An End-of-Winter Update

I could have called it "A Spring Update," but snow continues to fall as I write this entry. The winter has been long, and last month's burning of Morė, the effigy representing winter, apparently guaranteed the hasty arrival of spring. A long, dark winter does have its bright side, which is that no one feels obligated to go outside without a good reason. I have therefore been able to spend much of the last couple of months really focused on writing music.

But without actually scanning and posting my sketches, in writing there is little I can tell you about the music itself. What I can tell you is that I continue to find a wealth of inspiration not only in the music I hear in Vilnius, but also in the language itself.

Unlike Spanish, for instance, the Lithuanian language is devoid of any regular system of syllable stress, and the fact that the language utilizes some of the most ancient linguistic characteristics and numerous inflections makes possible an incredibly nuanced yet flexible form of expression. This combination opens up many possibilities in terms of creatively setting Lithuanian to music, but it also highlights the care that must be taken, especially in such a text-driven and drama-dependent work as an opera, to preserve the intended meaning and tone of any one line of text.

You might ask, "How are you able to understand the complexities and nuance of the language without being a native speaker?" The answer is that I don't. I made multiple audio recordings of Marija Simona "acting" the parts of the libretto, which helps when it comes to making many compositional choices, but regardless of the inflection and intonation I can objectively glean from the recording, there will always be certain signifiers that can only be truly understood by a native speaker.

But this may not be a bad thing. A fellow composer in Baltimore once lamented the tendency among composers to write vocal music that so closely reflects the natural rhythm and inflection of the language. I, on the other hand, saw nothing wrong with the trend and considered the language itself full of multiple implications for the music. I still do, but as of this week, much less so.

What changed my mind was a repeat viewing of Peter Eötvös' opera, Love and Other Demons. Never mind that the predominantly English libretto was written by a Hungarian author; I thought the English was practically flawless. On top of that, Eötvös understands and speaks very good English himself. But unlike the first time I saw the opera, on Thursday I picked up on some very subtle text-music relationships that revealed the composer as a non-native speaker. There was no misplaced syllable stress or awkward phrasing, but rather a sung English that to my ears was devoid of any aural signifier that might point to a specific English-speaking culture.

I recently read a BBC article that referred to this kind of English as "globish," and while the term applies mainly to English that is free of any vocabulary, metaphor, or humor that might cause misunderstanding between two people from different cultures, I wonder if the term could also include specifically aural nuances such as intonation, rhythm, etc. that might be particular to any one region or culture.

For me, this lack of recognizable, culture-specific nuance is what made the music interesting and fresh. A native English speaker could deliberately alter the music to counter the natural delivery of a line of English text, but I doubt the effect would be the same. In Love and Other Demons, the text is not set in an "unnatural" or "unusual" way, but rather in a manner that is so neutral (at least to American ears) that the listener is likely to detect no cultural code acting as mediation (and perhaps even a hindrance) between the text itself and its musical representation.

Maybe I'm preemptively defending the compositional decisions I've been making in my own opera, but if my musical treatment of Lithuanian text reveals my non-native background, then perhaps I have reason to celebrate.

The Story

I've been waiting anxiously to write in more detail about the opera's plot, and now, after many reviews, changes, cuts, and additions, the libretto is more or less in its final form. But rather than writing the event-by-event synopsis, I'll just give an overview of the story.

After a brief prologue shedding light on Julius Jušinskas' (my grandfather's) childhood in Lithuania, Act I opens in a foreign labor camp in Eastern Germany just before the end of WWII. The camp's inhabitants, a mixture of several nationalities but mostly citizens of countries annexed by the Soviet Union, live not only under the stress of difficult manual labor and the constant threat of Allied bombings, but also with the feelings of homesickness, rootlessness, and alienation so familiar to displaced persons (DPs). Some of my grandfather's worst stories came from his family's life in Brandenburg, and by all accounts it was a terrible and dangerous place for anyone, especially a family (by the end of the war, three of his four children had been born).

By the end of the first act, the war has ended and, to the horror of everyone in the camp, they learn that once again they are under the control of the Soviet Army, the very danger from which they had originally fled. Tormented by homesickness and constant exodus, yet fearful of the consequences of remaining under Soviet rule, most choose to escape to Allied-controlled Western Germany. With the Russian occupation zone border closed to those attempting to flee, the Jušinskas family manages to slip through with the help of a bribe.

