Lithuanian-American siblings Vija and Dovas Lietuvninkas have been singing traditional Lithuanian folk music since they can remember.
“One of my earliest memories in general is of my grandfather singing Lithuanian folk songs to us as we were going to sleep, as lullabies as we’re sleeping over at their houses,” Dovas said. “So, literally from the very beginning, we were kind of inundated with these Lithuanian folk melodies. And so it’s been with us our whole lives.”
Dovas and Vija grew up in the Chicago area, home to the largest population of Lithuanians in any city outside of Lithuania. That meant they were surrounded by Lithuanian American culture. Vija remembers going to a Lithuanian summer camp where, “a huge element of that was singing every day. And we would also sing in the car, and we would sing with family and friends. It was a really common occurrence.”
“It was so normal to us to always, you know, break out into song at family gatherings or other holidays, or just any function or event with a bunch of Lithuanians,” Dovas said. “If there’s a critical mass, that’s just gonna devolve into singing at some point – and some accordions may just spontaneously erupt somewhere.”
Along with singing at family gatherings, there is a tradition of large Lithuanian song and dance festivals. The tradition started about 100 years ago and was maintained by the Lithuanian diaspora while the country was occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II.
Dovas said the festivals are an important cultural gathering space, “particularly when Lithuania was still occupied, and our grandparents’ and our parents’ generation were really agitating for independence from the Soviet Union and asserting Lithuanian cultural identity outside of the country.” The festivals continue to this day. “We just get together and we sing and we dance and we enjoy our cultural connections with each other,” Dovas said.
In the late 1980s, music was a central part of what became known as the “singing revolution” in the Baltic states. “Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia really leaned into those musical cultures to act as a peaceful protest during the Soviet occupation,” Dovas explained. “And that led to Lithuania being the first country to separate from the Soviet Union in 1990. And a large part of that was due to the kind of unification of the people through song.”
Dovas and Vija don’t consider themselves professional performers of Lithuanian folk music. Dovas is a professional classical musician, while Vija focuses on Lithuanian folk art including traditional Easter eggs.
“I really love doing them,” she said. “And I enjoy teaching other people how to do them, and in general I’m really interested in folk art from the craft perspective, hands on.” She’s currently getting a master’s degree at RISD, focusing on “how folk craft can influence people’s relationship to their immediate community. I’m finding that people are really looking for those connections, and that these kinds of back-to-basics ways of connecting, through really tangible and old ways of making, are really exciting and people are really drawn to it.”
One of the songs they shared was a cheerful a capella duet called “Augo girioj ąžuolėlis,” or “The Oak Grew in the Forest.” “There’s an oak growing in the yard, and a son is going with the father, and the father is worried about his son,” Dovas explained. But the son says, “‘Don’t worry, Father. Your son will grow up to be a soldier for Lithuania.’ But then the father says, ‘Well, I have no need for a soldier. I just need a plowman.’ And then says, ‘Well, not having been a soldier, he will not make a good plowman.’”
The second part of the song, he said, focuses on a mother and daughter. “The mother has no need for a dancer. She just needs a weaver,” Dovas said. “Well, not having been a dancer, she won’t make a good weaver. So, ‘let your kids do what they want’ is the moral there.”
One of the oldest folk song forms in Lithuania is the sutartinė, which means “to be in accord.” It’s been designated by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Dovas explained it as, “this ancient type of polyphonic or multi-part song where it’s the separate parts, you kind of sing it like a round, and you pass it around through the circle or through the group of people.” A round requires at least three singers, so Mareva Lindo and I joined them in singing “Kūkal rože ratilio,” a Midsummer song.
“The multiple parts are essentially, are kind of multiple keys. And then once the parts start meshing together, it’s this beautiful dissonance that kind of happens because you’re hitting major and minor seconds just non stop,” Dovas said. “So it’s this kind of cyclical, dissonant, kind of trance stuff going on. That’s been going on for, you know, probably thousands of years at this point. So that’s a particularly unique part of the Lithuanian folk music tradition that everyone’s quite proud of over there.”
Dovas brought a traditional Lithuanian instrument called the kanklės. It’s a little smaller than a guitar and it’s held on the lap and strummed like a harp. “There are stories of the type of wood that is used to make them, where in some traditions, if someone in your close family or in your village is dying or close to death, or has just passed, you go out into the woods and you find a tree that speaks to you, that has potentially that person’s spirit in the tree, and then that is a tree you make the kanklės out of,” he said. But this one he bought in Lithuania.
They sang a song with kanklės accompaniment, called “Ant kalno karklai siūbavo,” or “On the Hill the Willows Were Was Swaying.” “We set the scene in the willow on the hill, and there’s a well at the bottom of the hill,” Dovas said. “And there’s a girl and she’s, you know, picking rue or something, which is the typical thing. And then here comes a young man upon his horse and he starts approaching the girl, and in this case she rebuffs him and he goes on his merry way.”
Finally, Dovas and Vija shared another song with us from their grandparents’ era, between the two world wars. It’s called “The Weeping Violin,” and tells a mournful story of three sons who go off to war, never to return.
You can find Dovas playing some very different music in his trumpet trio, something something trumpet.
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Music included in the episode, as performed by Dovas and Vija Lietuvninkas, in order of appearance:
- “Augo girioj ąžuolėlis,” or “The Oak Grew in the Forest”
- “Kūkal rože ratilio” sutartinė, a Midsummer song
- “Ant kalno karklai siūbavo,” or “On the Hill the Willows Were Swaying”
- “Kaip verkiančio smuiko,” or “Like a Weeping Violin”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story had mixed up some of the names of the songs.
