melody enabled the composer to “incorporate all twelve degrees of the musical system in the diatonic scale,” “transform the supporting tone structures into tonic centres,” and “make the interaction of the structures functional.”[17]
In the modal Lithuanian music and polyphonic sutartinės, essentially examples of sonic models polished through centuries to achieve maximum refinement, Juzeliūnas found a mechanism for the articulation of his own musical ideas, and simultaneously a platform for the development of contemporary musical language. “Polyphonic” doubling of the tonal supports allowed him to construct the “acoustic intensity logic”[18] of the sonic material, and hence create complex timbral spaces.
Juzeliūnas’ compositional ideas undoubtedly had more affinity with his forerunner Webern, rather than his contemporary Pierre Boulez, who had by then completed his fundamental study of serialism, Boulez on Music Today[19]. Boulez was an architect who thoroughly considered all the details of his musical language, while Juzeliūnas approached it in cultural and ethnic terms, searching for the origins of his musical sensibility and seeking continuation of his native cultural tradition. Webern had pondered basic, elementary figures of a new musical language, while Boulez proposed a complete and practically hermetic system. The latter calculated the whole building and its details like an architect, while Webern had only projected its genesis and the construction materials. In this regard, Juzeliūnas was obviously a follower of Webern, as he was likewise more concerned with offering the tools and conditions that would leave enough space for further individual transformations of the musical material and would create a sufficiently solid environment for creative work based on logic rather than intuition. The difference was that while Webern had sought universal comprehensibility of his musical language, Juzeliūnas pursued national and inter-national universality.
It is symptomatic that the postwar Lithuanian attempts at serial music were also much closer to the technique and style of the pioneers of dodecaphony than to the perfected and complex system of their contemporaries. In this context it is also logical that the idea of dodecatonics proposed and implemented (albeit published as a separate theoretical treatise as late as in 1997) by Osvaldas Balakauskas was essentially a compositional technique that had branched off from Webern’s ideas.
It is possible that the radical approach of serialism was foreign to the Lithuanian nature, attuned to the pursuit of the golden mean, balance, and harmony of the opposites. Even the expressionism and dissonance of the Schoenbergian dodecaphony were alien to Lithuanian composers. Juzeliūnas tamed both streams. However, he also continued structural emancipation and articulation of the chord structure, “which would secure the functional logic of the harmony and modal gravitation,”[20] sought “the patterns and a constructive atmosphere embedded in folklore,”[21] and created a new compositional dialectic of sonic complexes, with timbre – the key parameter of modernization of 20th-century music – as its focal point.
Still, one might ask: why did Juzeliūnas strive to preserve the tonal supports in the heyday of total serialism as well as stochastic and aleatoric music? Perhaps not merely because he was trying to blindly adapt the model of the sutartinės, or feared the Soviet-construed spectre of “formalism” which still haunted art in his time, albeit to a lesser extent. The composer seemingly anticipated that, from the acoustic perspective, radical rejection of the supports would ultimately fail the test of time. As we now know, 20th-century postmodernists and adepts of new tonality had a similar suspicion.
IV. Music and Linguistics. Juzeliūnas and Greimas
The tradition of the collaboration between music and linguistics was begun in the 20th century by the already mentioned Anton Webern, who was profoundly influenced by the works of Karl Kraus. The composer began his series of 16 lectures given in 1932–33 and published as The Path to the New Music with a reference to the German linguist’s essay on language, claiming that “[e]verything in it can be taken literally as applying to music.”[22] Webern found echoes of his own musical ideas in Kraus’ works, which emphasised the importance of understanding the material one uses constantly throughout one’s life, the human duty to serve language, and the necessity to not only learn to speak, but also come close to a grasp of the word-shape[23]: “[a]ll art, and therefore music too, is based on rules of order”[24]; “When one gets an inkling of the laws, then one’s bound to find one’s relationship to such minds entirely changed!”[25]
In the postwar period, references to works by structuralist linguistics and anthropology theorists, particularly in the field of phonology, began to pop up in texts by Boulez, Stockhausen, and Berio. What these works had in common was a view of the technical dimension as autonomous and separate from the aesthetic frame in which it manifested itself.
