A PREMONITION OF WAR IN LITHUANIAN MUSIC AND LITERATURE (2021–2022)
Authors: Landsbergytė-Becher Jūratė 
Published: March 2023

The article draws attention to the impact of the political situation on the conceptuality of music and the formation of paradigmatic situations of musical language in newly created pieces. Such examples can be found in the new works of three young authors: Mykolas Natalevičius (b. 1985) «Gas Flare», Andrius Šiurys (b. 1991) «Non-finito» and Dominykas Digimas (b. 1993) «Sub-silence» for flute and organ, 2022. Here the music is identified with space — with the emerging connection between space and the universe, with the analogy of burning space and emptiness, consolidating the paradigm of space and its transformations in new music. In other words, the transcendentalism of its visual landscape is linked to the air as a matter via the acoustic sound poetics of air-controlled instruments, flute and organ. It is particularly related to the paradigm of the vanishing and the birth of sound or the rebirth in a hum, a particular analogy of the apocalypse and the creation of an alternative — the other space. In that sense, the works of this new music can be filled with a premonition of war and the annihilation of humanity, what their content speaks about. Natalevičius’s «Gas Flare» talks about the ecological death of the earth, related to the extraction of gas energy from the depths of the earth. About the flame, its overall destructive irrationality and the eclipse of the economy. Šiurys’s «Non-finito» tells about the interaction of timelines leading to a rationally cold aggressive nothingness, the so-called «The Devil’s stairs» (according to G. Ligeti) and the static of eternity. Digimas’s «Sub-silence» is a work of post-apocalyptic hope, where the depths of silence hide the impulses of the light-shadow interaction, the mysterious movement of the regrouping of the layers of nature and the mystifying rebirth — the silent turn of the world. The latter is a characteristic phenomenon of Lithuanian art philosophy, the pulsation of the links between art and nature, which Digimas transforms into the present in his own way, concentrating even more on the paradigmatic situation of a global transformation.

Meanwhile, the literature opens up a direct historical context connected to the present: Russia versus Europe. It is the latest book, «Peter’s Empress», volumes I and II by Kristina Sabaliauskaitė (b. 1974), the most popular writer in Lithuania at this moment (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2019, 2021). Here, the writer exposes the horrific wounds of Russian history, the implied terror and threats to Europe, based on the historical facts of the era of Peter I, told through the perception of his wife Marta Skowronska, who originally came from a Lithuanian-Polish family, living in town and went through all the possible shifts and metamorphosis to become the Empress of Russia. The difficult-to-take-in topicality of Sabaliauskaitė’s book, opening the sick Russian mentality connection between medieval slavery, world domination and being sealed off from foreign influences, a mixture of raging madness and cruelty, was an extremely prophetic literary «blow» in 2021, which shook Lithuania, reminding of terrible experiences before the start of a new war. The writer also became an analyst of the actual today’s situation, presenting translations of «Peter’s Empress» in Europe and at book forums, where her work and thoughts about Russia’s mental identity became a sharp intellectual instrument capable of explaining the «implausibility» of the war to a nurtured European democracy. Thus, she and her literature became direct participants in the defence mission of the hurt nations.It can be stated that Lithuanian music and literature sensed the essential quiet and later a blazing turn of the world and unfolded Baltic Mannerheim’s line on its horizons.