The Fifth International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony ...

Lithuanian and Ainu Vocal Polyphony: Certain Parallels
these refrains are especially important to the rhythm
of the sutartinės. Such onomatopoeic words include
taduvõ, čiūto rūto, tatatõ, siuli siulingėla, dūno,
rititatatoj, dautuvõ, tūto be tūtõ and others 8 .
It is difficult to ascribe meanings to the following
words that Lithuanian sutartinės songs often contain:
Rimo rimo tūto, / Rimo rimo tūto. / Sutarjėla, / Su–
tarjėla 9 . Explanations: rimo could mean seriousness,
calming down, quietness or in one’s turn; rymà (a
long vowel conditioned by musical stress) – peace–
fulness, rhyming, thinking while rhyming; tūto –
probably refers to tūtuoti ‘to toot, to pipe, to tru–
mpet or to sing sutartinės’ as well as ‘to shout in a
drawling manner’ or ‘to trumpet’ (like swans, gee–
se, cranes); sutūtuoti – ‘to have tooted, to have co–
me to agreement or to have sung’; tūtuoklės and si–
milar words – the skudučiai ‘Lithuanian multi-pi–
pes’ and sutarjėla – ‘while coming to agreement’,
‘while tuning’, ‘harmonised’ or ‘by common con–
sent’ (Račiūnaitė-Vyčinienė, 2006: 6-14, 10).
Lithuanian sutartinės tradition
<strong>The</strong> old singers compared the singing of sutartinės
to birdcalls, saying that the singing was like the
whooping of cranes 12 or akin to the tooting of
swans 13 . Very often sutartinės singing was described
as chickens clucking, i.e., instead of referring to
singing, it was said that the women kudekuoja 14 ,
kudėkakoja 15 , kudoja 16 (synonyms in dialects, verb in
the third person, infinitive of kudakuoti, kudekuoti,
kuduoti ‘to cluck’ or ‘to cackle’ like hens) (Rači–
ūnaitė-Vyčinienė, 2002: 266–267). It is possible that
clucking associates with the “jumping” of the voice
and not filling in the thirds or fourths, giving the imp–
ression of chopping, i.e., accenting every pitch (fan–
fare-like inflections are characteristic of sutartinės
melodies in the north-eastern sutartinės territory.
Some think that melodies of sutartinės sung in the
Biržai area have been influenced by the natural
4) Singing like birds piping
Ainu tradition
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<strong>The</strong> upopo sounds comply with the etymology of the
word, upopo, ‘noisy singing like birds twittering’
(Jordania, 2006: 155).
<strong>The</strong>re are a variety of rimse dances in the Ainu
tradition imitating movements of cranes, snipes,
white-rumped swifts, sparrows, foxes and gras–
shoppers. Songs to these dances often have words
describing their chirpings.
According to Nobuhiko, in dances imitating birds,
women also imitate a bird’s call by using trills and
falsetto (Chiba, 2008: 333).
“In speaking of the overall sound world, a distinction
is made between (in the Saru dialect) haw and hum.
<strong>The</strong> term, haw, literally ‘voice’, includes the voices
of humans, birds and other animals as well as with
the sound of instruments such as the tonkori ‘lute’
and the Western violin” 17 .