Re Kutavicius: it may be relevant that Lithuania was the last major pagan state in Europe. In the late Middle Ages it was one of the most significant powers in the continent, controlling most of Poland and the Ukraine and dealing as an equal with the Khanate of the Golden Horde based in Crimea. Not exactly fluffy bunnies - they seem to have been into public human sacrifice. They were only beaten by a long and murderous military campaign by the Teutonic Knights on one side and Ottoman expansion on the other.

Litrhuania also has one of the smallest linguistic minorities in the world, the Livonians, whose music seems extremely archaic ("runic" chants covering a very narrow range - Sibelius used some of them as motifs).

Glasgow "City of Culture" invited Lepo Sumera, the Lithuanian composer who was (a sinecure job I think) Minister of Culture in Lithuania at the time, to spend some time in Glasgow writing community-based compositions involving schoolkids. One of his other pieces played at the same concert made some pretty blatant allusions to Lucy-in-the-Sky-with-Diamonds-type Sixties Western psychedelia. So I asked him in the question time whether he was deliberately invoking drug references and if so how that went down with the Lithuanian power elite. He acted rather embarrassed and tried to dismiss it as fluke. I would probably have done better to pin him down over the wine and nibbles and ask if he'd compared Scottish and Lithuanian magic mushrooms.