Act II takes place in a DP camp in Western Germany around 1950-51, the last years before most countries will close their doors to DPs, who will then either be forced to repatriate or begin life on their own in the crippled postwar German economy. The DPs are terrified at the thought of returning to a Soviet-controlled homeland, and the vast majority choose to stay in the safety and stability of the camp. Life in the camp is not easy, but everyone is guaranteed food, shelter, schooling, and the stubborn belief that someday they will be able to return to a liberated homeland.

However, while physical conditions in the camp are tolerable, the psychological toll wrought by hopelessness and the lack of free will is mounting. With the already small and bureaucracy-laden window of opportunity to emigrate narrowing, the DPs scramble to win their own ticket to the U.S., Australia, Canada, and other countries with immigration quotas that could not possibly accommodate the massive number of hopeful families. In their desperation, many attempt to improve their chances by secretly swapping chest x-rays or accusing others of wartime collaboration and other crimes, while those most psychologically strained resort to suicide.

Pressure mounts after Adelina (my grandmother) and Julius are maliciously interrogated by agents in the camp. Julius obstinately holds onto his dream of returning home, but Adelina's persuasion, along with a last-minute letter of sponsorship from Julius' distant "Uncle Joe" in Chicago, finally convinces him to let go. With mixed feelings of relief, optimism, nostalgia, and fear, the family boards a ship bound for New York, leaving behind a decade of uncertainty, isolation, and dejection.

While some scenes are fictional (though definitely not implausible), others are based on my grandfather's actual experiences. For instance, Marija Simona included in the libretto an almost absurdist scene based on an incident in Brandenburg when an unlicensed German "doctor" tried to amputate my grandfather's injured leg. And the last scene in Act I and one of my favorite stories is how my grandfather managed to bribe the guards at the border of the Russian occupation zone:

Hundreds of people were at the border, but no one was allowed through. After pulling one of the guards aside, my grandfather withdrew a bottle of his homemade liquor from under his coat. The guard gladly accepted, but motioned to the other guard at the post, as if saying, "what about my friend over there?" My grandfather then pulled another bottle from under his coat, thus securing his family's passage into the British occupation zone. Minutes later, the family was picked up by British soldiers and taken to a warehouse just inside the British zone, where they were to stay until morning. During the night, everyone woke up to an extraordinary commotion. Hundreds of additional refugees had made it into the British zone. Later the family learned why so many of them had escaped: the guards had gotten completely drunk.

The Jušinskas family lived in Wehnen, a DP camp in Oldenburg, in the British zone, for almost six years before they finally received an offer of sponsorship from Uncle Joe. My mother was born there, and my aunts and uncles remember it well. While their time in Brandenburg before the end of the war was dangerous and physically debilitating, their stay in Wehnen was overshadowed by suspicions, accusations, rivalries, jealousies, and bigotry among desperate camp members. People did commit suicide, and Julius and Adelina were, in fact, interrogated for some unknown reason, but whatever that reason or the outcome was, it was the last push my grandmother needed to convince my grandfather to emigrate. The photo to the right is of the Jušinskas family in Wehnen, ca. 1947 (from left to right: Edita, Adelina [with my mother, Zita, in her lap], Julius, Irena, and Julius, Jr.).

Once the libretto has been thoroughly reviewed by several pairs of eyes, I'll give a more detailed synopsis. I have already begun to write the music, and now that the dramatic structure and pacing of the opera is all but set in stone, I'm looking forward to discovering where it takes the music.

Love, Longing, Uncertainty, and Booze

These are the principal recurring themes in the Lithuanian songs my grandfather, Julius Jušinskas, sang.

With the thin but treacherous layer of ice covering sidewalks throughout the city, this week was the perfect time to put a kettle on (or more precisely, flip the switch on the electric water boiler) and spend some quality time with the musical impetus for this opera. This exploration included transcribing melodies and tracing (or, as in some cases, guessing) their origin, but it also included translating the text of each song. While this translation work is far from complete (here I must credit my mother for her extensive help), it so far has yielded several and sometimes unexpected rewards.

On a purely musical level, it is worth noting that although my grandfather's control of individual pitches was shaky at best (he was, after all, about 90 years old at the time the recordings were made), his sense of key and pitch center was quite consistent. Here are two short excerpts of my grandfather singing the song from which the title of this blog is derived. The first was recorded in 1999, when he was 89 years old, and the second was recorded three years later in 2002, just two years before he passed away. Apart from the variation in melody and with the exception, perhaps, of a few microtones, the key is the same.