The Paris-based Lithuanian semiotician Algirdas Julius Greimas, with whom Juzeliūnas was in correspondence and whom he met after a prolonged break in 1970, was studying the processes of the emergence and grasp of meaning at the time.[26] It is difficult to say how much Greimas could have influenced Juzeliūnas’ theory (and maybe even vice versa!) – the surviving correspondence is meager, most likely due to the discretion elicited by the Cold War situation on both sides of the Iron Wall. Yet it is perhaps more important that there were no walls to preclude a conceptual approach to the used and reflected material in any sphere. Certain ideas spread simply as signs of their epoch. Thus, when Juzeliūnas was trying to discover the internal logic of Lithuanian sonic mentality, its unifying principle, and universal traits that would allow its application to other nations seeking to retain their particularity, Greimas was studying mythological narratives in an attempt to find a universal model of meaning and its functioning in the human world, which could be applied in different spheres of human activity. Incidentally, Juzeliūnas presented Greimas with a collection of the Folklore Studies journal issues he had bought back in the interwar period. The composer’s account of this episode reveals that “Greimas was immensely pleased by this gift. When he came to Vilnius a few years later, he told me these Lithuanian folklore compendiums gave his research a new direction. After an in-depth scrutiny of all those volumes, he began relating semiotic problems to Lithuanian sources.”[27]
Both Greimas and Juzeliūnas employed a deductive method, developed a conceptual, coherent theory, a “metalanguage” indeed, and pursued a formalisation of this theory. What united them was that Greimas was looking for linguistic meaning structures in the oral tradition (myths), while Juzeliūnas explored the singing one (sutartinės). Perhaps it would be safe to say that sutartinės were to Juzeliūnas what myth was to Greimas. Furthermore, as a sung form of folklore, sutartinės also retained the mythical dimension, based on more than just the empirically calculated interval structure: they preserved the autonomous layer of meaning and semantic codes carried by sound, crystallized through long centuries – thanks to the instrumental and particularly the vocal practice.
Hence, using Greimas’ terms, in Juzeliūnas’ musical model we could speak of musical narrativity of a mythical nature as a kind of system the composer employed as a base for the “constructive atmosphere” and “harmonic preconditions”[28] of his musical language, using certain principles of this narrativity. The theory proposed by Juzeliūnas displays a juxtaposition of two closed discourses (sutartinės and dodecaphony), which can be perceived as a form of mixed gesturality that creates a distinctive narrative structure with a common denominator, i. e. the background in which the articulation of meaning unfolds. This common denominator, or semantic axis, is the twelve-tone system. According to Juzeliūnas, “the compatibility of different musical systems is a problem”, but “the basic elements […] – the partition of the octave into twelve degrees […] – are shared,” thus providing “a possibility to solve the issue of compatibility.”[29]
In both Greimas’ and Juzeliūnas’ conceptions, meaning emerges in a relationship and from a relationship. Juzeliūnas was looking for “possibilities of determining the structure of chords and the norms of their correlation” in “the distinctive traits of Lithuanian folk melodics”[30], as he claimed that “the interval structure particularities of the archaic Lithuanian monodic melodies and sutartinės […] best reveal the national distinctiveness of Lithuanian folk music.”[31] Here, relationship refers to the differential distance (in Juzeliūnas’ system, bettween the bitonic support points and the elements shaping the dynamic of the material), thus it is possible to speak of a model of articulation of binary oppositions’ meaning. One of the key principles in the composer’s concept is “the mechanism of melodic gravitation”, where it is most important to determine “the degree of the stability and instability of sounds,”[32] and decide what should be considered the “unitary norm” in “acoustic intensity phenomena.”[33]
Like myths to Greimas, sutartinės were to Juzeliūnas an already existing language, a semantic depository that could be formalised using structural means. In search of sonic structure universals in the fields of acoustic meaning, Juzeliūnas introduced the form of mixed gesturality, a dichotomous model in which, as Greimas argued, “the mythical element was dissolved in the practical, and vice versa.”[34]
The structure of Juzeliūnas’ theory, as well as the vocabulary (albeit not always scientifically precise) he used to formulate it (the composer spoke of “the semantics of musical language”, which “manifested itself in the cultures of the world in abundant and diverse forms”[35]), allow for more than mere speculation about unilateral or bilateral inspirations and/or influences. Perhaps it was not just a coincidence that the composer met Greimas in May 1970, and spoke of “constructive premises”[36] in October the same year.
