In the beginning was polyphony
Lithuanian folk singing and the deep history of music
First, listen to this:
This haunting song “Saulala sadina” (“The sun is setting”) is an example of the traditional Lithuanian vocal genre known as sutartinė. Typical features of these songs include:
Linear polyphony with frequent harmonic seconds between voices
Narrow range
Polyrhythm and syncopation
Two simultaneous texts
Alteration of meaningful text and nonsense syllables
Close intertwinement of music, text, and movement
Many of the songs are associated with stepping, bowing, and other “proto-dance” bodily movements. This can be seen in the video, where the singers bow in turn while singing, a practice derived from the tradition of bowing to the sun after harvesting rye. These songs were performed primarily by women, and became associated with witchcraft as the tradition declined.
These songs were first documented in the 16th century, but the Lithuanian musicologist Eirimas Velička has provocatively suggested that the sutartinė can be traced back to “Old Europe, before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans,” that is, before 3000 BCE. “The word sutartine is derived from the verb sutarti (to agree, to be in concordance, to arrange), which has a double meaning: both ethical and aesthetic.” (Velička, p. 3) The multiple parts — typically two, three, or four — are seen as being of equal importance. Note that although “Saulala Sadina” is technically a three-part sutartinė canon, only two voices are heard at a time.
Although there are no known parallels to the sutartinės in the music of neighboring cultures, similar polyphonic textures with close intervals (a “diaphony of seconds”) can be found around the world, for example, among the Ainu people of northern Japan and the Nuristan region of Afghanistan. Velička also relates the performance of instrumental sutartinės on psaltery, pan pipes, and wooden trumpets to the pan flute ensembles of the Solomon Islands and the wind bands of the Central African Baka.
Velička cites research suggesting that the seconds heard in sutartinė performances tend to be between a tone and a semitone (about 180 cents), evoking a sensation of “maximum roughness.” He later quotes another scholar who argues that ancient Lithuanians must have felt that the second was a consonance, since they used it so frequently. Here’s a potent little reminder that consonance and dissonance are anything but “acoustic facts,” and that they are living, buzzing realities long before (and after!) they become conceptually entombed in books of music theory.
These songs feature virtually all the techniques of polyphonic organization familiar from the early history of notated European counterpoint, “from unison and antiphon, bourdon and paraphony, to canon or free counterpoint.” Likewise, the rhythmic combination of the voices tends to explore every possible combination of metric feet, a complexity that arises out of a single melodic line that is canonically superimposed upon itself. (Velička, p. 8)
Lithuanian sutartines provide support for the argument that polyphony, far from being the uniquely distinguishing feature of modern European notated music, is in fact a widespread musical phenomenon developed in oral cultures throughout the world. Ethnomusicologists have known this for over a hundred years, but Eurocentric assumptions about musical and cultural complexity die hard. (My fascination with this thesis stems from its centrality in Ernst Ferand’s history of improvisation in European music, which I am in the midst of translating.)
Musing on the deep history of musical texture, Velička notes the fascinating theory, suggested by scholars Curt Sachs and Joseph Jordania, that polyphony actually preceded monophony in human music-making because—plausibly—its easier for a group of people to sing a bunch of different parts than to all sing the same thing: “It can be assumed that the ancestors of mankind already performed polyphonic music while they had not yet developed sufficient rhythmic synchronization and pitch-matching abilities to coordinate monophony.” (Velička, p. 9)
The development of polyphony—again, on a primarily oral/improvisational basis—thus appears central to the formation of human social and collective consciousness:
Intertwining voices are perceived not as two separate and independent melodic lines, but as a qualitatively new acoustic reality, where the totality of the sound is not a simple sum of individual melodic voices. […] During the performance, the individual consciousness of the singers seems to merge and dissolve into the group consciousness, thus creating a new, higher-level collective entity. These polyphonic songs require a collective performance experience, which is gained by singing together for a certain period of time. [Velička, p. 3]
All the voices of the sutartinės are equal and point to the egalitarian nature of the community of performers. Each individual voice in a sutartinė lacks the full meaning that the ensemble of all the voices creates. The performer of the songs has the experience of a ‘collective subject’. [Velička, p. 10]
Sources: Eirimas Velička (2024), “Lithuanian polyphonic songs sutartinės: The archaic nature of their musical language in the context of global music.” Fronters in Psychology 15:1285394. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1285394.