Whether it was because of the muscle memory he developed during his long lifetime of singing the same songs (most other songs fall between the keys of F and A-flat), or perhaps because of a more inherent sense of absolute pitch, this phenomenon is remarkable for a man his age (Elliott Carters of the world excepted), especially one without any musical training. If the former is true, then it highlights the frequency with which my grandfather sang these songs and therefore their importance to him.

Musical peculiarities aside, the songs offer a wealth of information about my grandfather's life as well as insight into his personality. Apart from a few phrases, I never spoke or understood Lithuanian before my grandfather passed away in 2004. Despite having lived in the United States for over fifty years, he spoke only broken English, and any conversation I ever had with my grandfather was either through my mother or limited to short phrases. Furthermore, I only saw him for two or three weeks out of the year, and I certainly didn't have as many questions for him then as I do today.

My grandfather left Lithuania when he was 30 years old, just after he married my grandmother, Adelina. It is no wonder then, that the love and lost youth which dominate the largest group of songs are embodied by imagery from Lithuania. In the recordings he sings of smoking with his brothers (all of whom he never saw again), bathing in the local river, and of his many loves. In most cases, the latter of these is compared to or represented by different plants or flowers. For instance, in one song he sings that he "planted many flowers- some blossomed, some did not," and in another he sings of the flax he planted on the river embankment: "it grew... it bloomed... I pulled it out of the ground... I took it home." The tone of these songs is usually nostalgic, and he frequently notes that the loves he had eventually vanished and that his youthful days will never return.

My grandfather grew up during the first period of Lithuanian independence, a relatively peaceful time which ended when the Soviet army occupied Lithuania in June, 1940. This development is clearly echoed in a song about a bittersweet spring. In the song, he sings about how the weather is beautiful in the spring and that flowers are bursting from their buds, to which he adds that "our brothers are saddling the horses" and that "one can hear the sounds of swords."

In March of 1941, my grandfather and grandmother, along with their infant son, Julius, Jr., left Lithuania. During the ten years that followed, they lived as displaced persons (DPs), eventually ending up in Germany. Towards the end of WWII, my grandfather was absorbed into the masses of foreign labor used to fuel the waning German war industry, and the family was often forced to live in separate parts of the country. The stress of difficult labor and agonizing separation magnified his short temper, which, coupled with his stubbornness, often landed him in prison. "Dainuoju Dainą," the song I discussed at the beginning of this post, is a prisoner's song in which he describes the hard beds, the sounds of chains and shackles, and the unattainable luxury of rest. In this same song, he sheds light on the hopeless uncertainty of he and his family's situation- a gypsy predicts for him a long journey. In another song he reflects upon having been born and raised in Lithuania, but only God knows where he will die, perhaps in Warsaw or in Moscow.

These and the other songs my grandfather sang are, in the end, quite revealing about his personality and about the experiences he constantly revisited and which affected his character throughout his long life. I was pleasantly surprised that over the course of listening to the songs, I discovered things about him which would have otherwise remained uncovered.

And some things about him which were already abundantly clear were reinforced, in particular his fondness for alcohol. In fact, the liquor he made with homemade stills during his time in DP camps made him exceptionally popular and, on more than one occasion, greased the palms of those with the power to make his family's life impossible. Later in life, a dose or two of "medicine" was the only necessary prelude to a performance of these songs, and it is not surprising that booze earned such a prominent place among the most important themes. The last recording of the collection reflects his hard-headedness as much as it does his abundant sense of humor: "I got drunk as a rooster. No one will scare me off."

About the Librettist

I hadn't mentioned it until now, but I met my librettist, Marija Simona Šimulynaitė, back in October. She's a graduate student in the theater department at the Academy and focuses mainly on theater direction, but she's also a writer and an accomplished dancer (check out this video of her routine in the Lithuanian semi-finals of the Eurovision Dance Contest!). Not only did she enthusiastically agree to write a libretto, but she also offered to direct the production when the time comes.

To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly I was able to find someone willing to work with me. My only real preferences were that he or she speak English to some degree and not be in the midst of a well-established (and hence, hectic) career. After unsuccessfully chasing some leads through my teacher, the Composers' Union, and some of my new friends, I got an e-mail from Marija. She was recommended to me by the head of the Academy's theater deparment, Dr. Algis Mažeika, who was once himself a Fulbright scholar at the University of Kansas.

