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