Choral ballad by Peteris Vasks «Litene»: aspects of sound and pitch organization
Authors: Tytova Mariia 
Published: December 2023

The relevance of the article lies in highlighting the basic principles of organizing the sound tissue in the central work of the middle period of the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks' creativity, namely a ballad «Litene» for mixed choir a сappella.

The main purpose of the article is to identify the peculiarities of the sound and pitch organization of the choral tissue in the ballad «Litene» by Peteris Vasks and to determine its influence on the process of genre renewal.

The methodology includes methods of structural-functional and historical analysis to: trace the characteristic features of the ballad genre at different stages of development and identify individual features of its embodiment in the choral works of Peteris Vasks; establish the constructive features of the organization of the musical tissue and ways of its correspondence with the textual basis of the piece.

Results and conclusions. Thus, in the context of contemporary musical thinking, the pitch structure becomes an object of creativity, along with themes, rhythm and timbre, and this opens up and fills new gaps in the interaction of compositional techniques in the search field. Peteris Vasks, like many other well-known contemporary composers, is looking for his own individual and stylistic aspects of the pitch organization of the sound tissue and, choosing combinations of individual elements from the well-known composition techniques of the twentieth century, transforms them into a new sound «palette». The composer lets them into his own sound world, where they subsequently become an integral part, acquire stylistic features.

In the context of the unfolding of tragic events, the ballad «Litene» presents an array of expressive means that has already been used in previous choral ballads, namely, a combination of aleatoric movement that provokes the formation of sonorous phenomena and reliance on artificial symmetrical harmonic formations. However, it is here that the interaction of these techniques has the most impressive effect. The symmetrical soundscapes, built from a series of low-tertiary links using interval steps of «semitone-tone», are revealed first horizontally in each of the voices. Gradual vertical textural compaction, thickening is localized in the zones of climaxes, which are accompanied by an increase in tension. The activation of aleatory movements, the thickening of sonorous and sonorous phenomena, which supplant pitch manifestations with sound-image elements and streams of external noise (shouts, whistling, speaking, grotesque laughter, glissandos to extremely high and extremely low sounds), contribute to the embodiment of emotions of a huge tragic range. It contains the swirling waves of unbearable pain, despair and fear of an inevitable tragedy, the death of an entire nation from a criminal destructive force, and reflects the path to oblivion until the last, desperate collective groan. The work is imbued with such catastrophic feelings and meanings, its sound space created by Peteris Vasks on the fragments of phrases, words, exclamations, whispers, wails, screams and terrible, frozen, dead silence.

The choral ballad «Litene» occupies a special place in the work of P. Vasks. This work is about human pain, about terrible injustice, about suffering and death. At the end of the work, there is no prayerful enlightenment characteristic of the composer's music. In the preface to the work, the composer said that he chose a number of techniques that he believed most truthfully reflected the unhealed wounds of his people—the pain that does not go away.