After getting to know each other a little better during our first meeting, I gave her a copy of the final product of the reasearch I did over the summer: the story of my grandfather's life and a brief history of Displaced Persons Camps after WWII. Because the document has so much important and detailed information and is written in English, I was delighted to discover that Marija speaks English quite well.

But more importantly, I was excited by the energy and enthusiasm she injected immediately into her work. Only a week after our first meeting, she sent me a draft of the first half of Act I (after which I spent two days straight reading it with a Lithuanian-English dictionary in my lap), and today I am writing with the first draft of the entire libretto sitting next to me. What's more is that despite the speed at which she delivered her work, it shows evidence of great consideration of the details decribed in my original document while making light of them creatively through her writing.

Since we have not yet made final any cuts, additions, or edits, I won't give away any details about the libretto just yet, but I can say with confidence that this collaboration is off to a great start.

Love and Other Demons and Many, Many Other Concerts

I woke up on Monday after a two-week concert binge. The 2008 ISCM World Music Days festival finally ended this weekend, and now that I've recovered (somewhat) from my new-music hangover, I will attempt to recall some of the highlights and limit my music criticism to mentioning and providing links to some of my favorites. Be sure to click the link above to see more detail about the concerts and works.

The longest day of the festival was October 25. The first concert began at three in the afternoon and the last note was played at about 3:45 in the morning. The concert by the Lithuanian National Philharmonic included music by Joji Yuasa (Japan), Oscar Carmona (Chile), and Vytautas V. Jurgutis (Lithuania), the latter of which added his own electronic work to Ligeti's Atmospheres. John Adams' Century Rolls was also on the program, and expectedly so, since minimalism, with certain of its characteristics likened to the canonical folk songs sutartinės, holds a special place in modern Lithuanian music.

The following concert, which began at 9:30pm and lasted until 3:45 in the morning, was entitled Procession, and featured both music and food from around the world. Two American composers, Ashley Fure and David Coll, both had works on the program, and Coll gave a spirited presentation at the Academy the morning he headed back to the U.S.

Back-to-back concerts by the Ensemble Modern and the Cello Octet Amsterdam, a Spanish-Dutch group, made for an exceptionally impressive evening. Onutė Narbutaitė wrote works in honor of All Saints Day weekend, and Sunday featured the same work sung simultaneously in at least seven different churches throughout the Old Town (see right). The Strasbourg Percussion gave the premiere of a work by my teacher, Osvaldas Balakauskas, and the group was perhaps most intriguing due to sheer amount of equipment (see left) and noise sharing the stage. The Sound Cube project, hatched at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, brought a 40-speaker (give or take) surround system and sound engineers from Germany to the Great Hall of the Lithuanian Radio and Television. There was a concert dedicated almost entirely, with the exception of Lithuanian minimalist Rytis Mažulis' music, to the works of fluxus pioneer Jurgis "George" Mačiūnas (check out his Piano Piece No. 13).... and it was packed.

Most relevant to this blog was the sold-out Lithuanian premiere of Peter Eötvös' new opera, Love and Other Demons, based on the book by Gabriel García Márquez. Here I must credit my friends from the Academy for knowing how to get into a sold-out concert, for without them, I would never have seen it. You may think that sneaking into an opera performance sounds a little anachronistic today, but there was, after all, a great deal of nudity. In fact, the lead character of the opera, Sierva Maria, spends most of Act II in her birthday suit. I imagine performance anxiety becomes a non-issue after singing the most tragic aria of the opera "in the raw." As for the music itself, this review is generally positive and reflects many of my opinions. I don't have any pictures from the performance, but the picture to the right was taken during intermission in the Soviet-era National Opera and Ballet Theater, famous for its many chandeliers.

I mentioned less than half of all the concerts I attended, and while I enjoyed (almost) every minute of the festival, I can't include everything here. This was the first such festival I have been lucky enough to attend, and like a 21 year-old on his birthday, I simply overindulged. Someone asked me this morning what I thought of a specific piece on one of earlier concerts of the festival. I responded, "I don't remember. I think I heard too much."

Jonas Švedas Festival

With the weather in Vilnius as volatile as it has been this month, I promptly came down with a cold. But the good news is that I got over it just in time for the Third International Jonas Švedas Festival of Folk Instrumental Music, which ran October 7-11. Though the term "international" usually implies a much larger group of countries and regions, the festival featured mainly folk instruments and performers from the Baltics, Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia. Some performances were accompanied by the National Lithuanian Philharmonic, and others were solo performances. And the primary venue of the festival, St. Catherine's Church, made for a visually beautiful (albeit acoustically wet) concert setting.

