Abstract
The Baltic—a term with conventional rather
than rational implications—can be used as a general frame to arrange a
multitude of organological facts from historically, linguistically, and
confessionally different musical cultures—Estonian (EE), Latvian (LV) and Lithuanian (LT). The first part of the
article deals with the documentation of instrumental music, as well as the
research and significant publications of the period from the 13th century until
the end of the 20th century. Arranged in chronological groups, these
publications mark a synchronic regional perspective and outline some
significant steps in the development of organological/organographical thought.
Basic functional groups of musical instruments and music are discussed in the
second part. Thus, this article describes the instruments and the music related
to the Baltic people’s economic (mainly herding) activities, social
events and religious practices. Further, it examines musical instruments used
for contemplation and dance in their terminological, morphological, musical,
symbolic, and historical contexts.
Can the Baltic be regarded
as a region from the organological point of view?1 The geographical
contents of the term “Baltic” has changed over the course of time,
and thus it can be treated differently from different points of view.
Politically and historically, since the end of World War I, the three Baltic
states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have been denoted by that term. Latvia
and Estonia are successors to the Livonian Confederation, which had been
established in the 13th century by Crusaders and the Roman Catholic Church.
Lithuania is the successor to a part of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania
and the latter Polish-Lithuanian Confederation. Linguistically, Latvian and
Lithuanian, together with the extinct Old Prussian, are Baltic languages, and
Estonian is Finno-Ugric. Denominationally, Lutheranism is dominant in most of
Estonia and Latvia (except for the southeastern Latvian Catholic region called
Latgale), whereas the main part of Lithuania is Catholic. In addition, a small
southeastern district of Estonia called Setumaa is predominantly Russian
Orthodox. (For details regarding the history, linguistic landscape, etc., of
the Baltic region, see the article by Boiko in this volume.)
Musical instruments and
instrumental music are not so closely tied to language as vocal music, making
historical and confessional factors more important than linguistic ones. Thus,
one might expect more similarities in the instrumental music of Estonia and
most of Latvia (its central, western and northern parts) on the one hand and
Lithuania and Latgale on the other. This does seems to be true in regard to the
predominant dance music styles and instruments. But some relatively homogeneous
musical forms and instruments are spread throughout the entire Baltic region,
above all shepherd music and the Baltic psaltery (kannel EE, kokles LV, kanklės
LT). Yet
it should be admitted that these do not determine Baltic regionalism, as their
actual prevalence is much wider. For example, similar shepherd music and
instruments are known in northern European territories from the Vistula River
in the west to the upper Volga in the east, and from the polar circle to the
Pripet River in the south. The Baltic psaltery is documented in most of
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, but also in northwestern Russia, Karelia, and
southern and central Finland.
On the basis of such
examples, we could conclude that Baltic organology should be considered a
designation which is conditioned more in terms of politics than culture, but
actually certain deep common cultural traits or structural similarities do
exist between the three musical cultures. In approach towards the reasons
behind these similarities, we must take into account some general geographical,
historical, and cultural considerations.
The Baltic territory is
largely covered with forests, with a quite dense network of rivers, lakes and
many swamps. For this reason, it has been rather isolated, which resulted in
comparatively late Christianization; this took place in Latvia and Estonia only
in the 13th century and in Lithuania at the end of the 14th century. Further, “official”
Christianity coexisted for a long time with pre-Christian beliefs and
practices, and only after the reformation in the 16th century and in the
following centuries did it gradually gain broader acceptance among the rural
population.
The feudal institutions
imposed ethnic or, at the least, linguistic distinctions upon the social
structure. Thus peasants and the lowest townsfolk were indigenous people
(Lithuanians, Latvians, Livs, Estonians), whereas the aristocracy, merchants
and most of the clergy were Germans, Poles, Swedes or at least speakers of
German, Polish, or Swedish.
The medieval total
population of the Baltic was comparatively small, and this promoted the
development of a peaceful and extraordinary tolerant character among its
peoples. For example, non-Christian Jews were permitted to settle in the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania since the 13th century, and after its confederation with
Poland, this region offered the most favourable environment for Jews in Europe.
Large Jewish communities formed in Lithuania from this time and in Livonia as
well from the second half of the 16th century; soon Vilnius became famous as
the “Northern Jerusalem.”
The oldest iconographical
evidence related to musical instruments in the Baltic region is a picture
imprinted on a clay tablet, found in archaeological excavations in Tērvete
(Latvia) and dated from the 13th century. On it is depicted a piper’s
portrait and a conical pipe with four fingerholes. Generally, though, musical
instruments and music making in Livonia did not attract the serious attention
of chroniclists of the time, and only a few works contain information of some
significance. The 13th-century Livonian Chronicle of Heinricus and the Rhymed
Chronicle
may be considered to be the oldest written sources.
The Chronicle of Heinricus, written in Latin, deals
with events in the Baltic region during the end of the 12th and the first
decades of the 13th centuries (Heinricus 1993). Quite frequently church bells,
or campanas,
are mentioned. Referred to as “war bells,” they were used for
signaling an enemy attack and were considered to be a good war trophy. A string
instrument of Riga inhabitants called cythara Rigensium is also mentioned in this
chronicle, perhaps as a metaphor for the townsfolk’s sorrow. During the
Estonian siege of Beverin Castle, a Latvian priest is described as praying to
God to the accompaniment of a musical instrument, whose harsh tone in
conjunction with prayer surprised the Estonians. Drums with pipes (tympanum
et fistulas),
or with some other musical instrument, are played before an attack as well as
afterwards, especially if it has been successful. To stay awake during a night
attack, swords are beaten against shields, drums and pipes, and other musical
instruments are played.
Musical instruments are
also described in the Rhymed Chronicle of the second half of the 13th century
(Reimchronik 1998), but not as extensively as in the chronicle of Heinricus.
The military trumpet herhorn made of animal horn is mentioned the most often to
announce the beginning of a military expedition or for some other signaling
purpose. Only once is the big bell (grōzen glocken) mentioned as a signal for
the army to gather.
Though they do not describe
musical instruments directly, historical documents of the 13th to 14th
centuries are the oldest, and thus most valuable, sources. Though some biases
emerge in the texts of the oldest chronicles, nevertheless some details,
including those connected with the use of musical instruments, are rather
realistic and exact.
A picture of music making
in Livonia was published in Cosmographey by the Basel scholar Sebastian Münster
(Münster 1550/1598). It is possible that this picture was sent to the
publisher by the wandering literati Hans Hasentödter in 1547. The
engraving shows devils and witches dancing and three musicians—a lutist,
a bagpipe and a hurdy-gurdy player—accompanying them.
The Livonian Chronicle, written by Balthasar
Russow up to 1583 and published a year later, contains several references to
the use of musical instruments in 16th-century Livonia (Russow 1584). Just as
mentioned in the chronicles of the 13th century, church bells seem to have been
a good war trophy. Military kettledrums and trumpets played separately or in
ensemble, are mentioned rather frequently. Kettledrums were broadly distributed
in Europe by the middle of the 15th century. They were used as a signal
instrument in church towers, and Russow possibly referred to this use when he
wrote of “leather bells.” Pipes and drums were played in towns, and
towns’ drummers and musicians were also mentioned. Organs were used in
churches, and the bells rung during wartime were referred to as “the
bells of horror.” There are several references to bagpipes: the large
bagpipe, well known in every village, and the peasant bagpipe. The ensemble
playing of many bagpipes is vividly described.
The written sources about
Lithuanian instruments are comparatively late. Annals and chronicles that
mention musical instruments date in Prussian Lithuania from the 16th century,
with real descriptions appearing first during the 17th century. In Lithuania
proper, such references to instruments only appeared two centuries later after
that. The long trumpets attracted special attention, and several informants of
the 16th century (such as the Swedish historian Olaus Magnus, Italian traveler
Guagnini and Polish historian Mateus Stryjkowski) mentioned them.
Particularly interesting
from organological point of view is the first translation of the Bible into
Lithuanian, which was made by Jonas Bretkūnas and published in Prussian
Lithuania in 1591. The last page of the sixth volume contains a list of the
Lithuanian and German names of thirteen musical instruments: harp, lute,
hurdy-gurdy, organ, kettledrum, fiddle, shawm, trumpet, psaltery (kanklės
LT), pipe,
a set of single-tone pipes (tutuklės LT), and large and small
bagpipes. The translator may have provided such a list in order to explain his
translations of the corresponding Biblical terms.
Organological information
contained in the sources of this period is largely sporadic. Besides
terminology, we can also find important details regarding construction,
playing, use and symbolism. Names of musical instruments and of their parts are
mentioned in dictionaries or in translations of Christian writings. There are
some significant remarks about the use of instruments, for example in the
17th-century Latvian phraseological materials of Georg Mancelius. Mancelius
describes in these the relations of musical instruments to different spheres of
human life and activities. Thus he refers to stick rattles and kokles as peasant (Baur) instruments, drums,
copper drums (kettle drums) and trumpets as military (Heer, Hehr) instruments. New names of
instruments and idiomatic expressions appear in the 17th-century texts of Georg
Elger, but especially in the Latvian-German dictionaries of the linguist and
theologian Christopher Fürecker and of the priest Johann Langius.
