Shrovetide in Lithuania. Carnival character songs in a sociocultural context

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Dainos; Kaimas; Kalendorinės šventės; Karnavalinės dainos; Latviškos dainos; Miestas; Persirengėliai; Sovietmetis; Užgavėnės; Žanras; Žemaitija (Samogitia); Calendrical festivals; Carnival songs; Genre; Latvian songs; Masked people; Samogitia; Shrovetide; Songs; Soviet era; The city; The village.

ENThe songs of the costumed characters in the Shrovetide processions - 'beggars', 'Jews', and Gypsies' - as well as the songs about them have been sung in Žemaitija up to the present times. Alongside with the documented sociocultural context, they reveal the processes of the musical folklore survival, its recording, studies, interpretation, and the use in the cultural policies, their links with real life, and the opportunities of sociocultural engineering. Should we assume that archaic calendrical folk songs existed in pre-Christian times in Žemaitija and later disappeared, it is likely that, due to the zealous activities of Catholic bishops in Žemaitija in the fields of church singing, the vacuum was filled, to use the contemporary term, by "folklore pop singing". Those were humorous songs, depicting representatives of different social classes and characterised by the contemporary structure and the common European musical stylistics, or else parodies of church hymns. The structure of the lyrics and melodies of the 'beggar', 'Jew', and 'Gypsy' songs testified to a rather late period of their formation. Their targeted investigation in the last decade of the 20th and the early 21st century, when the informants were asked questions not only about the specific 'beggar', 'Jew', and 'Gypsy' songs, but also about the repertoire performed during Shrovetide, and the studies of the ancient folklore archives proved that the songs of such a character had stayed in people’s memory, sometimes coming out in public, for at least two centuries. Given the evidence of the written sources and the sociocultural context, one has to admit that the origin of the examined songs can by no means be related merely to the Shrovetide environment. That is especially true of the 'beggar' songs/hymns. However, in the late 19th century, or, more precisely, in the early 20th century, those s.On the one hand, they have always been a syncretic genre, related both to the sociocultural and the calendrical festival environments. On the other hand, independent fields of their existence are evident. The same can be said of a number of other songs of 'prestigious' or 'non-marginal' genres (wedding, family, military, etc.), as the present genre classification of folk songs is a conventional matter. The idea of the late origin of the Žemaitijan costumed character songs and their "transfer" from the community to calendrical songs was confirmed by their comparison with the Latvian autumn-winter calendrical songs, the points of contact at the formal level being the features typical of the late layer of Latvian songs. The fragmentary written information of the 15th through the 18th century about the Balt/Lithuanians Shrovetide celebration came from the urban environment, affected by the Western European traditions, customs, and the forms and ways of celebration. The said background must have affected the daily life and festivals of the neighbouring rural lifestyle: unfortunately, there are no direct data about the rural Shrovetide celebrations. The regulations of the creators of the Lithuanian system of education, who at the initial stage were simultaneously disseminators of the Christian faith, contained information about the Shrovetide Festival in the urban environment as well as the aspiration to control it and about the dissemination of such celebratory traditions, or the conception of the festival, to the provinces of Lithuania. Therefore, unsurprisingly, the first information from the rural environment that appeared in the early 19th century included authoritative prohibitions, constraints, and encouragements to control oneself and to "celebrate properly", i.e. in compliance with the Catholic morality norms.The early 19th century writings of the clergy as well as of first ethnographers testified to the fact of the urban fashion of carnivals spreading to villages, even if it was not clear to what extent. They spread from the centre, i.e. cities and monasteries, to remote provinces and were mixing and transforming into specific, sometimes hard-to-recognise forms. In the late 19th and the early 20th century, the period of formation of European nation states, idealised rural culture was chosen as an ideological tool, and simultaneously as a means. In the first half of the 20th century, the rural Lithuanian Shrovetide customs were written or spoken about as extinct or on the verge of extinction that were to be urgently saved. The encouragements came to focus on the village and to oppose the rural culture to the global one. The original cultural process changed its direction to the opposite one and moved from provinces to towns. The process gave rise to different cultural hybrids, or they were modelled consciously. That was true of the ruralstyle Shrovetide and other calendrical and non-calendrical festivals that were celebrated in towns since the first half of the 20th century. The structure of the Shrovetide festival that has evolved from fragments over the centuries and its both rural and urban "ideological" content show the commonality with the customs of many Western European countries at a certain macrolevel. At the microlevel, which included also folk songs, local features were revealed. Moreover, the lyrics and music of songs in the ritual and non-ritual milieu "lived" their own lives, sometimes they separated, and sometimed merged into one. That was especially evident in the late layers of musical folklore. [...]. [From the publication]