Lietuviškojo modernizmo magistralės ir Naujosios Vienos mokyklos idėjų paraštės
The main lines of Lithuanian modernism and margins of the New Viennese school-based ideas

Summary/Abstract: The formation of Lithuanian professional music took place in the context of the emergence of musical modernism and its principal representations of the first half of the 20th century. Analysing the phenomenon of the peripheral musical culture, the article asks: How does a concrete national culture absorb the paradigm of modernism? What can the national cultures that did not influence the main experiences of 20th-century modernism and avant-garde tell us about modernism? After reviewing peculiarities of twentieth-century’s Lithuanian music, which resounded Schoenberg school’s disseminated technological ideas, we can state that Lithuanian composers were not just passive twelve-tone technique successors. In particular, the idea of ordered or serialized elements and transpositions was distinctively and independently interpreted. In Čiurlionis’ piano music of his later creative period (1904– 1909), linear polymelodic tendencies gradually emerge: the compositional texture opposes the homophonic harmonic conception and moves closer towards the coexistence of melodies (lines), layers , tonic models or extended tonalities (his preludes for piano VL303, VL335, VL338, VL339, etc.). It seems that Čiurlionis filled the staffs of his sketches of piano works as a painter, structurally modelling and multiplying in an ornamental way the structural details of the com-positional text (an ostinato, the intervals, textural pictures and “clusters” of intervals). Symmetrized segments that reported melodic tones (soprano, alto, tenor) were a model in play by M. K. Čiurlionis in his Variations cycle (VL 257, op. 15 No. 2) in 1904. Their schematic semblance forms a “magic square” – a palindrome distinguished by partial symmetries. It is supposed that the same palindromical scheme, practised three times in a play by M. K. Čiurlionis (VL 257, op. 15 No. 2), later was repeated in a more complicated form of Besacas Variation, (VL 265, 1904 –1905) in the plan of the fourth part of row or microseries transpositions. In his Piece (Variation) 4, Čiurlionis created the plan of transpositions of the row treated as a basso ostinato, unique for his time, which was discovered by Vytautas Landsbergis (1980). Basso ostinato (microseries), transposed six times, is extrapolated from its successive pitch, i. e. the level of each transposition systemically starts from the successive pitch of the row. The mentioned principle of the functioning of basso ostinato in Čiurlionis’ piece reminds of the technique of trans -positions of a series used in the post-war avant-garde compositions all parameters of which were serially controlled (multiple serialism and total serialism, the technique of superseries or Überreihe). M. K. Čiurlionis used not the intention of 12 non-repetitive pitches but the equivalence of the letters of words and musical tones significant to him. Čiurlionis’ discovery of the mentioned principle of transposition of a row coincided with the beginning of the history of the New School of Vienna.The composer who accepted and most consistently developed the method of com-posing with “Twelve tones related only to one another” (according to Schoenberg) was Osvaldas Balakauskas. He worked out his own compositional system and grounded it theoretically in his Dodekatonika (published in 1997 in Poland). The title Dodekatonika (Dodecatonic) in some way emphasizes what was already evident in the 3rd edition of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre – Twelve-Tone Tonality (“Tonalität einer Zwölftonreihe”, Harmonielehre, Wien, 1922, S. 488). The generating principle of the system is based on the Pythagoras’ Perfect Fifth. Thus, the fifth (2:3) is a minimal harmonic opposition 81 (according to Balakauskas) in the harmonic projection of 12 fifths (PQ). His so-called universal, “magic”, symmetrical tone row is formed on a strictly diatonic base: its O = R, the second half of the row (tones 7– 12) is the reflection (retrograde inversion) of the first half (tones 1 –6). The row is constructed on two tritones, one of which is in the centre of the row (axis-interval between tones 6 and 7) and the other forms between the last and the first tone (tone 12 and 1) which, by the way, always guarantees highly rationalized Vorformung methods. O. Balakauskas himself sees his series as a result of the analysis of and discussion on Hindemith I Reihe and H. Hanson’s system. Yet we should mention that George Perle, the scholar of the New Viennese School, created a basically analogous series (only from tone C) which is based on his system of the circle of fifths.Later compositions by Balakauskas and the transformation of his serial technique represent further reflections on and the destiny of the compositional principles of the New Viennese School in both Balakauskas’ work and in Lithuanian music at large. First of all, Balakauskas started to associate the twelve-tone technique not so much with its axiom, the tone row, but with the idea of transpositions / transpolations and discipline. In Balakauskas’ new perception of serialism, the row is conceptualized as a principle that regulates a cycle of transpositions or a row of transpositions. To illustrate the development of the twelve-tone technique and its application to individual creative work, we will take a look at the Balakauskas’ creative attempts in search of the objects for transpositions and elements of the row as he understood them. These are the answers that Balakauskas have come up with: a) a single tone as the element of a row; b) a three-tone structure as an element of a row; c) a complex of two or more clusters as an element of a row; d) a stylistically marked musical sample (Balakauskas uses the word “sample”) as an element of a row; e) an intext as an element of a row. The further way of Balakauskas’ constructive composition and dialogue with the technological ideas of the 20th century constructive classics is evident in the changes his work has gone through. Ever since Balakauskas has been the symbol of Lithuanian avantgard, whereas his Fourth Symphony (1998) sounded open longing for tonality and the apotheosis of consonance at large. O. Balakauskas gave up his modernist outlook and seemed to have returned to jazz as the source of his creative work.

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