Abstract
Culture and cultural activity, as defined by the Lithuanian philosophers A. Maceina and A. Šliogeris and the French philosopher E. Mounier. Example of the singer’s cultural disposition in the Lithuanian folk song Tu, dobilėli (“You little clover”) (link to recording, sung by the author). Spirit of a person as the source of culture. Importance of consciousness and its evolution for the person in general and the musician in particular (H. Berlioz). Concepts of hermeneutics and musical hermeneutics. Analysis of the understanding of the text in light of the sources of culture which lie concealed within the inner creative force of a person, with reference to the Lithuanian composer J. Švedas and writer B. Sruoga, active in the interwar period.
We have lost ourselves in outward progress, allowing all advance in the moral life and inwardness of the individual to come to a standstill.
—Albert Schweitzer (Civilization and Ethics, tr. Charles T. Campion (London: Black, 1955), 12).
You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF
What is culture? (In Latin, cultūra means cultivation, upbringing, nurturing, improving, developing, worshipping.) A concept with a multiplicity of meanings and actions! “There has been no period which has not had culture, since without culture a person can simply not survive in the world. Culture is the basic condition of their existence.”Footnote 1 Since culture is not innate, it has to be acquired—adopted—by each individual.
The ability of a person to understand culture and devote themselves to it depends on the extent to which the person is a thinking and simultaneously free being. Culture conveys a system of value-based attitudes, which determines the quality and direction of the activity of the individual and society. Meanwhile, in order to adopt for oneself cultural values, a person must have a certain relationship with cultural objects. The more building blocks a person has at their disposal, the richer and more imaginative their thinking and activity.
A human receives or starts nothing from themselves; one acquires everything from material being. Existential experience is furthest from the so-called spontaneity and existential autonomy of the pure inner self; it spreads as co-creation. In this respect the mortal exists as an intermediary through which the being constructs itself and opens up to itself through the phenomenon of being.Footnote 2
According to Antanas Maceina, cultural activity is an expression of the cultural disposition of (a) one’s inner disposition and (b) the activity itself and the result or the good arising from it, which is visible and constant.
An example of this cultural disposition is the singer’s wonder and gratitude before the gift of nature in the Lithuanian folk song Tu, dobilėli (“You little clover”) [link] [1:53] (recorded in 2019 in the studio of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, sung by Juozas Rimas).Footnote 3
Since the personal life is that of freedom and self-surpassing, not of accumulation and repetition, culture does not consist, in any of its domains, in the heaping-up of knowledge, but in a deep transformation of the subject, enabling him to fulfil ever new possibilities in response to ever-renewed calls from within. […] Culture is that which remains when one no longer knows anything,—it is what the man himself has become.Footnote 4
The creation of music as a manifestation of spiritual culture is “spirit turned into matter” (Maceina), while in the process of interpretation this spirit has to be liberated through the expression of sound. Without interpretation this spirit would remain “imprisoned” in the signs. Each creative work needs a perceiver, who can in one way or another use it. Only in this way does a work come to life. The music created, if it does not belong to the genre of improvisation, still has to pass through a second act of creation, that is, it has to be performed. Music is an allographic branch of art. The first part of this compound word (from the Greek állos meaning “other”) means otherness, difference, that is, indirect access to what is registered by the signs. Unfortunately, in the practice of performers at the lower level of culture, one is often satisfied only by the conversion into sound of the graphic-acoustic sign—the note, without striving for an understanding of the structural logic, the revelation of the intonational features.
The source of culture is the spirit of a person. The spirit of a person is an independent fundamental. It is possible to be alive but not spiritual if one lacks a relationship with the manifestations of spiritual culture. “To shut out demands emanating beyond the self is precisely to suppress the conditions of significance, and hence to court trivialization. […] I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter.”Footnote 5 It is also possible to turn a musical text into sound in a trivial way, without delving into the meaning hidden within it, satisfying oneself only with a superficial—sign-based—realisation of it.
It is high time, therefore, to remind the subject that he will never re-discover and strengthen himself without the mediation of the objective […]. The person is, indeed, an inside in need of an outside; and the very word “exist” indicates by its prefix that “to be” is to go out, to express oneself. It is this primordial motive which, in an active form, moves us to exteriorise our feelings […], to inflict the imprint of our action upon visible works and to intervene in the affairs of the world and of other people.Footnote 6
Our evolution (or progress) is the evolution of our consciousness. Consciousness cannot evolve unconsciously. So, consciousness, and its orientation of values, determines also the operation of the will, which provides energy to our conscious activity, that is, to do something. Self-change, or evolution, requires a perception that a person is lacking something and wants to improve the quality of their activity. “Many do not know that they do not know, and many think they know when they know nothing. Failings of the intelligence are incorrigible, since those who do not know, do not know themselves, and cannot therefore seek what they lack.”Footnote 7 It is said that, if someone wants to change, they look for the means to do so; if they do not want to, they look for reasons to justify their existing condition.