Fürecker’s dictionary is particularly important, as most authors of
the 18th and 19th centuries authors subsequently used it and adopted its
materials. The Lithuanian-German and German-Lithuanian dictionary of Philip
Ruhig also has a certain value, with its list of names of Lithuanian
instruments.
The first complete translation
into Latvian of the Old and New Testaments was published by Ernst Glück in
1685 to 1691. It contains expressions concerning playing situations and the
names of instruments, such as trombone, trumpet, pipe, bagpipe, psaltery (kokles
LV),
violin, drums, all mentioned in rather positive contexts. The translator surely
looked for terms and expressions that were in current use and that could be
properly understood by as many readers as possible. His work therefore provides
an insight into some aspects of musical life of that time.
Remarkable moments of
Livonian musical life have caught the attention of travellers, historians and
ethnographers. The playing of the bagpipe at a wedding is pictured in Adamus
Olearius’s Vermehrte newe Beschreibung der Muscowitischen und
Persischen Reyse
(1647). August Wilhelm Hupel (1777) displayed his sceptical attitude regarding
the musical possibilities of kokles, whereas he is very positive towards the bagpipe,
designating it the most beloved instrument of Latvians and Estonians. Two sets
of bagpipes and wedding rattles are depicted by Johann Christoph Brotze at the
end of the 18th century in his Monumente (Brotze 1771–1818). Estonian and
Latvian bagpipes are compared in Johann Christoph Petri’s geographical
and cultural essays about Estonia and Estonians (Petri 1802, 1809). Johann
Georg Kohl (1841) describes the playing of kokles, but most of his attention
is paid to bagpipes and other wind instruments such as pipes and horns.
The first significant
drawings and descriptions of native Lithuanian instruments were published in
Lithuania Minor and in Prussian Lithuania: Theodor Lepner’s work Der
preusche Littauer
(1744:94–98) and Matthäus Prätorius’s Deliciae
Prussicae oder Preussische Schaubühne (1871), both finished in the 1690s. The
former contains a picture of kanklės, drums, trumpet and pipe and a small
chapter about Lithuanian music and instruments, while the latter shows a
picture of musicians playing pipe, drums and bagpipe to accompany dance.
Valuable information on kanklės and other instruments as well as on traditional
singing was provided one-and-a-half centuries later by Friedrich August
Gotthold in his work (1847) Über die Kanklys und die Volksmelodien der
Litthauer.
In the beginning of the
19th century, scholars from Lithuania proper began to pay attention to
Lithuanian traditional music and instruments. Historian and ethnographer
Simonas Daukantas (1845) wrote about instruments in village musical life: long
trumpets, pipes, clay pipes, kanklės and violins. Ethnographer Liudwik Adam
Jucewicz (1846) classified instruments into “migrated” (e.g.,
violin, clarinet, gensle, bandura, flute. etc.) and “local original”
(pipe, primitive clarinet, whistle, dzindzinis, clay pipe, bagpipe, long
trumpet).
One of valuable sources of
the period when rural instrumental traditions were still alive is the
collection of Andrejs Jurjāns. While he also published his field
observations (Jurjāns 1879; 1892), the most important are his descriptions
of musical materials (Jurjāns 1912; 1921). In his articles he described
the construction, technology, use, provenance and other aspects of many
instruments, including the trumpet, goat horn, drums, frame drum, stick
rattles, jew’s harp, hammered dulcimer, pipe, reed, bagpipe, violin, kokles and others. A unique and
extraordinary ensemble from the small Suiti district is mentioned that
contained seven bagpipers and eight players of goat horns. This ensemble made
music on the occasion of the visit of the Russian crown prince to Liepāja.
The first Latvian
ethnographic exhibition was organized in Riga in 1896, and its catalogue,
written by the priest Wilis Plutte (1896), is notable for quite extensive list
of instruments. Listed as instruments of olden times are: the frame drum, stick
rattles, whistles, trumpets, double-reed pipes, goat horn, aurochs horn,
bagpipe, musical bow, kokles with five, six, nine, ten and twelve strings,
hammered dulcimer and the jew’s harp. The violin, zither, viola, cello
and double bass are referred to as instruments of modern times.
Some publications of
Lithuanian folklore or ethnography also contain significant comments about
instrumental traditions. Thus Antanas Juška-Juškevič (1880)
commented on dance music instruments (bagpipe, goat horn, kanklės, violin) as well as on
ritual instruments (pipes, horns, violin, drums and trumpets). Particularly
important were the activities of the Russian Geographical Society, whose member
Professor Eduard Wolter was one of the most fruitful collectors of Lithuanian
and Latvian ethnographic materials. In addition to vocal music, he also focused
on musical instruments (Wolter 1892) in his writings, especially on the psaltery,
of which he collected and documented several examples. Wolter theorized that
the instrument stemmed from the Finnish kantele, thus opposing the views
of the recognized Russian organologist Aleksej Famincyn (1890).
In the second volume of his
collection of Lithuanian folksongs for German readers, Christian Bartsch (1889)
provided a brief essay on Lithuanian instruments called Über
littauische Musikinstrumente. Based on the materials of Theodor Lepner,
Matthäus Prätorius, Friedrich August Gotthold and others, this essay
adds new pictures and more information on kanklės, trumpets and pipes. Some
of these illustrations have been reproduced in a number of later works.
Similarly, Franz Oskar Tetzner based his 1897 study on earlier materials, which
he supplemented with pictures, information and new ideas about the kanklės, trumpet, drum,
jew’s harp, single-tone pipe, clarinet and hammered dulcimer.
Adolfas Sabaliauskas is
regarded as the first Lithuanian researcher to study musical instruments and
music specifically. He extensively collected vocal and instrumental music from
the Aukštaitija region and published his observations in several works. In
his first publication about the polyphonic vocal style sutartinės and musical instruments
(Sabaliauskas 1904) he describes instruments of northeastern Lithuania (e.g.,
the five-stringed kanklės, a set of end-blown single-tone pipes, a set of
trumpets, long trumpets, pipes, the goat horn, clarinets) and the essential features
of instrumental music. Revised and supplemented, this material was republished
later (Sabaliauskas 1911a:96–108; 1911b). Another work of Sabaliauskas (Music
of Lithuanian songs and hymns, 1916) was published in Finland and contains more
than 40 instrumental melodies and drawings of instruments.
A small study on Lithuanian
instruments was written by Curt Sachs (1916) which was published in the journal
Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie. Introducing the
Lithuanian instruments in the collection of Berlin’s Königliche
Sammlung für deutsche Volkskunde, he comments on their provenance and role
in Lithuanian culture.
In 1918 August Bielenstein
published an important work in two volumes, Die Holzbauten und
Holzgeräte der Letten. The ninth chapter of the second volume is devoted to musical
instruments. All materials are arranged into chapters entitled
“Woodwinds,” “String instruments,” and
“Percussion instruments.” Information about wooden cowbells and
children toys can be found in other chapters. August Bielenstein describes
types and forms and the construction and technology of the instruments, in
addition to terminology, purpose and provenance. Generally one might say that
his work is the most extensive and significant organological work in Latvia in the
first half of the 20th century. In some cases, its contents might be regarded
as unique, as later several of the described artefacts no longer existed in the
living tradition, nor are to be found in museum collections or other
descriptions.
The well-known Finnish
ethnomusicologist Armas Otto Väisänen wrote a series of excellent
articles in which he attempted to clear up several issues regarding the origin
and distribution of kantele and related Baltic instruments (1928a, 1928b,
1934, 1937). Thus, disputing Famincyn’s hypothesis, he argued strongly
that the Baltic psaltery is quite distinct from the Russian gusli in construction and
overall design, and that it has a separate history.
In the period between 1923
and 1930, the music school of Klaipėda became an important center for the
collection of traditional music, including instrumental music and instruments.
The composer Juozas Žilevičius organized and directed these
activities, later publishing the results in several articles, the most important
of which is “Lithuanian Folk Music Instruments” (1927). In this
article, he names and classifies 26 different instruments according to their
morphology and origin. From the viewpoint of origin, he forms three groups for
these instruments: 1) local original instruments, 2) transmigrational, which
were brought to Lithuania, temporally existed and disappeared, and 3)
superstratial, which were brought to Lithuania, adopted and became established
in traditional musical life.
Juozas Žilevičius
settled in Chicago in 1929, publishing articles there on “Native
Lithuanian Musical Instruments” (1935) and on the kanklės (1937), in addition to
working for years on a bibliography concerning Lithuanian musical instruments.
Elmar Arro, the eminent
Estonian musicologist, completed a remarkably thorough and well documented
study called “Zum Problem der Kannel”; it was presented as a paper
to the Estonian Learned Society in 1929, and published in 1931. This article
examines the structure of the instruments of the kannel-kokles group and the distribution
of its subtypes, at least in Estonia and Latvia.
Profound scholarly studies
of Lithuanian instruments are executed by Zenonas Slaviūnas-Slavinskas.
After finishing his extensive fieldwork in 1930s, he published the results, two
of which are considered basic, “Lithuanian kanklės” (1937) and
“Musical bow—A Primitive Lithuanian Musical Instrument”
(1939). The former article is of particular significance, dealing with the
problems of the historiography, terminology and chronology of the kanklės. Slaviūnas defined
three basic groups of the instrument—primitive, simple and composite kanklės—an approach that is
still valid nowadays. In addition, he also describes instruments, music and
players. It should be mentioned that Zenonas Slaviūnas contributed to
recording traditional music on wax cylinders and to classifying the recorded
material. Later he published three volumes of sutartinės—traditional vocal
and instrumental polyphonic melodies—which include 81 melodies for
different instrumental groups and for kanklės.
In the publication of Elza
Siliņa about Latvian dance (1939), a chapter on musical instruments is
included. Dealing with issues of dance accompaniment, she discusses clapping,
stomping and the use of clappers and rattles, especially in terms of their
magical aspect. Other instruments (whistles, pipes, kokles, bladder fiddle and
bagpipes) are characterized, mostly from the viewpoint of their relationship to
dancing.
Jūlijs
Sproģis’ unpublished book, Ancient Musical Instruments and
Melodies of Work and Celebration Songs in Latvia (1943) was the most
extensive organological work up to that time. Trying to view Latvian
instrumental music problems in regional and historical contexts, he describes
percussion instruments (drums, stick rattles), woodwinds (trumpet, horn,
and—less extensively—jew’s harp, pipe, whistle, panpipes,
bagpipe), and string instruments (musical bow, bladder fiddle, monochord, hammered
dulcimer, kokles).
Folklore texts mentioning musical instruments are used in this study together
with historical and ethnographical facts. Forty-six instrumental tunes played
on the trumpet, goat horn, pipe, bagpipe and kokles are included.
Unfortunately, the Sproģis’ book did not mark a new period of
Latvian organology. Being prepared for publication in 1943, in the end it was
not published due to some unclear wartime obstacles. A proof copy remains in
the Latvian Folklore Archive.
Composer and folk music
collector Emilis Melngailis did extensive fieldwork in 1920s to 1940s. He
collected mostly vocal music but also paid attention to instrumental music as
well. Most of his organological materials are published in Latviešu
dancis
(1949), where alongside the description of musical instruments and their
construction and use, some ideas on the revival of instrumental music are
expressed. More than 50 instrumental tunes (e.g., trumpet, goat horn, pipe,
bagpipe, kokles
melodies) are included in the book, and most of these melodies reappear two
years later in the first volume of his collection of Latvian musical folklore
materials (Melngailis 1951).
Some linguistic studies
have been published that touch, to different extents, on certain organological
problems. Terminology, names of instruments and their parts, comments and
explanations can be found in Ulmann’s dictionary of the Latvian language
(1872–80). Johann Sehwers (1924) studied organological information
contained in linguistic materials, including dictionaries, Christian texts, and
songbooks, basically of the 17th to 19th centuries. Almost 30 years later, he
published his revised article in German translation as the eleventh chapter,
called “Musikinstrumente,” in his study on the influence of Germany
on Latvian (Sehwers 1953). Studying personal names and surnames in the sources
of the 13th to 16th centuries, Ernsts Blese (1929) discovered some
“instrumental” names, pointing either towards the profession of
musician or instrument maker, or having some other relation to musical
instruments. The Latvian language dictionary of Kārlis Mühlenbachs,
edited by Jānis Endzelīns (Mühlenbachs 1923–32), can be
regarded as the most important source of linguistic materials. Besides
terminology, descriptions concerning technology, playing, and use can be found
in the dictionary, therefore providing the possibility for some etymological
study.
The unpublished work of
Jūlijs Sproģis foreshadowed the complicated and generally fruitless
post-war period in Latvia, which was only interrupted by a couple of delayed
publications by Melngailis. The situation was similar in Estonia and Lithuania,
where only one publication can be mentioned: the research of Stasys Paliulis on
Lithuanian traditional instrumental music (1959). This detailed study of wind
instruments (a set of end-blown, one-tone pipes, trumpets, pipes, and others)
and their playing traditions is supplemented with 366 documented instrumental
tunes.
It was only in the early
1960s that a new level of research was established by the works of Joachim
Braun. He started his organological studies with investigations of the history
of bowed instruments in Latvia, and the first significant result of his
research was the book Development of the Art of Violin-playing in Latvia: A
Review
(Braun 1962a). This was followed by several articles in Latvian, Russian,
German and other periodicals and collections of articles (e.g., Braun 1962b,
1971, 1975). His works are based on an extensive study of previous literature,
materials of the Riga city archives and other sources. He focused on the
problems of the history of instrumental music and gradually expanded into the
field of musical archaeology. Having reconstructed a general picture of music
cultures of different historical periods, he argues certain views regarding, e.
g., the “Latvian” origin or the age of certain instruments. He
touched on ideas about the role of ethnic contact, the professionality of
musicians, the relation of the phenomena of instrumental music to certain
aspects of legal systems, traditions, social spheres, etc. Yet the scholarly
activities of Joachim Braun were not evaluated properly in Soviet-occupied
Latvia. Because of his emigration to Israel, Braun’s later research was
not published, and no reference to his works was permitted for almost 20 years.
The Finnish linguist Eino
Nieminen studied Finnish kantele and the names of related Baltic instruments
(Nieminen 1963). He has proposed the hypothetical *kantlīs/*kantlēs as the primitive Baltic
prototype of the Baltic and Finno-Ugric names known today. Information about
Baltic musical instruments has been published in the Atlas of musical
instruments of the peoples inhabiting the USSR (Vertkov, Blagodatov et al.
1963, 1975). The chapter of this book on Baltic instruments was compiled by
Elza Jazovickaja, with the colaboration of Herbert Tampere from the Estonian
side, Jēkabs Vītoliņš, Emilis Melngailis and Sergejs
Krasnopjorovs from the Latvian side, and Jadviga Čiurlionytė and
Jonas Švedas from the Lithuanian side. In addition, there are references
to the works of August Bielenstein, Andrejs Jurjāns, Stasys Paliulis,
Antanas Sabaliauskas, Curt Sachs, Zenonas Slaviūnas, Jūlijs Sproģis
and Pranas Stepulis as well. For this atlas, the editor-in-chief Konstantin
Vertkov proposed his own system of classification, which he claimed to be
derived from the Hornbostel-Sachs system, but which in fact had no resemblance
even at the first level of classification. The traditional aerophones,
chordophones, membranophones and idiophones are described, alongside with much
information on so-called “modernized” instruments. On the whole,
the atlas may be regarded as one of the first coherent descriptions of Baltic
musical instruments; unfortunately, it cannot be used as a reliable source
because of the lack of references and because of imprecise or even false
information. For example, piping is mentioned as used for seeing off poor
people and orphans who have been conscripted for military service. Further, the
atlas describes the double-reed, single-pitched pipe as being good for playing
melodies, the kokles as an indispensable wedding instrument and drums as
instruments that had already long disappeared.
A chapter on Baltic instruments
is included in Czech organologist Alexander Buchner’s Musikinstrumente
der Völker
(Buchner 1968:206–208). Many Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian instruments
are described here, but a certain disposition towards “original ethnic
sound tools” is evident; such popular, but “international,”
instruments as the violin, bagpipes (except Estonian), concertina or
jew’s harp can scarcely be found. Besides, descriptions of traditional
instruments are mixed up with the so-called “modernized”
instruments—a typical result of Soviet pseudo-folklorism. The strange
spelling of original Baltic terms suggests that the source of the article is
some Russian publication, and indeed the first edition of the Atlas of
Musical Instruments of the Peoples Inhabiting the USSR is indicated in the
bibliography.
Latvian scholars used to
refer to folklore texts as a source of organological information, but the first
serious analyses of folk songs from the viewpoint of ethnomusicology was
carried out by Karl Brambats. In his article “Die lettische Volkspoesie
in musikwissenschaftlicher Sicht” (1969), Brambats surveys important
periods of Latvian ethnogenesis, describes formal characteristics and the
cultural and historical value of folk poetry, and touches on problems of
chronology. On the whole, folk songs about musical instruments are more archaic
than those about singing; nevertheless, their information is too scanty to
characterize certain historical periods.
Data about Latvian
archaeological instruments have been summarized by Vladislavs Urtāns. He
has described bone whistles and flutes, the oldest of which have survived from
the Neolithic period: a trumpet mouthpiece, a bronze trumpet of the late Bronze
age, jew’s harps of the 13th to 17th centuries, and an ornamented piece
of kokles
resonator (Urtāns 1970). Almost two decades later, Arvydas Karaška
(1989) conducted a similar study by in Lithuania.
The prominent researcher of
Latvian traditional vocal music Jēkabs Vītoliņš has also
published work on instruments and instrumental music (Vītoliņš
1972). Therein he briefly discusses the role of musical instruments in the life
of Latvians of past times and characterizes the most important idiophones,
membranophones, aerophones and chordophones. His publication is based on the
works of Andrejs Jurjāns, August Bielenstein, Jūlijs Sproģis,
Emilis Melngailis and Vladislavs Urtāns. The work, on the whole, does not
provide new materials or views and contains some essential mistakes, among them
classificatory.
