Lithuanian and Polish musical networking during the Cold War: political curtains and cultural confrontations
LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Lenkijos ir Lietuvos muzikantų bendradarbiavimas; Lietuvių ir lenkų muzikų bendradarbiavimas; Muzika ir politika; Opozicinis kultūrinis tinklas; Opozicinės kultūros tinklų kūrimas; Tapatybės (trans) formavimas; Tapatybės (trans)formavimas; Transnacionalinė difuzija; Šaltasis karas; Cold War; Identity (trans)formation; Identity transformation; Music and politics; Oppositional cultural networking; Polish and Lithuanian musicians' collaboration; Polish-Lithuanian musicians' collaboration; Transmnational diffusion; Transnational diffusion.
ENDuring different stages of the Cold War, the communication and collaboration of Polish and Lithuanian musicians were of various levels of intensity and rather controversial. For a long period of time, Lithuanian music spread through Poland only via vertical channels, as part of the USSR's foreign cultural (and economic) policies - in the international activities of influential Soviet institutions, such as Goskoncert, the official state concert agency of the USSR, and the USSR Composers' Union. The limitations and constraints imposed by the centralized music exports were circumvented due to the special role of Poland on the contemporary musical scene both in the Communist world and in the ideologized East-West confrontation. However, the breakthrough in the dissemination of Lithuanian and Polish music and its transnational cultural understanding in Poland and Lithuania occurred not because of the liberalization of political constraints or the strengthening of the economic leverage through the vertical (centralized institutions) and horizontal (national organizations) channels, but due to the forging of informal relations between the unofficial Polish stage of contemporary music and the institutionally independent actions of Lithuanian composers and musicologists since mid-1970s. That promoted the full-value representation of the works of Lithuanian composers on the official stages of Poland, which formed an internationally influential Polish critical discourse on Lithuanian modern music. In both Poland and Lithuania, independent music festivals, artistic actions, private lectures and semi-official publications (samizdat/magnitizdat) flourished on the margins of official culture as cultural expression of liberation.From oppositional to mainstream culture festivals in Stalowa Wola, Baranów, Sandomierz, cultural activism during Martial Law such as the Traugutt Philharmonic (Poland), privately grounded youth music festivals in Druskininkai, Anykščiai, Kaunas and Vilnius, underground Fluxus movement (Lithuania) to Baltic Singing Revolution - all these cultural events and activities demonstrate the rupture between the attempts of authorities to maintain a total institutional control and the distrust of the society in it, the emancipative needs of individual. In that particular environment, a new view on Lithuanian culture was shaping in Poland, which allowed Polish critics through music to define a new Lithuanian cultural identity, different from the previous politicised stereotypes, while the Polish music and musicology contributed to the renewal of the music modernisation discourse in Lithuania. [From the publication]
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