The historical development of music from a single line to polyphony, i. e. the organic expansion of the sonic space, which according to Webern provided more space for the realization of the musical Idea, corresponded to the monodic melodics principles, in Juzeliūnas’ words, “gradual filling of the melodics with new cells”, “enrichment of the initial supporting tone structures with new sounds”: the composer discerned here “a common principle which makes the dramaturgical development of the melodics gradual.”[37] Hence the structures of Lithuanian monody and sutartinės on the mythological and figurative level corresponded to the regular multiplication of nature, the woven national patterns, and the figurative principles of folk painting. Juzeliūnas’ effort to structure his ideas is one of the most original compositional thinking breakthroughs in Lithuanian music at the time. The composer sought a qualitatively different, profound understanding of his nation’s sonic layer and obtain a qualitatively new musical regularity, much like the one the dodecaphonists had arrived at via a synthesis of polyphony and homophony.
V. Internal Reconstruction. Juzeliūnas and Kazlauskas
We could infer that Juzeliūnas was probably still more influenced by the Lithuanian linguist Jonas Kazlauskas, who died under unclear circumstances in 1970, rather than Algirdas Julius Greimas. There is no written record of their interaction – no surviving correspondence (most likely because both lived in Vilnius), thus we know of it only from the reminiscences of the composer’s wife.
In 1968 Jonas Kazlauskas wrote his Historical Grammar of the Lithuanian Language, which ushered in “a fundamentally new stage in the historical research of the Lithuanian language”[38], and for which he received the state prize of the Lithuanian SSR. The book was published in 1971. In the same year, the text of Juzeliūnas’ On the Structure of the Chord was submitted for consideration by the Composers’ Union, and in 1972 the dissertation was defended at the Leningrad Conservatory. It was also published as a book later that year. Symptomatically, the almost concurrent theories of both authors were met simultaneously with acclaim (for novelty and originality) and with considerable criticism.
The 1972 review by A. Gerdenis and V. Žulys criticized Kazlauskas’ theory, “a significant treatise in Lithuanian and more generally Baltic linguistics”, for the author’s failure to provide a comprehensive system, and for his self-professed task of “not so much reconstructing the Lithuanian (or Baltic) language of the prehistoric period as a system, but merely pointing out some new possibilities for Baltic linguistics […].”[39] According to Kazlauskas himself, he did not pursue the aforementioned task of systematic reconstruction for the following reason: “As long as the history of the individual phenomena of the Lithuanian and other Baltic languages has not yet been properly researched using the methods of internal reconstruction, and as long as the relative chronology of the individual alterations is unclear, such a pursuit would be impracticable. Employing the material of the old monuments and dialects of the Lithuanian language, this work aims to identify the internal reasons behind the alteration of the particular phenomena, and the older state is reconstructed mostly based on the causal relation between the phenomena.”[40] Juzeliūnas, too, had no intent of proposing a comprehensive, complete system. In the introduction of his work, he even made a disclaimer that “the Lithuanian folk melodics will not be examined in all its aspects.”[41]
The aforementioned review of Kazlauskas’ book stated that “next to indeed astounding discoveries and interpretations it contains many doubtful, insufficiently substantiated and even fallacious claims”; “the foreword suggests that internal reconstruction is the key research method, yet even after reading the entire book it remains unclear what that term signifies here”; “a work which begins a fundamentally new stage in the diachronic research of the Lithuanian language lacks a very much needed explication of the theoretical and methodical principles employed, save for several hints in the foreword.”