A few years later a similar
study was done on Estonian instruments by the prominent researcher of Estonian
traditional vocal music, Herbert Tampere (1975). He describes such aspects of
the instruments as terminology, ergology, musical features and playing
techniques, repertory, functions, history, group playing, ensembles and makers.
His chosen sequence of instrument classification is the same as that of
Jēkabs Vītoliņš: idiophones, membranophones, aerophones and
chordophones. The publication is illustrated with musical examples, photos,
historical documents and archive materials, as well as with folklore texts showing
the use and symbolics of the instruments. An important chapter includes a
classic collection of instrumental tunes for different instruments, including
pipes, clarinets, bagpipes, horns, trumpets, kannel, bowed harp and violin,
numbering altogether 125 tunes; many more tunes for bagpipes, violin and
accordion appear in the subsequent dance tune chapter. Thus Herbert
Tampere’s book is the most general and informative publication about
Estonian musical instruments and instrumental music in 1970s and 1980s.
Three years later, a
catalogue of musical instruments found in the Theatre and Music Museum of
Tallinn was published (Laanepõld 1978), with more than 50 photos and
drawings of Estonian traditional instruments. About the same time the Latvian
Open-Air Museum published a brochure that gave a general insight into all
groups of Latvian traditional instruments (Priedīte 1978).
Issues dealing with Baltic
musical instruments are discussed in two articles by Stephen Reynolds, a
professor at Oregon State University (USA). He describes the Baltic psaltery,
its ergological type, and comments on iconography, terminology, provenience and
research problems (Reynolds 1973). In his article “The Baltic psaltery
and musical instruments of gods and devils” (1983), he accentuates
symbolism and mythological views, whereby the semantics of musical instruments
is analysed in early historical sources and in folklore materials. His
conclusion is that a dual cosmogony dominates over the expected tripartite
scheme of Dumesil, and the main division character is “upwards” or
“downwards.”
Significant research on the
Baltic (Latvian and Lithuanian) psaltery was conducted by Christina Jaremko for
her master’s thesis (1980). With analyses of Baltic cultural history in
the background, she reviews the role of musical instruments in peasant society.
Folklore materials are discussed, paying particular attention to significant
motifs such as “golden kokles,” “God’s kokles,” “singing
bones,” ornamental patterns, etc. Musical instruments have played a vital
role in Baltic nationalistic movements; the same is true in respect to cultural
life in emigrant communities.
The Lithuanian scholar
Marija Baltrėnienė has prepared a publication in two volumes on
Lithuanian folk music instruments (1980). The first volume deals with the
historiography of Lithuanian instruments and with their modernization, including
an extensive list of names of instruments and a good bibliography. Aerophones,
chordophones, membranophones and idiophones are presented in the second volume,
in a sequence similar to that of the Atlas of Musical Instruments of the
Peoples Inhabiting the USSR. Baltrėnienė outlines the construction, musical
properties, tuning, use, and history of each instrument, paying particular
attention to their modernization and utilization in the musical scene between
the 1950s and 1970s. There are no pictures included and only a few musical
examples appear at the end, yet still the two volumes summarize organological
knowledge and provide sufficient detail.
The first book devoted
solely to Latvian musical instruments is the work of Īrisa Priedīte What
They Played in the Olden Days (Priedīte 1983). This work sums up most
published facts and stories about Latvian instruments and their groups. New
information, particularly from the archive of the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum,
is included, especially about instrument makers, players and their ensembles.
The pub’s role in the development of rural music traditions is shown. It
should be added that the information published about Latvian instruments in the
New Grove’s dictionary is mostly compiled by Lilija Zobens from
Īrisa Priedīte’s book (New Grove 1984). Lilija Zobens seems to
have compiled most Estonian articles as well except that about kannel, which was written by the
Estonian folklorist Ingrid Rüütel. Lithuanian materials were written
by the Lithuanian organologist Arvydas Karaška.
Īrisa
Priedīte’s book is substantially analysed in two articles by Karl
Brambats, published in the journal Latvju mūzika (Brambats 1987, 1988).
Disputing the theoretical basis and the classification used by Priedīte,
Brambats lays out contemporary standards for such a work in his review.
Regional, cultural and other parallels are given for the most important or
problematic instruments and their groups, so that Karl Brambats’ work can
be regarded as new, significant research in Latvian organology.
Īrisa Priedīte
discusses particular problems in the ethnography of musical instruments in
several publications (1984, 1985, 1992). Summing up information from all
museums in Latvia, she has prepared two significant catalogues: Folk Music
Instruments
(1988) and Zithers and Their Makers (1993). The first catalogue presents all
categories of instruments, together with archaeological findings, while the
second deals with zithers and zither-like kokles, along with references and
descriptions from the scientific archive of the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum.
Those two catalogues were compiled almost a century after the first of their
kind was published (Plutte 1896), indicating the changes that Latvian
organology has undergone.
An authority on Estonian
organology, Igor Tõnurist, began his studies on musical instruments of
the Estonian and Baltic regions with his graduation thesis, On the Problem
of the Origin of gusli
and kantele
(1969). In
the next years, a series of articles followed on various organological
subjects.2 A selection of his works (translated into Estonian if
this was not the original language) was collected into a single volume in 1996,
with German summaries accompanying each article.
On the whole, Igor
Tõnurist focused on musical life in Estonian villages and did excellent
work that studied instruments from the viewpoint of musical ethnography. He
used extensive historical and ethnographical materials from Estonia and
neighbouring regions, thus drawing conclusions that are significant to the
general study of Baltic instruments. This pertains particularly to the scheme
of how two basic types of kannel-kokles have emerged and developed.
Antoher Estonian
organological study that should be mentioned here was compiled by the
musicologist U. Haasma on the goat horn and its music (1986). Having described
instruments, players and use, he then focuses on analyses of recorded goat horn
tunes.
Valdis Muktupāvels has
studied the problems of classification, use and semantics, playing, etc., of
Latvian musical instruments since the early 1980s. In his work Folk Music
Instruments in the Territory of the Latvian SSR (1987), he classified
Latvian instruments according to the system of Hornbostel and Sachs and
described them according to the scheme developed by Oskár Elschek and Erich
Stockmann. In several articles he has discussed traditional functions,
symbolism and semantics of instrument use (Klotiņš &
Muktupāvels 1985, 1989; Muktupāvels 1986, 1991a, 1993a).
Muktupāvels has also published more generalized reviews for teaching
purposes (Muktupāvels 1988, 1991b, Avramecs & Muktupāvels 1997)
or for popular publications (Muktupāvels 1993b, 1998), the latter written
in the English language. A review of what has been written and published about
traditional musical instruments in Latvia, “Historiography of Latvian
Musical Instruments,” has appeared in the scholarly magazine Letonica (Muktupāvels 1999). A
brief chapter on instruments is included in the article on Latvian music in the
European volume of the Garland Encyclopaedia of World Music (2000).
In his review of Latvian
ethnomusicology, Martin Boiko discusses in a general outline the most
significant organological developments as well from the end of the 19th century
to the early 1990s (Boiko 1994). He also clearly shows, incidentally, that the
study of traditional vocal music has dominated the field of Latvian
ethnomusicology, and that the considerable accomplishments in the area of
organology are the results of individual, rather than institutionalized,
activities.
In collaboration with
colleagues, the prominent Swedish scholar, publisher and photographer Per-Ulf
Allmo published an extensive study on bagpipes in northern Europe (1990). A
chapter written by Bo Nyberg is devoted to Estonian-Swedish piping traditions,
and in it he describes instruments, music, players, and historical facts in
detail. The chapter on Finnish and Baltic piping contains historical as well as
contemporary materials on Estonia, including quite a bit on Latvia.
The most extensive and
general work on Lithuanian instruments is the 1991 book by Marija Baltrėnienė
and Romualdas Apanavičius entitled Lithuanian Traditional Musical
Instruments.
Formally, the sequence of the instrument categories follow here that of
Hornbostel and Sachs, but in fact two more categories are added: 1) objects
utilized as musical instruments and lesser known instruments and 2) foreign and
classical instruments. It is difficult to understand the criteria according to
which the instruments are classified into Hornbostel and Sachs’
categories or into these two added categories. The reader is expected to simply
accept the fact that the jew’s harp, zither, hammered dulcimer, violin,
bagpipe or concertina are “borrowed” or “classical”
instruments, while the modernized wooden cowbell-xylophone, concert kanklės or
“elaborated” clarinets are treated as traditional rural
instruments. Nevertheless, descriptions of each instrument are as thorough as
possible, and, together with previously published information, substantial
amounts of new material from museum collections and archives are used. In
addition, the book contains many photos, musical examples and spectrograms of
selected instruments.
