Užaugo liepa

Based on a traditional Lithuanian part-song

Performed at the 2024 Centennial Lithuanian Song Festival in Vilnius, featuring more than 11,000 singers!

Sutartinės are traditional Lithuanian multi-part songs and have been recognized by UNESCO as “Master- pieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” in 2010.

This piece expands upon the traditional Lithuanian sutartinė “Užaugo liepa,” a story of a linden tree and a woman’s reverie. In the original version, each verse is sung three times, each time by a different singer, accompanied by a call-and-response refrain of “Dautuvo” and “Ratilio” in the other voices. My setting preserves this texture in the first verse. After that, we depart from the strict canonical form; each successive verse is given a unique character to help illuminate the meaning of the text and make this fantasy colorful and vibrant.

Performance Note: The piano brings a certain dreamy otherworldliness to the story, but the voices should have lots of rhythmic vitality, especially when singing syncopations and the “dautuvo / ratilio” nonsense words in the verses and refrains. These articulations are marked in the score.