Today's singing tradition of Lithuanian polyphonic songs sutartinės: relations of Western and Eastern cultures

The dichotomy “East-West” is a philosophical concept of ancient origin. Despite the fact that East and West can be interpret and understood as a cultural hemisphere, it is necessary to talk about their commonalities and points of contact. In an article author notes, drawing on her many years of singing practice and scientific re-search, that the music of sutartinės is understood not as a mix of different vocal parties, but as a sounding pulsat-ing space. In this sense, sutartinės are close to minimalistic—music and visual art—works which are character-ised by the multiple repetition of elements, their severity and precision. In performing sutartinės, just like East-ern traditional music, one characteristic is to, through controlled emotion, “enter” one certain state and remain in it for a long time. Speaking about sutartinės, the author discusses old Lithuanian relations with the East, which are not so much a geographical, but more mental. It is known that the West in general is characterized by the propensity to search for manifestations of spirituality in the East. Therefore, the links of sutartinės with the East may be the result of this search. The author raises the question of whether the modern tendency of young people to sing the sutartinės may be the result of the search for spirituality in Eastern culture, or the spirit of the East ra-ther than the West lies in the very nature of sutartinės. Modern music projects, bringing together Western and Eastern cultures, helps to understand the original features of the sutartinės and possibilities of “western” medita-tion