A significant study of the
traditional kanklės has been made by a group of authors led by Romualdas
Apanavičius (Apanavičius & Alenskas, et al., 1990, 1994). Such
aspects as typology, provenance, terminology and chronology are discussed,
treating as well the ritual use of instruments and the ethnic backgrounds of
players. The authors define three basic types of kanklės and determine their
distribution in the eastern Baltic as being arranged in three geographical
regions that are longitudinally oriented. Kanklės and the players of
different Lithuanian ethnographic regions are characterized in detail, focusing
upon the playing traditions, technology and repertoires.
Issues involving the
instruments of the kannel-kokles-kanklės group have been treated in
a series of symposia that has been held every third year since 1991.
Proceedings of the second symposium in Vilnius were published in a brochure
(Kanklės 1994), thus making it possible to follow the main research
interests and directions.
In a series of works,
Romualdas Apanavičius has studied the relationship between the
ethnogenesis of the Baltic peoples and the provenance of musical instruments
(1992, 1994, 1997). On the one hand, without defining the conceptual basis of
the approach, correlations between archaeological cultures and traditional
musical styles or instrumentarium are rather disputable. On the other, the
study draws our attention towards some neglected or only hesitantly approached
problems, such as the stylistic and generic strata of instrumental music in the
Baltic and in neighboring regions, the functions of instrumental music in
village community life and rituals, etc. The subsequent comparative study of
instruments in northern Europe appeared in the collection of essays, Ritual
and Music
(Apanavičius 1999). This study focuses on the instruments played during
calendar celebrations and rituals; besides describing the functions of
instruments, some mythology motifs and ethymological considerations are also
discussed. Two more interesting organological studies are included in this 1999
collection: Gaila Kirdienė’s article (1999) on Lithuanian fiddle music
in wedding rites and ceremonies and Gvidas Vilys’s article (1999) on
percussion plaques used for ritual signaling in Lithuania and northeastern
Europe.
Chapters dealing with all
categories of Lithuanian instruments are included in the illustrated
encyclopaedia Musical Instruments of the World (Vyčinas 1999).
Together with short commentaries on most Lithuanian instruments, about 50
drawings are included.
The following review of
musical instruments and instrumental music in the Baltic focuses on the functionality
of instruments and their semantics. Though each particular instrument has one
or several characteristic applications, there is usually one dominating
function. From this viewpoint, some general functional groups can be
distinguished within Baltic peasant society: 1) instruments and music
accompanying a community’s economic (basically herding) activities, 2)
instruments and music of social events (e.g., calendar festivities and family
celebrations), as well as of religious practices, 3) instruments and music of
contemplation and 4) dance music instruments. Signaling music pertains to
several of these groups—specifically, 1, 2, and 4—and therefore has
not been treated separately.
Herding activities are
closely related to the use of different musical instruments, mostly aerophones,
as well as idiophones. Wooden or metal cowbells (krapp, kell EE, koka zvans,
grebulis, skrabals, govju zvans, govs pulkstenis LV, skrabalas, varpelis LT) are tied onto the
cows’ necks. The animals can thus signal their location, especially when
in forested pastures, and the sound of a ringing bell is also meant to frighten
away wolves and evil spirits. Wooden bells are carved out of a single piece of
hard wood and have one to five hanging wooden clappers inside. Metal bells are
made of brass or bronze plates, with a hanging metal clapper inside.
Several simple aerophones
are used mostly for amusement during herding, for instance whistles and some pipes
and reeds, whereas horns, birch bark or wooden trumpets are tools of the senior
shepherd. Single-pitched whistles (pajupill EE, svilpe, svelpīte,
dūda LV, švilpukas LT) are made of a willow or osier branch; they have a
wooden block (or fibble) at one end, while the other is stopped. A
“piston-type” whistle with sliding stopper is also known. In making
the whistle, a kind of “symbolic” or “magic” technology
is applied: a spell is chanted during the loosening of bark from the branch.
Vessel-shaped whistles without fingerholes or with one to six fingerholes (savipiilu,
pardipill EE, svilpaunieks, pīlīte LV, molinukas LT) are made of clay in the
form of a bird, horse or devil; birdsong imitations or playful variations of
simple motifs are played on these. Pipes (vilepill EE, stabule LV,
lamzdelis, vamzdelis, dūdelė LT) are made either of bark or wood. The time
of year for making bark pipes is late spring and early summer, when it is
possible to “twist off” the bark from 20- to 50-cm-long, straight
branches. A block from the same branch is inserted in one end, and three to six
fingerholes are cut. Bark pipes, about 50 to 70 cm long and without
fingerholes, are used as overtone instruments; the playing technique involves
overblowing, combined with the stopping and opening of the end hole with a
finger. An open pipe without the block and with three or four fingerholes is
known in Estonia. Wooden flutes are made of different kinds of wood, mostly
ash-tree, apple-tree, maple or lime. The end with the block may be cut flat or
may have a nose-like shape. These flutes are 25 to 45 cm long and often have
six fingerholes on the upper side and one beneath. Clay flutes are made in
eastern Latvia and Lithuania, while archaeological bone flutes mostly from the
10th to 17th centuries have been found throughout the Baltic region. The style
of the known flute or pipe tunes is purely instrumental, and not an
instrumental version of vocal or dance music. In some cases short tetrachordic
or pentatonic motifs are repeated with variations.
To make simple clarinets (roopill
EE, birbīne, niedru stabule, dūde, spendele LV, birbynė,
dūdelė, plunksna, šiaudelis LT), straw, reed, wooden branch or
bird’s feathers are used. An idioglot reed is cut close to the stopped
end and two to five fingerholes can be made. These instruments are mainly used
by young shepherds for entertainment, whereas more solid instruments are looked
upon as useful for supporting the herding process. This latter status can be
attributed to a kind of hornpipe: this is a wooden clarinet with a heteroglot
reed on one end, a cow-horn on the other, and with three to six fingerholes (sarvepill
EE, ganurags, birbīne LV, birbynė, trūba su parputu, klernetas
LT). This
is a tool of the senior shepherd, who uses it to collect his herd, to direct it
to pasture and to communicate with other shepherds. Hornpipes may be used for
amusement as well; birdsong imitations, song tunes or free improvisations are
played on it.
Trumpets (karjapasun,
tõri, tõru EE, taure, strumpe, trūba LV, trimitas,
triūba LT)
are made either of bark or wood, and two different technologies exist for their
production. In the first, a band of alder or birch bark is rolled up to make a
conical tube about 60–70 cm long. A wooden needle is pierced through the
broad end to hold the roll tight, while the narrow end is cut even, or a wooden
mouthpiece is inserted into it. It is usual to supply the bark trumpet (lepatoru
EE, ganutaure LV, žievės triūba LT) with a single heteroglot
reed, in which case the instrument is side-blown and is characterized by a loud
and far-reaching tone. To make a wooden trumpet, a slender trunk is sawn
longitudinally and each half is hollowed out. Both halves are then put back
together and fastened with bast (or other natural fibers) or with birch bark,
which is tightly rolled around the two halves. The length of wooden trumpets
may vary considerably, from 45 cm to almost 2 m. The trumpet is an important
instrument of the senior shepherd; it is played early in the morning to collect
the herd, but especially in the afternoon, when driving the herd home. The
trumpet sound signals the location of the herd and the shepherd, and it is
believed that wolves keep away from the herd as long as they hear the trumpet.
Bark trumpets are predominantly single-tone instruments, but it is possible to
vary the intonation considerably through the player’s lips. Wooden
trumpets are overtone instruments, and sequences of longer and shorter overtone
motifs are available to the player. A relatively short wooden trumpet (ingeri
karjapasun EE)
with fingerholes is known in northeastern Estonia, where Ingrian Finns lived.
The instrument, with its four to six fingerholes, is suitable for playing
certain dance tunes.
Horns are made of different
animal materials, including goat, cow, ox and others, but the most important is
the goat horn (sikusarv, sokusarv, pukasarv, lutusarv, karjasarv, luik,
karjaluik EE, āžrags, bukarags, čučarags, dūduls LV,
ožragis, tirlitas LT). The narrow end is cut off and a mouthhole is hollowed, then
usually three to four fingerholes are bored or burned out. Intense lip pressure
is needed to play it, and the sound is strong and piercing, thus heard at a
good distance. The goat horn is used to play definite tunes that serve as a
message concerning, for instance, a lost cow. Also, the shepherd who is the
first to drive the herd out into the pasture informs others by playing a tune,
and an antiphonal response may follow from the other shepherds. The instrument
is played to keep wild animals away from the herd, as well as for herding. Its
harsh tone is supposed to have some magical power, and it may be used to
protect the herd from beasts and evil spirits. In addition, goat horns have
been documented as accompaniment to the scattering of manure onto the fields: a
slow-tempo, eight-bar period is played by all while driving their fully loaded
carts onto the field, and a fast response is played by those who have finished
their unloading first.
Clappers are instruments
used both in herding and in hunting. There are significant variations in form,
but quite often they are made as a rectangular birch, ash-tree or maple plaque
with a handle fastened to the middle of one surface and one to three freely
swinging wooden hammers on the other. When the clapper (klabata, klaburis,
talakans LV, kleketas, klebeda, pliauškutis LT) is held by the handle and
shaken, the hammers move to and fro, striking the tablet and producing a loud
clatter. This instrument is carried by shepherds from the first day of letting
the herd onto the pasture and throughout the entire season. Its sound scares
wolves, so that shepherds feel much safer with it at their side.
