Lithuanian polyphonic songs : the archaic nature of their musical language in the context of global music.

Lithuanian traditional polyphonic songs, known as , are characterized by a distinctive musical language and have almost no analogues in world music. The aim of this article is to explore the peculiarities of their musical language and the socio-cultural context of their performance tradition in order to reveal their archaic origins. The archaic nature of songs is shown not by individual features of their musical language, but by the totality of these features, the peculiarities of their poetics, and performance traditions.