Music is the art of moving intelligent human beings, endowed with special, well-trained organs, by means of combinations of sounds. To define music thus is to admit that we do not consider it, as the saying goes, fit for everyone […]. It requires of its practitioner, whether he be a performer or a composer, natural inspiration and skills that can only be acquired through prolonged studies and profound thought. The union of knowledge and inspiration constitutes art. Lacking these conditions, therefore, a musician can only be an incomplete artist, if in fact he deserves the title of artist.Footnote 8
In Lithuania, the word “hermeneutics” is unpopular among musicians, although the term “musical hermeneutics” appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century thanks to Hermann Kretzschmar. Hermeneutics is a branch of philosophy which studies the foundational texts of literature, explaining them from within, from the standpoint of the text itself: treating understanding as an essential characteristic of a person and their social existence. So, it seems, there is nothing in this definition which cannot be applied to the sphere of understanding music from its texts. “The human intellect is intentionally open to the ‘act of being’; it is this openness which makes the hermeneutical process dynamic.”Footnote 9
The problem of reading and deciphering cultural signs has presented itself throughout history. When printed materials appeared, in addition to the challenge of reading them, there was a further challenge—to understand them. It was not enough to read the letters of the text (and later the notes) in order to understand their meaning. But searching for meaning is one of the most important qualities of a person. When you look back at the history of live interpretation, you see that in the past even greater attention might have been accorded to meaningfulness of expression. In the press of independent Lithuania, particularly in the Muzikos barai,Footnote 10 we find valuable reflections from Jonas Švedas,Footnote 11 Motiejus BudriūnasFootnote 12 and Ignas Prielgauskas.Footnote 13 “The task of the performer is not just mechanistically to sing or play the notes written by the composer. They have to bring alive the content of the piece which is fixed in the notes. So they have to master not only the technical possibilities of performing the work, but also to recreate and feel in depth its very idea. […] People of low intellect struggle to understand the higher creative manifestations.”Footnote 14
As you can see, this is also relevant today; and will continue to be relevant until an evolution of our consciousness, or a change in the approach towards the performance of music, has taken place.
To understand things means to construct them in one’s mind […]. The sources of culture lie concealed within the inner creative force of a person, in that innate power which knows how to apply knowledge for its individual aims and desires. It seems not a mere paradox to say: the source of culture will be what, and to what extent, you are able to desire, and with what, and to what extent, you can justify that desire.Footnote 15
According to Antanas Maceina, cultural values are material without which the spirit cannot be creative, or the creative activity spiritual. “There is so much blessing and beauty near us that is destined for us, and yet it cannot enter our lives because we are not ready to receive it. The handle is on the inside of the door; only we can open it.”Footnote 16
Notes
- 1.
Antanas Maceina, ‘Kultūros filosofija’ [‘The Philosophy of Culture’], in Žilvinas Beliauskas and Stasys Juknevičius, eds., Kultūros prigimtis [The Nature of Culture] (Vilnius: Valstybinis leidybos centras, 1993), 335.
- 2.
Arvydas Šliogeris, Būtis ir pasaulis: tyliojo gyvenimo fragmentai [Being and the World: Fragments of a Quiet Life] (Vilnius: Margi raštai, 2006), 74–75. Arvydas Šliogeris (1944–2019) was one of the most famous contemporary Lithuanian thinkers, a full member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. He made a significant contribution to the development of modern Lithuanian philosophical terminology. The works of his translated into English (all by Robertas Beinartas) include: The Thing and Art: Two Essays on the Ontotopy of the Work of Art (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007); Names of Nihil (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008); The Fate of Philosophy (New York: Hampton Press, 2011).
- 3.
The text of the song in the original and in English, together with the author’s thoughts on the Lithuanian folk songs which he performs, can be found in Appendix 2.
- 4.
Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, tr. Philip Mairet (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 119.
- 5.
Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 40.
- 6.
Mounier, Personalism, 43–44.
- 7.
Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, tr. Joseph Jacobs (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2005), 62.
- 8.
Hector Berlioz, À travers Chants [Through Chants] (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1862), 1–2; ‘From the Writings of Berlioz’, tr. Piero Weiss, in Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (New York: Thomson Schirmer, 2008), 297.
- 9.
Alfredo Jacopozzi, Filosofia della religione (Casale Monferato: Piemme, 1992), 22.
- 10.
Muzikos barai: a monthly music journal which issued from 1931–1933 and 1938–1939 in Kaunas and in 1940 in Vilnius. It published articles on music history, theory, education and ethnomusicology, and descriptions of musical life in Lithuania, among the Lithuanian diaspora, and abroad.
- 11.
Jonas Švedas (1908–1971) was a Lithuanian conductor, composer, trombonist and educationist. In 1940 he founded the State Song and Dance Ensemble (now the Ensemble “Lietuva”).
- 12.
Motiejus Budriūnas (1898–1969) was a Lithuanian composer and choral director. He was editor of the journal Muzikos barai. From 1944 he lived in West Germany.
- 13.
Ignas Prielgauskas (1871–1956) was a Lithuanian pianist and composer, and the first Lithuanian pianist educationist to go deeply into the methodology of piano teaching.
- 14.
Jonas Švedas, ‘Meninė disciplina. Iš pedagoginių pastabų’ [Artistic Discipline. From Pedagogical Observations], Muzikos barai, no. 1 (1940): 17–18.
- 15.
Balys Sruoga, ‘Laiškai apie kultūrą’ [Letters about Culture], Skaitymai, bk. 22 (Kaunas, 1923), reprinted in Aušrinė, no. 8 (Vilnius, 1990): 62.
- 16.
John O’Donahue, Anam Ċara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1997), 87.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rimas, J., Rimas Jr, J. (2024). Music: A Part of Spiritual Culture. In: Etudes on the Philosophy of Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63965-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63965-4_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-63964-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-63965-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)