Similarly, Juozas Antanavičius criticized Juzeliūnas’ manuscript for the “lack of argumentation of certain theoretical statements and incoherent presentation of the material”[42], and argued that the book contained “some unsubstantiated, categorical claims, subjective and debatable interpretation of phenomena, incorrect usage of terms, and in general sketchy “composerly” formulations inappropriate for a scholarly study.”[43]
It must be noted that there was no favourable environment for the dissemination of new ideas at the time. The example of the Composers’ Union seems to suggest that in all similar scientific and artistic institutions there was an ongoing struggle between the “old” and the “new” thinking, between those who were trying to sustain themselves in the restricted framework instituted by the (political) system and those who wanted to break free from it. The Composers’ Union was divided by a confrontation between the “innovators” (including Juzeliūnas) and the “conservatives”. In 1969 Jurgis Gaižauskas, a member of the latter camp, identified “two negative manifestations of decadent music: 1. the use of avant-garde tricks and 2. complication of the musical language”, and proposed to “rigorously review the works of the Composition Department of our conservatory, educating the young composers in the spirit of Marxist ideology and Soviet aesthetic.”[44] Even Eduardas Balsys, then-chairman of the Composers’ Union, whose functions were supposed to ensure a neutral position or at least an attempt to unite the different interest groups, also saw “dry constructivism”[45] in Juzeliūnas’ works. At the time, Balsys was still a proponent of the traditional manner of employing folk music, which did not avoid “even direct citation”[46]. In 1971 he was convinced that “mechanical imitation of the various avant-garde streams has nothing in common with the progress of Socialist art.”[47] Undoubtedly, the political tension was the main hindrance to the emergence of a purely scholarly/creative atmosphere, which is the key prerequisite for the formulation of original ideas in a language that complies with the scientific standards.
With this context in mind, it is unsurprising that during the initial consideration of Juzeliūnas’ dissertation project the heads of the Composition and the Music History and Theory departments evaluated his manuscript quite negatively: “The author was reproached for aggrandizement of his own individual creative system, worship of technology at the expense of the emotional content, and subjective and unsubstantiated nature of many theoretical claims.”[48]
The composers’ schism also extended to the musicologists, although it must be acknowledged that most of them supported all of the composers’ innovative idea and ignored the ones which reflected not only political conformism, but also creative impotence or, to paraphrase Olivier Messiaen’s words about the “century of the lazy”[49], spiritual laziness. The musicologist Vytautas Landsbergis, who could not take part in the meeting, presented his opinion in writing: “It is an interesting and practically instructive contribution to the problem field of contemporary music – an amalgam of its constructive tendencies and the author’s distinctive approach to Lithuanian folk music.”[50] In his turn, Juozas Antanavičius noted that the strength of the book lay in its “prospective qualities – i. e. generation of new principles and new compositional possibilities rather than an analysis of the existing situation.”[51]
What both authors’ original concepts have in common is their principal method of internal reconstruction.
“Jonas Kazlauskas’ book begins a fundamentally new stage in the historical research of Lithuanian language, shifting the focus from comparison of language to internal reconstruction and comparison of dialects, from the history of isolated facts to the history of entire phonological and grammatical systems and subsystems.”[52] In the introduction of his work, Kazlauskas wrote: “If one goes back to that research stage when the model of the prehistoric period of the Indo-European languages was equated with the ancient Indian and Greek language models, it becomes quite clear that none of the extant Indo-European languages in the historical era can directly reflect the facts of the common Proto-Indo-European language. This means that internal reconstruction of the prehistoric form of the individual Indo-European languages now becomes extraordinarily significant.”[53] Juzeliūnas, in his turn, emphasized that the analysis of specific melodic structures and distinctive melodic cells allowed a deeper insight into the internal compounds of intonational melodics, and these could suggest certain vertical harmonic and horizontal polyphonic formations, as well as their interactions.
The two theories also share a diachronic approach.
Kazlauskas was concerned with the change of phenomena over time, the historical dimension, and etymology: “In some instances, the distinctive nature of a national language and culture is perceived as a constant feature of a particular nation (“the national spirit”, “the force of spiritual formation” etc.), rather than as a result of a long evolution. National particularity is turned into a mystical force that determines the entire nature of a nation’s language and culture, independently of the social conditions.”[54] Juzeliūnas, too, sought to avoid the notion of national identity as a “mystical force” in his theory by outlining both the past (the origins) and the future (the prospects) of his constructive system. His conception’s point of departure was “the fact acknowledged by many researchers that folk music served as the foundation of the professional composers’ work, and folklore had influenced composers of all epochs in one way or another.”[55] He “pointed out the early examples of non-tertian harmony present in some nations’ folk music and in archaic Russian polyphonic church chants, related to the folk tradition of polyphonic continuous part songs.”[56] Juzeliūnas historically analyzed “intonational structure types”[57] to prove that the triadic harmony norms prevalent in Western European professional music were later developments which could not accommodate the specific features of the modal character of folk music.
Like Kazlauskas, Juzeliūnas was looking for “native “cell moduses”, with a specific interaction of tones and semitones.”[58] He sought to re-construct the musical language from within, employing differential elements (Kazlauskas) or binary oppositions (Greimas). This was the reason why he rejected all of the practices of using folk music in contemporary works that had been prevalent until then.
