The Prayer of the Faithful Word

CD Mindaugas Bačkus. El Cello. - Domus Artis, 2005
CD Lithuanian Music in Context III. Experimental Ventures. - Vilnius, Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Centre LMIPCCD071-072, 2013

The impulse for this composition was a strange incident that took place at one event of the “Poetry Spring” festival held at St Johns’ Church in Vilnius, in 1991. Poet Sigitas Geda started reciting his poem The Prayer of the Faithful Word. Sigitas’ Prayer for St Bernard and soon began to break text into separate syllables to the point when they were no longer intelligible and reminded of barking or wolf’s howling at the end. Having no idea what had just happened, the audience was left in total bewilderment. Since then, the scandal has become overgrown with various legends: some inferred that the poet wanted to perform an act of exorcism in the church, which awaited reconsecration; others tended to think that the poet (possibly, also suffering from a hangover…) was struck by extremely reverberant acoustics of the church and simply amused himself in front of the baffled public. For his composition Martinaitis used a video recording of this act of ‘performative poetry’. Composed many years after the outburst of instrumental theatre in Lithuania (which happened in the second half of 1980's), it remains a good representation of the spirit that pervaded such experimental creations.

Linas Paulauskis