Explore and Discover

Where to find more information about the Song Celebration?

If you would like to do more research on a particular Song Celebration topic, take a look at this reference resource – the SongSpace bibliography. 

includes around 2,000 items, which are divided into more than 30 subcategories and folders in order to ease the search for sources. 

You can use the search function to find specific materials, topics or works by a particular author. Zotero is an open-access reference management tool that also makes it easy to create a bibliographic reference. 

This bibliography also includes the study “Song and Dance Celebration”, created by the researchers of the National Research Program project “Sustainability of Latvian Cultural Traditions in an Innovative Environment – Habitus”.

For a quick reference, please refer to the National Encyclopedia’s section on General Latvian and Song Festivals and the digital collection Song Festival Repository 

The following books can be useful for becoming familiar with the tradition of the Song and Dance Celebration:

  • Berzkalns, Valentins (1965). History of the Latvian Song Festival: 1864–1940. Brooklyn: Book Friend.
  • Berzkalns, Valentins (1968). Latvian Song Festival in Exile: 1946–1965. Brooklyn: Book Friend. See here .
  • Grauzdiņa Ilma, Olģerts Grāvītis (1990). Song Festival in Latvia. Proceedings. Numbers. Facts. Riga: Latvia’s Encyclopedia. See here.
  • Grauzdiņa, Ilma (2004). The Little Encyclopedia of the Song Festival. Riga: Musica Baltica. See here.
  • Muktupāvela, Rūta, Anda Laķe editor. (2018). Song and Dance Festival. Anatomy of Tradition. Riga: Jānis Roze publishing house. It should be highlighted as the most recent collective monograph, which analyzes the legal, financial, social, educational and other prerequisites for inheriting the tradition. 

If you wish to find out more information, you may search for sources in the following memory institutions:

  • The materials stored in the RMM can be found in the museum’s object inventory system MUPUS. This search tool can be used in the RMM reading room at Pulka Street 8 and in the exposition “Dziesmusvētku telpa” in Mežaparks big stage. 
  • The general catalog of the National Museum collection includes all objects and collections that are in the main collections of accredited state, municipal, autonomous, private museums. https://www.nmkk.lv/
  • Search for LNA in the unified archive information system search engine of the National Archives of Latvia.
  • Library catalogs are also useful – Kopkatalogs, the search engine of the Latvian National Digital Library and periodicals , books from various databases . 

For more information about this year’s festival, please visit the website of the XXVII General Latvian Song and XVII Dance Festival https://www.dziesmusvetki.lv/lv/