Ansis Bētiņš and Artūrs Čukurs are a Latvian vocal duo who move with ease between different sound worlds, from folk to early music to contemporary. Their approach is driven by a deep curiosity about the vocal traditions of different eras, places and cultures, which they rework with a personal sensibility and a rigorous sense of research.
On January 17, 2025, their record “Slavic Folk Songs” was released on the Swedish label XKatedral, a collection of folk songs coming largely from Ukraine and various Slavic countries.
So, first of all, how did this project begin? I read that you found all these online archives of Ukrainian folk music. But had you ever worked with this kind of repertoire before?
\[Ansis Bētiņš\] As you read in the liner notes of the record, I studied early music and, before that, I studied operatic singing, but never folk music. Neither Artur nor I ever studied musicology or traditional singing. It was just a lucky chance that we came across this music and this way of singing. And yes, we simply told ourselves that we could try it too, give it a go. We never expected that all of this would turn into an album and a tour with a repertoire like this.
As for me – Artur can tell his own version – I continue to perform as an early music singer, and this project, the one about Slavic folk songs, is something I do on the side. It’s a side project, but more and more it is becoming something bigger, more stable and almost a priority. It is starting to be one of the most important things in my professional life as a musician.
\[Artūrs Čukurs\] Even if we hadn’t done it before, folk music and singing are part of our culture, they are essential, and I think they have always been present in our lives, since birth. So, in a way, it’s as if we had been doing it all our lives.
And after working on this repertoire, which I would be tempted to call ‘pan-Slavic’, do you think you have found something -forms, structures...- in the music being made today?
\[Ansis Bētiņš\] Well, I haven’t really seen anything similar recently. Here we have a great choral tradition, a very strong tradition of choral singing. So there are some composers who continue to use folk music as a source of inspiration for their compositions. But I wouldn’t say it is a trend yet, especially when it comes to Slavic folk songs. We can see some influence, or at least some ideas taken perhaps from Ukrainian folk music, but not from the pan-Slavic region in general.
I think the idea, or rather the vision, at least from the point of view of Latvia — from our point of view, from Latvia — is that we are supporting Ukraine in every way possible. So I haven’t seen or heard of compositions influenced, I don’t know, by Russian or Belarusian folk music or anything like that.
\[Artūrs Čukurs\] But do you mean in Latvian music, or in music made in Latvia, or in general? Because I think there is a big folk music revival in Ukraine too. For example, there’s a very well-known band, DakhaBrakha, who create new pieces inspired precisely by their folklore. And they make this kind of folk pop... or I don’t even know exactly how to define it properly... anyway, that has been going on for a very long time.
But yes, I think it’s a bit complicated... when you ask about the pan-Slavic world, I think it is difficult to speak of the whole Slavic region as something unitary, because it is very varied. And I think that, yes, the situation is very different in each of its parts. So it is problematic even to try to see the pan-Slavic region as something unified nowadays, I would say.
Precisely: did you find, instead, something that unites the musics of the southern and northern Slavs?
\[Ansis Bētiņš\] I would say there are more differences than similarities. Well, the languages, at least from my point of view, seem similar. They sound similar. I can definitely see the link between them, since the Slavic languages belong to the same branch of the linguistic tree. But as for the melody, the way these songs are sung, the way the sound is produced and the different kinds of ornamentation found in this music, in these folk songs, there are many differences.
I mean, the southern Slavic countries were strongly influenced by the Ottoman Empire for generations, for hundreds of years, so their sound has a more Eastern, Middle Eastern character, one might say. And the tone is often more nasal too. There is a much wider use of ornamentation within these songs.
But in the northern part, in the northern Slavic countries, or better still among the eastern Slavs, things are different. We call it — maybe you have already heard it in our description — “white voice” singing. It is a kind of singing that doesn’t use head resonance, there is no amplification in the upper resonators. It is simply a pure, “white” sound that comes out directly from the throat.
This is one of the main differences between north and south. Even if sometimes there are overlaps. There are many similarities in the themes dealt with: whether we are talking about weddings, love, nostalgia or songs about nature, we often find recurring motifs. There are many songs, for example, about the fog, about thick fogs in which you glimpse a big tree and, next to this tree, there is a well or someone waiting for a beloved, or hoping that someone will arrive.
So yes, there are some similarities in the themes, but the way these songs are sung, the vocal technique, the way the sound is produced... there you can clearly see the difference.
A question about your process: how did you find the music in the archives? Were they all recordings, or did you find scores as well?
\[Ansis Bētiņš\] No scores. Basically we use field recordings as reference material and then we transcribe the music from these recordings, arranging the melodies for two voices. Because most of them are either monodic, so with a single melodic line, or, on the contrary, conceived for a much larger ensemble, even up to eight voices. So we have to adapt them and arrange them for two voices.
And have you been faithful to the singing techniques you found?
\[Ansis Bētiņš\] We tend not to stray too far from what the original sound is, from how it sounds in the recordings. Because, yes, as we said before, we are not professionally trained folk singers. So we rely on these recordings, convinced that they represent the way these songs should be sung, and for this reason we stick to that.
I mean, the very fact that we are arranging these songs for two voices, for our voices, is in itself something different from what we hear in those field recordings. And the fact that we are not trained as musicologists or folk singers also contributes to creating something different, something new, basically.
When I was studying ethnomusicology, I found the work of Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella, here in Italy, incredible: in the 1950s they recorded every kind of Italian folk music in a country that had just emerged from the war. In this way they managed to create an image of a nation, with all its nuances, differences and strong identities. And today it is easy to study all this, because there is this enormous, orderly archive of field recordings, ethnographies and writings. Did you find anything similar in your research?
\[Ansis Bētiņš\] Not really. The archives we used for our repertoire, as it is also written in our liner notes, emerged right after Russia began its full-scale war in Ukraine. And these archives are clearly being used as a tool to try to save the traditions and folk heritage of the regions of Ukraine that are currently occupied by Russia.