Juzeliūnas came from a rural background, thus the search for his own roots enabled him to implement both his own inspirations and Gruodis’ modernist ideal, and endow the latter with a real rather than a prop foundation, which would facilitate the formulation of the grammar of contemporary music, and even certain syntax rules. Juzeliūnas was not a melodist either. He was searching for a Lithuanian colour, harmony, and texture. His theory paved the way for Kutavičius’ cellular minimalism derived from sutartinės, as Juzeliūnas was concerned with the polyphonic articulation as well as spatial and multidimensional expression of the latter, rather than the monodic line.
Kazlauskas singled out the archaic layers of Lithuanian language in the common context of the Indo-European languages, but never discarded that context. Juzeliūnas also approached the chord structure of Lithuanian folk music in the context of other folk music traditions. Kazlauskas started from searching for the individuality of a language relative to other languages, as only internal reconstruction made it possible to expose these individual features. It was a search for distinctive rather than shared traits. A common system of all languages cannot be reconstructed due to the lack of equivalents, and Lithuanian language cannot be reconstructed as a system yet because its separate constitutive parts must be reconstructed first. Juzeliūnas also “reconstructed” only one part, the aspects related to harmony, which he considered the fundamental parameter of musical work. Perhaps because he pursued a textural rather than melodic sound, he reconstructed precisely the support axis of harmony formation. Like Kazlauskas, Juzeliūnas was in search of tools, not emotions. Kutavičius would revive this second level in contemporary Lithuanian music, albeit on different grounds.
Kazlauskas was concerned with historical continuity, because it was unfinished and unfixed. Continuity requires a certain structural base, a regularity that would explain historical change and would provide a possibility or at least an explication for further development. Juzeliūnas clearly realized that folk music could not be a part of Lithuanian contemporary music unless it became a structural part of the latter, a part of the articulation of its language, instead of remaining on the merely emotional or superficial melodic level. The search for the Lithuanian harmony was precisely the foundation and the explication of the grammar rules for the future of contemporary Lithuanian music. Juzeliūnas was looking for continuity, temporal alterations of phenomena, and the possibility of continuing the same model while accepting the moment of change. Kazlauskas claimed essentially the same by saying that cultural particularity was not a constant feature of a nation or culture.
VI. An Idea Without a School
It is obvious that Juzeliūnas’ concise theoretical study never became what it could have become, i. e. a compositional system that would transcend Lithuania’s borders. It did not even capture the attention of Lithuanian composers. Perhaps the reason for that was the sketchy and incomplete character of the theory itself, or the fact that its author, a longstanding faculty member of the Academy of Music (then State Conservatory), failed to adequately pass it on to his students. Instead of imposing his own system on the latter, Juzeliūnas taught the formation of creative style on a national basis, as, like Nadia Boulanger, he perhaps sought to motivate each of his students to discover their own distinctive musical thought and expression.
A demonstration of the theory’s viability was precluded by the absence of a “school” of followers that would have evolved around the composer, a critical environment that would help expose all of this system’s mechanisms, both shortcomings and advantages, and would perhaps spawn complementary versions. Yet the emergence of a school did not depend on Juzeliūnas alone. The entire environment at the time was adverse to that. For instance, Ambrazas suggested that “such a biased conclusion was seemingly based on a preconceived aversion to the author and a fear of him turning his creative agenda into an obligatory norm for the composers trained at the conservatory in the case of successful defense, rather than on an objective analysis of the theoretical claims presented in the dissertation.”[59] Such arguments attest to the restrictive attitude of the agents of the music field at the time and the absence of a collective environment (scholarly rather than political), and not to a lack of original ideas.
Nevertheless, its is beyond any doubt that Juzeliūnas’ brief theoretical work, which saw the light of day with such difficulty, as well as almost the whole of his practice based on this theory, had an impact on later Lithuanian music. This impact reached further than just Bronius Kutavičius, who based his musical language on the constructive logic of the sutartinės and their minute elements. Juzeliūnas’ theory certainly also paved the way for the younger generations who seemingly had nothing in common with his music. Yet that is precisely the odd logic of influences: sometimes the most obvious phenomenon becomes extinct before it has a chance to fully develop, while the smallest detail of some cultural act may spawn a whole trend.
