Klaipėdos universitetas

The instrumental music-making tradition of Lithuania Minor was officially recognised as a valuable part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and included in the national register in 2022. In the 20th century, the way of preserving the instrumental music-making of the Lietuvininkai (the inhabitants of Lithuania Minor) typically used for folklore was not followed, and it would have ceased to exist. However, the folklore revival movement that emerged in the 1960s, along with the determined efforts of Antanas Butkus, a master instrument maker, to restore the folk music instruments of Lithuania Minor, and other favourable circumstances, gave rise to renewed interest and new directions for the development of the tradition. The purpose of this article is to explore the forms and development of this folklore tradition, and to identify the factors that had the most important impact on its decline, restoration and continuity.

From the earliest descriptions and studies, the Prussian Lithuanians, or Lietuvininkai, and their sung folklore have usually been treated as one unit. However, the ethnographic region of Lithuania Minor is a vast territory stretching over 200 kilometres from north to south. Two distinct areas of ethnic Lietuvininkai music can be identified within it. This article aims to investigate the musical features of the folklore that existed in the Klaipėda district, and to reveal its uniqueness in the context of Lietuvininkai sung folklore.

Trisdešimtasis žurnalo „Res humanitariae“ numeris žymi reikšmingą postūmį savoje istorijoje. Nuo 2007 metų, kai buvo išleisti pirmieji numeriai, nuosekliai plėstas temų ir autorių ratas, peržengtos humanitarinių mokslų ribos. Tai atspindi greitėjantį gyvenimo tempą, mokslinės minties raidą, pokyčius Klaipėdos universitete.

Reformacija – religinis ir visuomeninis sąjūdis – padarė didžiulį kultūrinį ir socialinį poveikį Lietuvai bei kitoms Europos šalims, skatino politinės ir visuomeninės minties plėtotę, tapo akstinu valstybių ir visuomenių modernizacijai. Reformacija iškėlė gimtosios kalbos svarbą, paspartino nacionalinių kultūrų ir mokslo raidą. Reformacija nesiribojo religiniu sąjūdžiu ir nesibaigė kartu su juo. Ji tapo drąsių, subrandintų, iš sąstingio išvaduojančių proveržių metafora. Klaipėdos universiteto Humanitarinių ir ugdymo mokslų fakultete 2017 m. lapkričio 16 d. vykusioje 4-ojoje tarptautinėje tarpdalykinėje mokslinėje konferencijoje „Tradicijos ir modernybės sąveika“, skirtoje 500-osioms Reformacijos metinėms, Lietuvos ir užsienio šalių pranešėjai kalbėjo apie Reformacijos teologiją ir filosofiją, Reformaciją ir jos santykį su kultūros istorija, kalba, literatūra, menu, etnine kultūra.

5-oji tarpdalykinė mokslinė konferencija „Tradicijos ir modernybės sąveika“, vykusi 2019 m. lapkričio 20–21 d. Klaipėdos universitete bei Telšių vyskupo Vincento Borisevičiaus kunigų seminarijoje, skirta Žemaitijos vardo paminėjimo rašytiniuose šaltiniuose 800-osioms metinėms ir Telšių vyskupo Vincento Borisevičiaus kunigų seminarijos atkūrimo 30-mečiui. Klaipėdos universiteto Socialinių ir humanitarinių mokslų fakultete susirinko per 30 pranešėjų iš įvairių Lietuvos ir užsienio šalių mokslo ir studijų institucijų.

In terms of date of recording the earlier and most interesting Lithuanian musical folklore material, the 64 songs of Prussian Lithuanians collected in the 19th century and preserved in the L. Rėza archival legacy, have more or less never been considered in terms of influences from a multicultural environment. The aim of this article is to discover and reveal the Lithuanian and/or German/European relationship in the songs. Analysis of the songs showed the archaity of the melodies in the L. Rėza legacy, traditionally associated with the spiritual culture of the ancient Prussian or Lithuanian tribes, is highly suspect and a matter open to debate. Many of the rare individual songs turned out to have “foreign melodies”, i.e., local variations arose based upon direct or indirect influence by German or common European melodies.

Before the mid-20th century, the Jews in Žemaitija were the most numerous and economically and culturally significant minority, with close contacts with the Žemaitijans. The paper focuses on the stereotypical characteristics of Jews as reflected in Žemaitijan dialect texts from an ethnolinguistic point of view. The analysis of these characteristics provides knowledge about the evaluated nation from the perspective of the evaluating nation. The research into stereotypical images of Jews rests on the view that they consist of a specific set of certain common characteristics and traits, and an analysis of linguistic expression provides more detailed information about them. The research has revealed that the ethnic stereotype of Jewish people in Žemaitijan dialect texts is quite positive.

The article shows what information the press between 1905 and 1940 provided Lithuanian readers about Shrovetide celebratory traditions around the world. The information collected, consisting of seven articles, thirty photographs and drawings, is fragmentary but fairly informative, providing a good and concise understanding of this cultural phenomenon in a popular manner. By surveying and interpreting the available data, it tries to answer several questions: what significance these publications might have had on Shrovetide celebratory traditions and methods of celebration in early 20th-century Lithuania; how this information correlates with current academic research and known empirical data; what Lithuanian Shrovetide had in common with the winter-spring carnival celebrated around the world.

The article is devoted to present the results of ethnomusicological research on parallels in folk song melodies of the Prussian ethnic minorities: Lietuvininkai, Masurians, Kashubians. In the history of ethnic groups of the south part of the West Prussia and East Prussia speaking dialects of the Polish language – Kashubs and Masurs – you may distinguish quite a lot of parallels with the history of the lietuvininkai (residents of Lithuania Minor). A more detailed analysis of the melodies of investigated ethnic groups permits to state that the melodies of the lietuvininkai evidently differ from Polish melodies by the character of intonation, rhythm and performance. Nevertheless, they have intonation complexes, rhythmic elements that are alien to the melodic lines of the lietuvininkai folk songs and could be absorbed from the Polish ethnic music.