Various clappers are beaten
during hunting, usually a wooden plaque hung from the player’s neck and
beaten with two clapper-sticks, but beating trees with wooden poles is also
practiced. Also, cog rattles (käristi EE, tarkšķis,
tarkšans LV, tarškutis, terkšlė LT) are used, but their
primary function is rather to frighten away moles and birds from gardens and
fields.
Another kind of clapper,
consisting of a wooden plaque hung from a crossbeam and fastened to two
vertical poles, plays a special role in Baltic traditional life. This clapper (lokulaud,
kloba EE, klabata, briesmu dēlis, klabis, klangas LV, tabalas, kleketa LT) is used for a different
kind of signaling: it calls workers from the field for lunch or dinner and
announces the beginning or end of communal work in the fields, as well as
weddings. The different signals commonly have local associations, and one
extremely important signal is the call for help, especially in the case of fire
or some such disaster.
A unique phenomenon,
localized in northeastern Lithuania, is an ensemble of homogeneous aerophones.
A typical instrument in this case is a set of individual, end-blown,
single-tone pipes (skudučiai, skurdučiai, daudytės, skudai,
tutuklės, tūteklės LT). These pipes have one end open and the other
stopped, and are made either of tubular plants (cow parsley, Angelica
silvestris, Angelica archangelica, reed, elder), of lime-tr
ee, willow bark, or of a
tree (ash-tree, alder, osier) branch. The set consists of five to eight pipes,
with their length ranging from 8 cm to 20 cm, and their tuning is based on a
whole-tone sequence (for instance, b-flat, c1, d1, e1,
f1, g1, a1, b1-flat). Separate
pipes are similar to those of the panpipe, but there is a basic difference
between these: the pipes of skudučiai are never fastened together. Instead, each
player takes one or (more seldom) two pipes, and plays these in a group of five
or more players. The musical form, named sutartinė, consists of
polyphonically woven rhythmic lines, and each line is a repeated rhythmic
formula, complementary to formulas played by the others. As a result, an
endless musical cloth is created with major seconds or tone clusters as the
dominant harmonies. The playing of skudučiai is related to certain
situations, such as the celebration of shepherds’ spring holiday, or when
several shepherds are herding in close vicinity (as many as 25 shepherds have
been documented as playing together; Baltrėnienė &
Apanavičius 1991:77). Other occasions when skudučiai is played include the
nightwatch of horses, haymaking in meadows, relaxation during communal work in
the fields and at the following party and as entertainment on Saturday or
Sunday night. The skudučiai players are mostly men, but women and children can
participate as well.
Another instrument of
homogeneous ensembles in northeastern Lithuania is a set of five trumpets (ragai,
dūdytos, triūbos LT) of different lengths, within a range of
58–120 cm. The instruments are made in such a way that the second and
third harmonics can be easily played, and each player uses two tones, making
the interval of a fifth. The musical form sutartinė, played on ragai, is similar to that of skudučiai. The only difference
between them is that, instead of two pipes in one player’s hands, two
overtones of one instrument are used. Ragai are played in the spring
(when the first furrow is ploughed) and when the shepherds’ spring
holiday is celebrated; in the summer they are played when returning from the
nightwatch of horses, during haymaking, rye harvesting and during entertainment
for young people.
A curious situation of two
disparate groups of instruments—goat horns and bagpipes—playing
together has been reported at least once: when the Russian crown prince visited
Liepāja, musicians from the Suiti region of west Kurland played seven with
bagpipes and eight with goat horns (Jurjāns 1892).
Instrumental music is
played little in the context of annual festivities, and the use of instruments
as music producers is somehow overwhelmed by other uses and contexts that
become more significant, such as magic, signaling, and other specific kinds of
communication. This is the case when noise becomes an important component in
the soundscape of the special days of the yearly cycle. Hence, there is no
denying the importance of noise-producing tools in calendar festivities.
Christmastime is
accompanied with masked mummers’ processions, and an indispensable
acoustic component of these, in addition to singing and screaming, is the use
of clappers and rattles. Mummers generally use harness bells (kell EE,
zvans, pulkstenis LV, varpas LT) and tinklers (kuljused, aisakellad EE,
zvārguļi, zvādzenu josta, treikuly LV, žvangučiai LT), as well as household
utilities like metal vessels, brushes, wooden spoons and scrapers. A stick
rattle (eglīte LV) is used in Kurland; it is made of a fir tree as tall as a
man, with the bottom branches removed and the top branches hung with tinklers
and decorated with colored cloth strips and possibly a small bottle of
home-brewed liquor. The senior mummer holds the stick rattle in his hand and
stomps the floor with it.
Clappers with handles and
clappers hung on the player’s neck are intensely used during the Shrove
Tuesday mummers’ procession, together with cog wheels, pans and scrapers.
On Holy Thursday and Good Friday, the ringing of bells in Catholic churches in
Lithuania and southeastern Latvia is traditionally replaced by the beating of
clappers. Curt Sachs believes the latter tradition originated in the medieval
Catholic church, having derived from pre-Christian fertility rites. It was set
down in the first Ordo Romanus, the oldest ritual book of the Roman church, which
was definitely in use before the 9th century (Sachs 1930:29). In Baltic
churches different kinds of clappers with handles are used, and it seems that
hung percussion plaques beaten with wooden hammers are unknown. A custom that
was practiced in Lithuania and perhaps in Latvia’s Catholic regions until
disappearing during the late 19th century involved the kettle drum (vara
bungas, paupenes LV, katilas, būgnas LT). This instrument was placed in middle of a
churchyard and, beginning on Holy Thursday (when not only bell ringing but also
organ playing were forbidden), all were permitted to play it. Easter morning
was notorious for the ritual noise that is produced with the help of different
devices: trumpets, horns, clappers, cogwheels, drums and even guns.
Pipes, trumpets and horns
are heard on spring and summer holidays such as St. George’s Day, Whitsun
and St. John’s Day, which is the midsummer solstice celebration. Two
musical instruments of Jāņi (the Latvian midsummer festivity) are
depicted in dozens of Latvian folk songs. The names of these instruments are
“copper trumpet” (vara taure LV) and “copper
drum” (vara bungas LV), but contrary to the frequent occurrence of these
names in folklore texts, almost nothing is known about their actual appearance
and use. Reasons behind this contradiction have been the object of some
speculation (Jurjāns 1879; Brambats 1969; Braun 1971, 1975;
Muktupāvels 1991a), yet this problem is far from being solved, and I would
like to concur with Karl Brambats’s opinion that the “metal
trumpet” and the “metal drum” are the most puzzling
instruments related to Latvian folk songs (Brambats 1969:44).
Horns (sarv EE, rags LV,
ragas LT),
with a metal mouthpiece and bronze or silver fittings, as well as trumpets are
used for signaling, particularly to announce a forthcoming wedding and to
signal important moments of the wedding ritual. Goat horns are played during
matchmaking ceremonies; thanks to its role as a messenger of the initiation of
sexual relations, the goat horn has obtained a clearly defined phallic
symbolism in folklore texts.
The making and playing of
instruments, except for shepherds’ instruments, are basically men’s
business. However, there is a group of stick rattles (eglīte,
ērkulis, trīdeksnis, puškaitis, kāzu puķe, trumulis LV) in Latvia, basically in
its western region, which are used mostly by women at weddings. These include
the trīdeksnis, an iron stick with hanging bells and jingles and with a short
wooden handle, the eglīte, a fir-tree top decorated with colored feathers
and with hanging bells and jingles, and the puškaitis, a wooden stick, 20 to 40
cm long, heavily decorated with colored feathers, strips of cloth, and with
bells. The acts of making and playing these instruments are highly ritualized
and contain traces of archaic ritual mythology. The metaphysical importance of
the materials used exemplify this: the sticks are made of fir-tree, which is an
evergreen and therefore charged with life and fertility energies. Only cock
feathers are accepted for decoration, and this is in accordance with
traditional mythology, which treats cocks as a representation of time-cycles,
fertility powers and sexuality. Stick rattles are used to accompany ceremonial
singing in wedding rituals: the rhythm is marked by hitting a table surface
with a stick.
A kind of stick rattle
played at weddings by men is an iron hammer with jingles fastened to the handle
(čakans, čagans, čakārnis LV). A table surface is
struck by the hammer rattle as an accompaniment to ritual singing, but the
hammer rattle is used also for some ritual accents, such as for drawing a cross
sign above doors. Also, stick rattles (džingulis, kvieslė,
kvietka, maršelga LT) are well known in western and central Lithuania. The stick is
120 to 140 cm long and made of rowan-tree, which is believed to be good for
countermagic. Coloured strips of cloth, girdles and a bell or jingles are
attached to it. The stick rattle lies in the hand of a special person—a
kind of master of ceremony—whose main duty is to reinforce the invitation
to the invited guests by greeting them personally, and the rattle is used to
announce their arrival. By pounding the instrument on the floor, ceremony
master attracts the attention of participants and initiates some activity like
present-giving, ceremonial meals or dancing.