[1] [1] The duration of the “postwar” period varies for different regions, as it is determined based on certain stylistic changes. In Lithuania it can also be estimated in different ways. In this text, it refers to the period before the first signs of postmodernism.
[2] [2] Algirdas Ambrazas, Julius Juzeliūnas, Vilnius, Lithuanian Composers’ Union, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, 2015, p. 249.
[3] [3] Julius Juzeliūnas, Akordo sandaros klausimu, Kaunas, Šviesa, 1972, p. 6.
[4] [4] Ibid., p. 3.
[5] [5] Ibid., p.63.
[6] [6] Ibid., p. 113.
[7] [7] Anton Webern, Chemin vers la nouvelle musique, Paris, JCLattès, 1980, p. 96.
[8] [8] J. Juzeliūnas, op. cit., p. 3.
[9] [9] Ibid., p. 65.
[10] [10] A. Webern, Op.cit., p. 105.
[11] [11] J. Juzeliūnas, op. cit., p. 60.
[12] [12] Ibid., p. 65.
[13] [13] Ibid., p. 46.
[14] [14] Ibid., p. 56.
[15] [15] Ibid., p. 56.
[16] [16] Ibid., p. 96.
[17] [17] Idem.
[18] [18] Ibid., p. 73.
[19] [19] Pierre Boulez, Penser la musique aujourd’hui, Paris, Gonthier, 1963 ; English translation: Boulez on Music Today, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1971.
[20] [20] J. Juzeliūnas, op. cit., p. 4.
[21] [21] Ibid., p. 13.
[22] [22] A. Webern, op. cit., p. 43.
[23] [23] Ibid., pp. 43–44.
[24] [24] Ibid., p. 45.
[25] [25] Ibid., p. 55.
[26] [26] Sémantique structurale. Recherche de méthode, Paris, 1966; Du sens. Essais sémiotiques, Paris, 1970.
[27] [27] A. Ambrazas, op.cit,. 193.
[28] [28] J. Juzeliūnas, op.cit., p. 33.
[29] [29] Ibid., p. 7.
[30] [30] Ibid., p. 32.
[31] [31] Idem.
[32] [32] Ibid., p. 14.
[33] [33] Ibid., p. 73.
[34] [34] Algirdas Julius Greimas, Semiotika, Vilnius, Mintis, 1989, p. 135.
[35] [35] J. Juzeliūnas, op.cit., p. 113.
[36] [36] A. Ambrazas, op.cit,. p. 197.
[37] [37] J. Juzeliūnas, op. cit., p. 39.
[39] [39] Idem.
[40] [40] Jonas Kazlauskas, Lietuvių kalbos istorinė gramatika, Vilnius, Mintis, 1968, p.4.
[41] [41] Ibid., p. 32.
[42] [42] A. Ambrazas, op. cit., p. 235.
[43] [43] Ibid., p. 241.
[44] [44] Ibid., p. 224.
[45] [45] Ibid., p. 225.
[46] [46] Idem.
[47] [47] Ibid., p. 226.
[48] [48] Ibid., p. 232.
[49] [49] “This feverish century, this crazy century is nothing but a century of laziness. […] Lazy: those artisans of sub-Fauré and sub-Ravel. Lazy: the fake Couperin maniacs, writers of rigadoons and pavans. Lazy: the odious contrapuntalists of the ‘return to Bach’ who offer us, without remorse, dry and doleful lines poisoned by a semblance of atonality.“ Stephen Broad, “Messiaen: Poetics, Polemics and Politics”, Scottish Music Review, Volume 1, No. 1, 2007, pp. 88–89.
[50] [50] Ibid., p. 234.
[51] [51] Ibid., p. 240.
[53] [53] J. Kazlauskas, op. cit., p. 14.
[54] [54] From: “Gimtosios kalbos tyrinėjimai”, Tiesa, February 14, 1970, cited in: Jonas Kazlauskas, Rinktiniai raštai, vol. II, Science and Encyclopaedia Publishing Institute, 2000, pp. 318–320, p. 318.
[55] [55] J. Juzeliūnas, op. cit., p. 236.
[56] [56] Ibid., p. 237.
[57] [57] Ibid., p. 17.
[58] [58] J. Juzeliūnas, op. cit., p. 43.
[59] [59] P. 232.
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