Without going into a detailed listing of all the performers (there is no longer a festival website, so I can't provide a link), I'll just say that each offered a unique contribution to the zither-heavy festival program. But here are a few examples.

Olga Shishkina (Russia) played a Shostakovich-inspired work by Sergei Oskolkov for gusli and orchestra one evening, and performed a few solo works another. Oksana Kuznetsova and Elena Vorontsova, two Belorussian dulcimerists (wikipedia confirmed that "dulcimerist" is a word), also performed with orchestra (Kuznetsova) and solo (Vorontsova).

Many festival participants played the kanklės, arguably the most iconic Lithuanian folk instrument, but Aistė Bružaitė deserves special mention. She played most of a concerto for kanklės and orchestra by Lithuanian composer Vaclovas Paketūras before her aggressively virtuosic playing fatally snapped a string on the delicate instrument, putting a halt to the rest of the performance. Two days later, after a restringing, she appeared in a duet performance with Jolita Sidorenkaitė (also on the kanklės).

However, my personal favorite of the festival was Irmantas Andriūnas (and I really wish he had a website), who gave an impressive performance on the birbynė. The birbynė is another important Lithuanian instrument (a contender with the kanklės for the title of "national instrument of Lithuania") that featured prominently in the festival, and Andriūnas played three birbynės of different sizes during his performance of Gervių šokiai (Dance of the Cranes), a 15-minute piece by composer Vytautas Germanavičius that includes extended techniques familiar to most saxophonists as well as some unique to the birbynė. I couldn't figure out how to make the podcast option work (any tips from more experienced bloggers would be appreciated), so here are the links to two audio clips of Andriūnas playing a soprano birbynė and a contrabass birbynė. More clips of this piece and works for other instruments are available from this link to Germanavičius' Compositions for Lithuanian National Instruments.

Most of the Lithuanian performers at the festival are students or teachers at the Academy, or else closely affiliated with the Academy, and frequently commission composers to write new works for their instrument. Given their willingness to work with composers, it would be interesting to sit down with one of them to learn more about his or her instrument- not just its traditional usage, but any extended techniques that may have developed in the last few decades.

Lithuanian Composers Union

One of the many legacies of the Soviet Union in Lithuania is its socialist engineering of residential spaces. Images of rows of identical block apartment buildings aside, an interesting example of this type of planning in Vilnius is the Lithuanian Composers Union, situated in a quiet neighborhood west of the city center.

The LCU is the major hub for all Lithuanian composers and houses copies of every score, recording, and other publications by its past and current members. The building is also home to the Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Center, the major promoter of all Lithuanian composers and performers, including popular and folk music. In addition to maintaining a comprehensive website dedicated to its artists, it publishes and rents scores, operates three Lithuanian record labels, and helps to organize major events, including this year's ISCM World Music Days.

Last week, I visited the LCU in hopes of finding some useful materials about Lithuanian music. Linas Paulauskis, the director of the LMIPC, is quiet but extremely helpful. Not only did he offer to connect me with a few possible librettists, but he did not hesitate to lend me scores (some of which were one of only two copies) and recordings of the most recent and, in some cases, unpublished Lithuanian music. For one unpublished and unperformed opera, I was given a photocopy of the manuscript and a recording of the composer himself singing all the vocal parts over a midi realization of the instrumental parts.

Getting back to the main point of this blog post, the most unique thing about the LCU is its surrounding neighborhood, which is made up of a collection modest rowhouses on quiet alleys branching off of the main street. It was in these houses that Lithuania's composers lived together in a relatively isolated artist community. Each of the houses bears a plaque indicating its former composer resident and the years of residence.

In addition to the rowhouses, there stands a much larger apartment building- at least 14 units- which housed no one but composers. Both Osvaldas Balakauskas and Feliksas Bajoras live there. It is hard to imagine a composer who would not have been influenced by his neighbor at some point.

And while today many Lithuanian composers have chosen to move elsewhere as their economic independence increases, at least half of all important composers in Lithuania live next to the Composers Union. It must have been quite an experience to develop alongside every other composer in Lithuania. Given this fact, the diversity among their works should be seen as evidence of extraordinary creativity in what otherwise might have been a compositional melting pot.