“Post-Soviet,” writes Rūta Stanevičiūtė, along with “post-colonial,” “post-national” (“glocal”), and “omnivorous presentist” are four synchronous “dominant chronologies of transition” in Lithuanian music culture after 1990. A reader of this timely and refreshing book edited by American musicologists Jeffers Engelhardt and Katherine Pukinskis will discover that these four historical regimes also offer productive frames for studying transitions in Estonian and Latvian music after Soviet power dissolved. When did the transition begin? In Lithuanian music, was it Vidmantas Bartulis’s 1987 performance, “Mein Lieber Freund Beethoven” (157), or the 1963 Fluxus Manifesto published in New York by exiled Lithuanian artist George Mačiūnas (165)? In Estonian music, did it begin when composer Arvo Pärt saw his 1968 “Credo” banned by the Soviets, or after he emigrated in 1980 to freedom in Germany? In Latvian music, did it happen after 1966, when Pēteris Vasks, banned by the Soviets from higher music education in Latvia, nevertheless enrolled at the Lithuanian State Conservatory?
Such quibbles over timelines and geographies are not the goal of this book. What stands out is the plural “s” on the word, “Musics.” If the book were to focus on “classical” music of the 1990s, perhaps, like Soviet/post-Soviet musicology patriarch Richard Taruskin two decades ago, we might rediscover in Baltic music a transnational trajectory: “The more recent the work, the more consonant” (The New York Times, April 18, 2004). But a breathtaking diversity, not consonance, emerges in this book’s ten chapters encompassing diverse musical styles and disciplinary approaches. Živilė Arnašiūtė documents a current generational fissure in disagreements over whether rock musicians led the 1987–90 movement for Lithuania‘s political independence or nurtured an apolitical counterculture (both are true). Oliver Aas finds social class, gender, and urban/rural cleavages in the reception of Estonian “lowbrow” dance music; his chapter hints also at ethnic convergences around the Euro-skeptic, populist politician and “lowbrow” singer Aivar Riisalu, elected to parliament as a representative of the political party favored by Estonia’s “Russian-speaking” voters (90). A case study of untypical interethnic and intergender harmony and equity appears in Brigitta Davidjants’s microhistory of Estonia‘s Depeche Mode Fan Club, established by twenty-five teenagers in 1992. Sofia Joons Gylling documents a Swedish-Estonian folk poet’s songs that were shared among Estonia’s Swedish-speaking coastal villages in the early twentieth century, then remembered and sung by nostalgic refugees who escaped to Sweden during World War II, and finally revived in the 1990s by “heritagers” (archivists, ethnographers, and diaspora musicians) who reconnected descendants of Estonia-Swedes to their ancestral places.
Emerging trends in classical music are characterized as “many horizontal branches” by Rūta Gaidamavičiūtė, and “omnivorous” by Stanevičiūtė, quoted above. These leading musicologists offer two comprehensive, syllabus-worthy introductions to Lithuania’s musical wealth in global context. Both spice their deep surveys with colorful, concise descriptions of multimodal performances like Saulė ir jūra (Marina) (Sun and Sea [Marina]), winner of the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale: The audience is in a balcony, watching a sandy beach with “holiday-makers enjoying their daily lives and a carefree summer … [a] presentiment of disaster wafts in, like a gentle breeze” (167).
Australian violinist Sophia Kirsanova retraces two parallel paths in her studies of Latvian music, 1980–2000: she compiled and performed a repertoire of works for the violin, and recorded oral history interviews with five musicians whose careers began in the Soviet era and continued during the post-Soviet transition. Some lamented the loss of humbler, but stable incomes during the Soviet period, while others marveled at the fabulous fees paid to them by western producers (216–17).
Two further chapters also feature experience-enhanced perspectives of professional musicians responding to questions posed by the book’s co-editor, Katherine Pukinskis. Music is a language of its own, and people who compose, conduct, sing, or play that language see and hear things that we outsiders do not. The Latvian composer Laura Jēkabsone, a rising star on both national and global stages, observes that “We can learn specific rules in music theory while in school, but in real life, there are no rules” (150). Her creative works, performed with the vocal ensemble Latvian Voices, are built on a “cornerstone” of dainas (archaic oral poetry), but whatever it is that happens next dissolves generic distinctions among folk, classical, and jazz, and melts together national, global, Catholic, Lutheran, and pagan traditions. “I’m pretty sure that there are no limits,” she concludes (150).
Choral conductor Heather MacLaughlin Garbes highlights four currently rising composers: Laura Jēkabsone (born 1985), Ēriks Ešenvalds (1977), Pärt Uusberg (1986), and Evelin Seppar (1986), who all emerged as professional musicians in the current era of free speech and free global communication. They combine “a tremendous, grounded feeling of strong compositional techniques” and “a creative and inspirational freedom” (78) in a uniquely “Baltic” tradition. Concise overviews of each composer’s published choral repertoire complement Garbes’s interpretive insights, gained through more than a decade of close collaboration with the composers in performances by her Mägi Ensemble.
Johann van Niekerk’s study of “trauma tourism” mines his interviews with thirty-eight Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian musicians (half born after 1987), illuminating participation in Baltic choral music by visitors from abroad. For outsiders, “the appeal of commemorating the Balts’ successful non-violent resistance through music can inspire confidence and remind people of their deeply held values,” he observes, but it foregrounds “a brief period of resistance at the expense of the millennia-old cultural heritage” (55). Baltic singers, and the younger generation in particular, have learned to live with their peoples’ traumatic history “through education, humour, and a jovial pragmatism that may seem incongruent to visitors but is vital for the visited” (62). A productive path to “informed tourism” and “non-harmful encounters” with Baltic musicians and music today is “unsettled empathy” (65). Akin to that path, I think, is Rolando Vásqez’s “decolonial listening” as quoted by the editors in the book’s introduction. Baltic artists and scholars must be allowed “to define themselves, to themselves and to others, in relation to the histories, stories, and aspirations that they take as their own” (21, 229). They have moved on, no longer dwelling on a historical period that ended more than three decades ago. “This chapter of the post-Soviet is over,” concludes Kevin Karnes in the book’s Afterword (230).
