Saucējas

The members of Saucējas are united by the common goal of learning and popularising Latvian ethnographic singing styles and techniques, with particular attention to those local traditions involving multipart singing. The group’s repertoire includes various types of traditional polyphony, including archaic forms of drone singing as well as newer types of songs. The group develops its repertoire by working with archived audio recordings and traditional songs collected during fieldwork as well as direct contact with traditional singers.

Saucējas have prepared a number of concert programmes, which have also been recorded as studio albums. The group’s debut album includes many of their favourite songs, while each subsequent album has focused on a specific vocal music tradition. In 2012, Saucējas won the Annual Latvian Music Recording Award for best folk album for Dziediet, meitas, vokorā, an album dedicated to folklore from the Sēlpils and Vārnava areas. The recording of their concert in Paris has also been distributed as an album. In addition to their native Latvia, Saucējas have performed in Austria, Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Estonia, France, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland and Russia.

Saucējas sing in the appropriate dialect for each song and learn as much as possible about the specific manner of singing as well as other aspects of the music in order to highlight the natural beauty of the folk song. On its newest album, however, the group is going one step further by recording Latgalian songs in their natural acoustic settings. For each song the singers have chosen the appropriate season and time of day, thus providing a fuller insight into traditional Latvian vocal music, which until the first half of the 20th century still existed mainly in its natural environment, an environment that fundamentally influenced the content, form and performance manner of the songs.