Metaphor in the Context of Baltic Music: the Idea of Eternal Return

Jūratė Landsbergytė-Becher

doi:10.31861/pytlit2020.101.177

Abstract

Metaphor is the essential form for building momentum in the phenomenon of Baltic music. It created a new silent style of defensiveness and transcendentality, which eventually could help to change the self-awareness of the nation. The purpose of this article is to research the linguistic power of a metaphor, its transfer into the music and how it helped to uncover disinformation in the period of Soviet ideological domination. The comparative methodology is used to examine metaphors in the areas of music, literature, political science, and aesthetics of art philosophy. This article is structured to show the motion of metaphor in particular turns of time. Metaphor is a powerful instrument to raise the dimensions of the archetypes of national identity and statehood rights. Its usage could be compared with religion, nature, sacrality of space and history, and it is necessary for the change in the knowledge about the nation’s development. Metaphor is the renewed road to comprehend the importance of statehood existence and what happened in Baltic states during the times of crucial changes. It could be said that the metaphor helped to regain independence without the army and spreads its influence similarly at the present day, penetrating the new media streams connecting the matters of statehood. The article findings summarise the origins of the power of the nation based on the phenomenon of the resurrection of archetypes (under the theory of C. G. Jung), which were rediscovered by using principles of psychology.

Highlights

The significance of metaphors in the culture of thought of the Baltic countries has grown tremendously due to historical fractures caused by extraordinary circumstances
The intonational cell, the repetitive movement, and the minimalism inspire to create a system of dramaturgical action that allows us to unravel the fundamental paradigms of Balticness like the sea waves or the pulse of an alive heart
Metaphor is an essential factor in the transformation of the new resurrectional power in Baltic music

Summary

Introduction

The significance of metaphors in the culture of thought of the Baltic countries has grown tremendously due to historical fractures caused by extraordinary circumstances. The musical metaphor begins the act of transferring hum from the formless and transformational levels, captured by the emerging lines of melody fragments Such style is like a curse, a circle and the rising vertical, which pierces it through, becomes an act of motion of musical textures, scenography and notation graphics embedded with geometric dimensions ( ronius Kutavičius oratorio cycle “Last Pagan Rite”, 1978, “From The Yotvingian Stone”, 1981, “The Tree of the World”, 1986, “Magic Circle of Sanskrit”, 1993). Convergence brings the levels closer together, intensifying the action of the metaphor by moving the image from one height to another and by piercing one level with another It is illustrated in both oratorios by the singer’s stand up for a hymn – the rise of the melody from the eternal archetypal circle in Greimas’s isotopies are semantic elements similar to cells or small parts of the words without meanings and can serve as a basic level of semantic coherence (Tarasti 2002: 75)

Objectives

Conclusion