So, these archives of recordings are not something particularly organized or homogeneous. On the contrary, they are rather chaotic, and that is also why we had to do quite demanding work to listen to them all and transcribe them. Our method for finding the repertoire and the music we were interested in was simply to slowly scroll through all the archives, listen carefully to the recordings and then decide whether we both liked the way the melody sounded, whether we found something specific or interesting enough in that melody or in the theme to want to sing it and bring it to our concerts.
Sometimes it might be a different sound, a particular rhythm that emerged. Even Ukraine itself is not a homogeneous country: we noticed that the eastern part, the folklore of the east, and the western part, near the borders with Romania and Hungary, show notable differences. And this can be clearly perceived in the music and in the materials we found.
So, to answer your question, no, the archives are not homogeneous. And in fact we didn’t even find precise information on who created them, who the authors of these collections are. But we know that the oldest recordings we found date back to the ’80s, to the time of the Soviet Union. And then there are many others made in the ’90s and in the early 2000s. It seems that someone already had these recordings, but they had not yet been digitized. For us it was really very useful and important to have found them in this form, because they gave us the chance to build our repertoire.
I referred to the work of Lomax and Carpitella also because, over the years, the use of Italian folk music has taken on a political value of resistance. On your part, was there an intention to make a sort of political statement?
\[Artūrs Čukurs\] I don’t know, it was never a political statement for us from the beginning. I would say we simply came across this music and, basically, we liked it and wanted to share it. That is the truth, that’s all. But, of course, the contemporary context also makes it a political matter, I would say.
And yes, I don’t know... we have discussed some of the choices we make regarding the songs we sing, which song fits or which song seems appropriate to us, or which one maybe it is not the moment to sing right now. But the origin of everything, the initial reason, was simply the beauty of this music and our desire to share it.
As for the live shows, what kind of reactions have you encountered? Have you perhaps received criticism for the way you have interpreted the music?
\[Ansis Bētiņš\] We have never met anyone who disagreed with our choices or who told us that the way we perform these songs is inappropriate. We have played many times, including for Ukrainian refugees, and they are particularly moved and happy that we sing Ukrainian songs, especially in this period. The reaction has always been very warm and welcoming. In fact, they often ask us to include some of their favorite songs in our repertoire. Sometimes they come to us and ask: “Could you add this or that song?”. So yes, the reactions have always been really very positive and welcoming. We have never met strong criticism or disagreement about how we do what we do and how we perform.
\[Artūrs Čukurs\] And I also wanted to add that our audience is very varied, and it was a surprise for us to discover that people with very different musical tastes listen to us. Let’s say there are people who love folk music, others who love classical music, and also listeners of avant-garde music among our audience. And it is still surprising for us, also in terms of age: there are very young people and very old ones. This kind of music, surprisingly, manages to speak to many people, of different ages and nationalities.
So yes, I think it has something to do with the material itself, which somehow manages to communicate. I wouldn’t say “universally”, but there is certainly something that allows many people to find themselves in this music.
This question is aimed particularly at Ansis, who I know studied early music in Italy. What differences have you noticed in vocal and sacred music between Western and Eastern Europe?
\[Ansis Bētiņš\] I looked into this and I can say, almost with certainty, that there was a strong influence of the Italian Renaissance, of the early Renaissance and also of the Baroque, on Ukrainian sacred music. I too have sung a lot of Ukrainian sacred music, sacred chants for male vocal ensembles, from the early Baroque period, and in that era many Italian instrumentalists and teachers lived in northern Poland and in Lithuania, especially in Vilnius. And many Ukrainian musicians and composers studied right there. So it is almost certain that they met, and the music itself, the melody, the way the compositions are written and how they sound, and the way the harmonies develop, is very similar to what the Italians were doing in that period.
In particular I can mention Nikolay Diletsky, a very well-known Ukrainian composer of the Baroque period. He has compositions for vocal ensembles that resemble the compositions being created in that period in Italy. And, coming back to our program, to the project that Arthurs and I are carrying forward, we have also included some Ukrainian sacred chants in our repertoire, which we perform a cappella. But it is known — and we can find confirmation in written documents — that, in most cases, these chants were performed together with an accompanying instrument.
Usually it was a Ukrainian stringed instrument, the Bandura; in practice it is the same thing as the Italian monodies accompanied by lute or theorbo.
So yes, the influence of the Italian traditions was well known in Ukraine.
One last question: do you intend to continue this project, perhaps creating a songbook, an anthology?
\[Ansis Bētiņš\] I had never thought about it, but usually many people ask us: how many songs do you have? And I can honestly say that I don’t know. We have done so many concerts, with always different repertoires, that we have actually never counted how many of these songs we really have. But I don’t know, Arthur, do you think we will turn this into a songbook, an anthology? Will we create something like that?
\[Artūrs Čukurs\] I think we will have to collect even more of them, in order to call it an anthology.
Les Disparitions is a series of studies for viola, voice, cello and electronics that investigates the many forms of the disappearance of sound. Each piece develops around the idea of dissolution, exploring the boundaries between presence and absence, matter and sonic memory. The construction of the pieces is guided by verbal scores: texts that steered the work in rehearsal and that represent the conceptual and performative scaffolding of the project. These scores move between instructions for action and poetic suggestions, describing states of listening or sound conditions to be evoked and traversed. The result is a musical journey that winds along the margins of the perceptible, where sound transforms, withdraws and, finally, disappears.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →