The Baltic Sisters: breathing new life into Lithuanian sutartinės

Over a held drone, a voice starts singing, and then another begins to imitate it. A third voice is added, and a fourth. Though there are only actually two voices sounding simultaneously, as each voice pauses after two bars, the effect is of a canon that repeats endlessly. The four-bar phrases they sing are simple and narrow-ranged, first going down and then going up, and they are deliberately pitched to create gentle discords of clashing seconds.

The song is ‘Sesė Sodų’ (Sister’s Garden), a Lithuanian sutartinė sung by The Baltic Sisters, four singers from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, three sisterly nations on the Baltic Sea. “These are very old harmonies, and they’re sometimes a bit creepy for people nowadays to listen to,” says Laurita Peleniūtė, who is Lithuanian and a sutartinės expert. “But you feel the vibrations in you, so it’s very nice to do it. I often say sutartinės are not performed, they need to be eaten!”

They claim to be the first multinational group performing sutartinės, which it would be hard to argue with. They met at WOMEX in 2022, where they were representing their own groups, when the non-Lithuanians, Vineta Romāne and Liene Skrebinska from Latvia, and Marion Selgall from Estonia, asked Peleniūtė to initiate them into the mystery of sutartinės, which are unique to Lithuania.

All three countries have small populations and sit alongside each other on the Baltic Sea, but they have their own languages and cultures. Lithuanian and Latvian are in the Baltic group of Indo-European languages, so they are related, while Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language related to Finnish, in a completely different linguistic group to the other two.

They also all have huge song celebrations. The Estonian Song Celebration will take place July 3–6 this year in Tallinn. The Lithuanian Song Celebration is more irregular; it took place last year in Vilnius. All Sisters agree that the Latvian Song and Dance Festival is the most passionate, with 40,000 participants. It takes place every five years, happening next in 2028.

The three countries united in a protest for independence from the Soviet Union on August 23, 1989, when an estimated two million people joined hands to form an almost 700km human chain linking Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn in what was known as the Baltic Chain or Baltic Way. Concerts are still often scheduled on August 23 to celebrate this common history.

On The Baltic Sisters’ debut Värav / Vārti / Vartai (meaning, symbolically, ‘Gateway’ in Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian), they sing nine sutartinės, plus two Latvian and two Estonian songs, and one song which combines all three languages. Though Estonian and Latvian songs are usually not polyphonic, there are exceptions, like the distinctive leelo songs of southeast Estonia’s Seto minority. However, these are call-and-response, sounding more Slavic than sutartinės . The album has two Seto songs, ‘Sōrmemähkimise Mäng’ and ‘Aja Kari Siia!’, a herding song. “It seemed right to put these Seto songs alongside the sutartinės,” says Marion Selgall, who chose them.

But it’s sutartines that are at the heart of the record, and both Selgall and Romāne confess to having a deep love of them. “When I heard them for the first time, I was just fascinated,” says Romāne. “And actually, I was born in Selonia [southeastern Latvia], which is close to the region of sutartinės over the border and has its own songs, rotāšanas, with a drone and these clashing seconds.”

Sutartinės were first written about in the 16th century, but clearly go back much further, with songs related to agriculture and nature. “When you live in nature, the sunset is a special moment,” explains Peleniūtė. “‘Saulala Sadina’ [(Sunset Sutartinė)] is for singing at sunset. As a farmer, you see the sun going down like a seed into the ground, and in the morning, it blossoms… You start to sing when the sun is going down and it ends when the sun is gone.”

Peleniūtė says when musicologists collected these, they had to go at the right time of day or season of the year, or people wouldn’t sing them. They wouldn’t sing Christmas songs in the summer or summer songs at Christmas. If you wanted a song like ‘Treputė Martela’ (Daughter-in-Law’s Dance), you had to go in the autumn. “It’s a linen-working sutartinė, and all these working sutartinės have a really good rhythm. I know nothing about working with linen, but everything is written in the song. ‘First I seed it, then I put some water, then I cut it, then I dry it, then I brush it’, and so on. You didn’t need to learn how to read or write, you just needed to know how to sing and remember the lyrics. It was like that.”

There are essentially four types of sutartinė: dvejinės for two voices, trejinės for three and keturinės, like the opening ‘Sese Sodų’, for four voices, and they work almost ritualistically in a strict canon, though usually only two voices are heard at one time. While two voices sing, the other two women, usually, dance.

Peleniūtė sings some extraordinary sutartinės, like ‘The Cuckoo Was Cuckooing in the Heath’, which has the first melody in the minor and the second in the major. It’s things like this that make them such a fascinating genre. As well as the effect they have on the singers. “Sutartinės are a meditation,” declares Peleniūtė. “I sometimes do them in workshops of 300 people and after one hour it brings a beautiful relationship between those people. It’s like they had a journey together. A sutartinė is like a mantra. Not so much to be listened to, but performed.”

So why make this record if they’re not really for listening? “Because we choose those that are good for listening!”

One of the most remarkable tracks they devised for the album is ‘Cuckoo Song’ – different to the one mentioned above – which combines songs from all three languages. The basis is a rather brutal Estonian folk tale about a cuckoo: stepmother kills youngest daughter, who comes back as a cuckoo who sings beautifully and gives a scarf to her older sister, a hat to her brother and drops a millstone on the stepmother who killed her. Then, the cuckoo transforms back into the young girl. A rebirth. “It was harsh for women to live in these times,” says Peleniūtė. “Now we are free, so it’s a kind of healing, not to pass on this historical trauma to our daughters.”

What do they want people to get out of this album? “For people to know that we are not Russia,” says Peleniūtė without hesitation. “We are three different countries with a very old history and traditions. We were hidden by Soviet occupation, but now we are reborn. That’s why we’re The Baltic Sisters.”