Wedding and Christmas
celebrations are occasions when one can expect uninvited guest—that is,
travelling beggars—to appear. As a rule, they are expected to sing a
so-called “God’s song” before they are offered food. This
singing may be accompanied by the hurdy-gurdy (rataslüüra EE, rata
lira LV, jurana, ryla, ratukynė lyra LT), though this instrument is actually only
sparsely diffused in the Baltic region. A 16th-century engraving from Sebastian
Münster’s Cosmographey, suggests the use of hurdy-gurdy for urban popular
music in Livonia.
An instrument whose origins
are strongly linked to musical practices in northern Protestant countries is
the monochord (moldpill, laulupill, laulukannel, harmoonik EE,
ģīga, ģingas, džindžas, manihorka, meldiņu
spēle, akerdonis LV, manikarka LT). It is said to have been reinvented by the
Swedish Lutheran pastor Johannes Dillner in 1829 based on the Greek monochord.
Swedish authorities approved the monochord’s use as a simple and
easy-to-make instrument in parishes that did not possess their own church
organ. Since it aided the learning and accompaniment of sung psalms, it was
named “psalmodicon.” The instrument was actively propagated from the 1830s
to the 1860s, and it spread, in addition to Scandinavia and Finland, throughout
Estonia, the Lutheran regions of Latvia and the western Lutheran region of
Lithuania. The psalmodicon was above all a church musical instrument, but
apart from that context, it also turned out to be good for use in secular
musical activities such as choral singing, music education and even to produce
dance music.
The most characteristic and
significant instrument in Baltic traditional music is the plucked zither or
psaltery (kannel EE, kokles, kūkles LV, kanklės, kanklys,
kankliai, kunkliai LT).
This instrument is related to similar ones in nearby areas, such as the Finnish
kantele,
the Karelian kandeleh, and the gusli from northwestern Russia. Two different groups of
psaltery exist: 1) the older, smaller instruments with an uninterrupted
tradition of at least one thousand years, and 2) the new, larger instruments
that emerged about the mid-19th century or earlier, which assume several
features of German or Austrian box zithers.
The old smaller instruments
form a separate, morphological original group of zithers. The body is carved
from a single wooden plank, to which an ornamented soundboard is added. Steel,
bronze or natural fiber strings, numbering five to twelve, are tuned with the
help of wooden pegs. The strings are positioned slightly radially, not
parallel, and are free—that is, there is no bridge connecting them with
the resonator.
Several distinct local
musical styles of Baltic psaltery are known. One of the so-called “primitive”
styles—instrumental sutartinės for kanklės—is performed in
northeastern Lithuania, in approximately the same territory as that of vocal
polyphony and of ensembles of aerophones. Typically, five-stringed instruments
are played, and various scales of a diatonically filled fifth are used for the
tuning. Unlike vocal sutartinės, in which the polyphony is clearly heard, kanklės versions of sutartinės reveal their polyphonic
character only through an analysis of transcribed examples. The listener hears
only repeating periods, with a texture of pulsating parallel seconds. This
music is contemplative and used to be played at home just for the player
him/herself at an appropriate time, such as the evening, when general calmness
sets in. A proper result of sutartinė playing should be the feeling of church
bells ringing in the musician’s head. To intensify the effect created by
the sutartinė,
the instrument could be placed on a table surface or, more seldom, on the
player’s chest or stomach while s/he lies in bed.
The reference to church bells
is important for the Estonian kannel playing of the Setumaa area. Names of local
Orthodox churches or monasteries are extended to musical compositions,
suggesting the reflection of their particular chimes in kannel pieces. The resulting
musical texture is a pulsating alternation of two basic chords with rhythmic or
melodic variations.
A significant feature of
Kurland kokles
tradition is the presence of instrumental drone: the longest string is tuned
one-fourth below the tonic and is often plucked or touched during play. This
string has a special name in Latvian: dziedātāja, “the singer.”
Also, the drone function of the longest string can be observed in eastern
Latvia, Setumaa and southwestern Lithuanian traditions. The tuning of the
Latvian kokles
is a diatonic scale, thus, for the seven-string instrument, a1, g1,
f1, e1, d1, c1, g. When played, it
is placed on a table or on the player’s knees. A special damping
technique is used: some strings are damped with fingers of the left hand; when
the strings are plucked with the right hand, only undamped strings produce
tone, while some slight-beat notes are picked up with the left hand fingers.
While the known kokles’ repertoire contains mostly
dance tunes and in a few cases song melodies, the instrument is not used for
dance accompaniment and only seldom for song accompaniment. Again, the purpose
of kokles
playing seems to be contemplation, for the aesthetic experience of the player
and those who happen to be nearby.
Its Apollonic, heavenly
aura and fine, deeply moving tone quality have made the kannel/kokles/kanklės instrument a symbol for
the national music of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, respectively.
Psaltery-playing traditions had declined by the end of the 19th century,
although five- to twelve-stringed instruments could be heard in some remote Baltic
regions until the second half of the 20th century.
Influenced by a variety of
imported German and Austrian zithers, new hybrid forms of the Baltic psaltery
developed in the second half of the 19th century (kannel, simmel, simbel EE,
kokle, cītara, cīters, cimbole LV, kanklės, citra LT). The body of the new
zither-like instruments is glued together from smaller parts, and special ribs
are introduced to withstand the increased tension of the strings, which range
from 17 to 33 in number (though if doubled or tripled, up to 90). Metal pegs
are used instead of wooden ones; strings are parallel to each other, and a
bridge connects them with the resonator. The drone string dziedātāja has been lost, but two to
three bass strings have been added instead.
The new zither-like kannel/kokle/kanklės is enthusiastically used
to accompany singing and to play dance music. An ensemble of two or more
zithers is typical throughout most of Estonia and in the northern part of
Latvia, and instruments are sometimes played while lying directly on a wooden
floor, thus increasing their sonority. It is quite usual to play zither
together with other instruments, such as violins, the concertina, and others.
Traditional life offers
many opportunities for rhythmically and aesthetically organized body movements
or dancing, and as a rule instrumental music is an essential element of such
situations. Some Latvian folksong texts refer to trivial accompaniments to
dancing—handclapping, feet stomping or whistling—as being superior
to instrumental playing. In fact, though, this is a mere poetic indication of
an unmarried girl’s freedom, which is superior to the status of the
married woman; here, instrumental playing unambiguously connotes the wedding.
Compared to the music of
the shepherd, for signaling, or for contemplation, playing for dance requires a
higher level of professionalism. In addition to technical skills, this suggests
a good knowledge of repertoire and the ability to control situations, as the
musician acts to a certain degree as a master of ceremony. Solo playing
traditionally was preferred at weddings, and, if there were two or more
musicians, they played in turn, replacing each other when tired, whereas pub or
open-air dancing required bands of a certain size. Historically, the role of
dance music bands increased dramatically by the end of the 19th century, and
different ensembles have dominated dance music making since then.
Many historical and other
sources of the 16th to 18th centuries, led first by Sebastian
Münster’s Cosmographey, bear witness to the predominating position of the
bagpipe (torupill, kottpill, lõõtspill, kitsepill EE,
dūdas, somu dūdas, dūdu pūslis, dūkas, stabules, somas
stabules, soms, kulenes LV, dūdmaišis, dūda raginė, Labanoro
dūda, murenka, ūkas, kulinė su ūku, kulinė LT) and of so-called
“drone music” in Livonian rural and urban musical life. Lithuanian
and eastern Latvian materials seem to be more modest.
Generally, a bagpipe
consists of one bag, a chanter, one or two drones, and a mouthpipe for
inflating the bag. Bellows are used quite seldom. Chanter and drones have
single reeds, mostly idioglot and made of a reed or feather. There are six or
seven fingerholes, and no overblowing is used. Drone pipes decorated with inlaid
bronze or copper metalwork and wooden bells in the form of a curved horn on top
of both chanter and drones are characteristic for Lithuanian bagpipes and can
also be seen on two examples of southeast Latvian instruments. Bags are made of
the skin of sheep, goat, lynx, dog, cat, or of the stomach of a cow or sheep. A
peculiarity of Estonian and Latvian seaside villages is the “seal’s
stomach,” by which the bag is made of the stomach of a grey seal. Most
bagpipes in Latvian museums have sheepskin with wool inside. Also, the bladder
of an ox or a pig is used.
It has been documented that
piping began with a kind of rhythmically free prelude or “call” (uzsaukums
LV) and
finished with short trilling. Special tuning pieces, sung with text, are known
in Estonia. Throughout the Baltic, bagpipes were mostly used for playing dance
music, especially at weddings. The bagpiper was also in charge of music for
certain ceremonies, such as processions, riding, bringing the dowry chest,
giving presents, invitations to meals, the first dance of the bride, and
general dancing. Some ceremonial dances, such as the “round dance”
(voortants EE, apaļdancis LV), were performed together with a bagpiper, who
walked at the head of the column. Bagpipe music, accompanied by ritual singing,
is described in Latvian weddings of the 1780s. Numerous Latvian folk song texts
mention bagpipes with drums as wedding instruments; the frequent occurrence of
such an ensemble might be the result of a Livonian law of the 16th to 17th
centuries that stated that “non-Germans,” that is, Latvians and
Estonians, could use only (bag)pipes and drums as their wedding instruments.
