Lietuvos sentikių dvasinės eilės
The spiritual songs of Lithuanian Old Believers

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the Lithuanian Old Believers' traditional ways and spiritual songs as one of the unique genres of Russian traditional music. This theme has not been researched, therefore, this article is the first publication of the kind in the field of musicology. In Lithuania, intensive studies of Old Believers' culture and history began in the last decade of the 20th century, since 1996 when the Interdisciplinary Group of Lithuanian Russian Old Believers began to work. In various expeditions, most of the material have been recorded.As a separate religious group, Old Believers formed after the schism in Russian Orthodox Church in the middle of the 17th century. In Lithuania, Russian Old Believers have been living for more than 300 years. During this time they preserved a unique religion and a lot of features of traditional life. Till the 20th century Old Believers have preserved the values of their ancestors.When we are speaking about Old Believers as a religious minorities, regarding their musical culture we mean only "znamennoye peniye" - a traditional style of singing in the Old Ortodox Church and spiritual songs (duchovnyye stikhi). Old Believers themselves claim that they do not have music at all.Russian Old Believers derive spiritual songs from written medieval literature. The spiritual songs are intermediate between religious and secular (worldly) music of Old Believers. These works perform a didactic function and reflect the philosophy of live of Old Believers. Spiritual songs aren't to be performed in church. These are the only songs that are allowed during the fast days. In Lithuania, the spiritual songs were sung by anyone who knew them, had a good voice and musical memory.It is hard to find a strict typology of spiritual songs in modern scientific literature. Often scientists use the typology created by Piotr Bezsonov who divided spiritual songs according to the origin of words into two groups: old and new.In Lithuania, since 1996 more than 30 spiritual songs with melodies have been recorded. Among those, there are a number of related and entirely different examples.

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