Between the 17th and 19th
centuries, bagpipers (torupillimees EE, dūdinieks, stabulnieks LV,
dūdorius LT)
were in demand at festivities, weddings and other celebrations, at revelry
accompanying work in the fields and at fairs. In 1777 the Baltic German
historian and publicist August Wilhelm Hupel described bagpipes as the most
beloved musical instrument of Latvians and Estonians. Nevertheless, landlords
did not tolerate the noisiness of bagpipes, and piping was therefore restricted
and even prohibited by law. Thus, the use of bagpipes was restricted to smaller
celebrations in 1753, and from December 15, 1760 it was totally prohibited,
under threat of corporal punishment for the piper and a fine for the
responsible nobleman. At the same time, though, the bagpipe is mentioned in
several Christian texts as an instrument that pleased God, especially in the
first Latvian Bible, which was prepared by Ernst Glück between 1685 and
1691. Even in the 1825 edition of this Bible, the bagpipe is mentioned as an
instrument for praising God. It is not surprising that in neighbouring lands like
Denmark and Sweden, bagpipes appear in the hands of angels in old church wall
paintings.
On the whole, Baltic piping
traditions are not homogeneous; certain differences exist in construction,
style and repertoire. Livonian (Estonian and Latvian) instruments display more
similarity with Swedish and northern European bagpipes, whereas Lithuanian
instruments and the two known southeast Latvian specimens can be attributed to
central-eastern European tradition. Bagpiping gradually decreased in the first
half of the 20th century and was only practiced in a few places throughout the
Baltic: on the western Estonian mainland and the islands, in the Suiti region
of western Kurland and in eastern Lithuania.
An instrument
characteristic for western Estonia, and chiefly on its islands, is the bowed
lyre (hiiu kannel, rootsi kannel EE) with three to four horsehair or gut strings. It
was used in Swedish communities in Estonia and on the western coastal region
and can be regarded as a variation of the Swedish stråkharpa or talharpa. Its name, “Swedish
kannel” (which is the English translation of “rootsi
kannel”),
is also indicative of the “Swedish origin” of this instrument. When
played, the instrument is held on the knees with the tuning pegs turned
upwards. The player inserts his fingers through the frame into the upper part
of the lyre and between the strings, pressing upon these with the nail or with
the backs of his fingers. By bowing back and forth, two strings are
simultaneously set into motion, resulting in a melody with a drone. Mainly
dance music was played, but the use of bowed lyre for psalm accompaniment was
known as well.
The jew’s harp (parmupill,
konnapill, suupill, mokapill, suukannel EE, vargas, vargāns, biuvas, zobu
spēles, bandura, duceklis LV, bandūrėlis, bindurėlis,
dambras, šeivelė-kanklikė LT) in the Baltic can be regarded as a popular
instrument, but with irregular application. Its repertoire mostly consists of
dance tunes, and the instrument was historically used for the accompaniment of
dancing, either solo or with other instruments such as the violin, frame drum,
triangle and harmonica. It should be noted that the jew’s harp was used
as a dance music solo instrument only in the absence of other instruments. A
kind of programmatic music was performed on the jew’s harp in Estonia,
for example, such compositions as “The lark” or “The chimes
of London.”
The history of the
jew’s harp in the Baltic began in the 13th century, and numerous
archaeological findings of the 13th to 18th centuries witness to its popularity
in Estonia and Latvia, though less in Lithuania. Such instruments have been
mostly found in the direct vicinity of medieval castles, which might explain
some aspects of early history and provenance in the region. Jew’s harps
were forged by local smiths, and even at the end of the 19th century they were
still produced in large numbers.
Various kinds of bladder
fiddles (põispill, umba EE, dūda, pūšļa vijole,
mazā basīte LV, pūslinė, bandurka, boselis, dambra,
lankelis, lankas su pūsle LT) are quite characteristic throughout the Baltic.
The common instrument has a one- to 1.5-m-long wooden corpus in the form of a
stick or a long narrow plank, one or two gut strings and a pig bladder inserted
between the corpus and the strings. Two basic forms are known: the flexible
musical bow and the rigid stick or plank. On the musical bow, the pitch is
changed by pressing the upper end of the instrument downwards and then
releasing the pressure, while in the case of the rigid stick, the strings are
pressed against the fingerboard, or only the free strings are sounded with the
help of a horsehair bow. The low, rough and uncertain tone of the bladder
fiddle makes it in dance music ensembles the instrument with a predominantly
rhythmic function. Though some authors (e.g., Slaviūnas,
Baltrėnienė, Apanavičius, Priedīte) tend to ascribe
ancient, local development to those instruments, it seems more reasonable to link
their provenance to medieval and later central European instruments such as the
German bumbass, which was particularly popular among German soldiers during
World War I (Tõnurist 1985a:273).
The spread of the violin (viiul,
kiik, kiigepill EE, vijole, pijole, pivole, skripka, spēles, smuikas LV,
smuikas, griežynė, muzika, skripka LT) in the Baltic lands
started probably in the second half of the 17th century. Gradually replacing
the old dance music instruments, especially bagpipes, and partly taking on
their repertoire, the violin became the most popular folk music instrument in
the 19th century and later. Significant is how the Latvian newspaper Latviešu
avīzes wrote
about it in 1865: “Nowadays they dance to violins, in those earlier days,
to bagpipes.” For some time during the 18th and 19th centuries, bagpipes
were played together with violins in Estonia. No doubt, violin playing was
influenced by its predecessor, and this may be the case with the use of a drone
technique. This technique involves playing the melody on one string and
simultaneously touching one or two free strings with the bow, thus producing a
drone accompaniment. Also, until the end of the 19th century the violin was
generally used as a solo instrument, and the fiddler (pillimees EE,
spēlmanis LV, smuikorius LT) enjoyed the status of a prominent person at
weddings.
From the second half of the
19th century on, fiddlers began to play in ensembles with other instruments.
These included the following:
1)
the
zither (tsitter, akordtsitter, akordkannel EE, cītara, cīters,
“dūru" cītara LV, citra LT);
2)
hammered
dulcimer (cimbole, cimbāle, cimbala LV, cimbolai LT);
3)
mandolina
(mandoliin EE, mandolīna LV, mandolina LT);
4)
guitar
(kitarr EE, ģitāre LV, gitara LT);
5)
double
bass (kontrabass EE, bass, base LV, basetlė, basedla, basas, bosas LT);
6)
concertina
(lõõtspill, bajaan EE, ermoņikas, gumžas,
garmoška LV, armonika, koncertina, bandonija LT);
7)
accordion
(akordion EE, akordeons LV, akordeonas LT);
8)
drums
(trumm EE, bungas, bubna LV, būgnas, būbnas, bubinas, kelmas LT);
9)
the
frame drum (puuben EE, bundziņas, sietiņš, bubyns, baubens
LV, būgnelis, bubinėlis, bubnelis LT) and other percussion
instruments.
Estonian ensembles of the
19th century were typically comprised of violin, the new kannel or zither and
concertina; a drum or frame drum could be added. Later in the 20th century it
was usual to reinforce strings by adding a double bass, guitar or mandolina,
and small wind instrument bands gained increasing popularity as well. The
situation was similar in central and northern Latvia, but in Kurland and
Livland the typical ensemble was generally made up of one or two violins,
double bass, some wind instrument and (always) a zither. Musicians themselves
recognized the violin and zither as the core instruments of the ensemble.
Eastern Latvian musicians preferred an ensemble of one or two violins together
with concertina, frame drum and/or hammered dulcimer. This is much the same as
in eastern Lithuania, and the lack of a zither seems to be a distinctive
characteristic of dance music ensembles in Catholic Latgale (except its
northwestern area) and Lithuania. Thus, a typical ensemble of central and
northern Lithuania comprises one or two violins, double bass, clarinet and
concertina. In southern Lithuania one or two violins are played together with
hammered dulcimer and frame drum, but a combination of two violins and double
bass is eagerly practiced as well.
1 This
article was prepared with financial support of the Latvian Culture Capital
Foundation.
2 Among
the most important of these articles are: “The Estonian Bagpipe”
(1976a), “Psalmodicon in Estonia” (on the Scandinavian influence on
Estonian folk music instruments) (1976b), “Where did they strum/ring on gusli?" (1977a), “Kannel from the land of Vepsa to the land of
Setu” (1977b), “Double Pipe of the Setus” (1980), “Folk
music instruments and ethnic-cultural ties among peoples inhabiting Eastern
Baltic” (1985a), “Estonian village musicians around the turn of
centuries” (1985b), “Musician in Estonian wedding” (1986),
“The pastoral musical instruments of the Finno-Ugric peoples”
(1990), “Jew’s harp in Estonia” (1991).
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