The Colour of Water

CD Between Music and Ritual. - Music Information Centre Lithuania, MICL CD111, 2021

JUSTĖ JANULYTĖ (b.1982) currently divides her time between Vilnius and Milan. Her magnum opus, the longest, technically most complex and, so far, the most successful of all her works, is Sandglasses (2010) for four cellos, live electronics and an installation of video, light and tulle. It displays her style and methods of composition to the fullest, and it received its Czech premiere at the Moravian Autumn Festival in 2015. Her idiom is recognizable right from the title, which only ‘disguises’ itself as a poetic program and looks as if it ought to be interpreted as a metaphor with many possible meanings, but it is in fact its primary meaning that defines rational ties with the work’s structure. Similarly significant is the composer’s attitude towards the instrumental apparatus – she doesn’t treat them as individual voices but rather as parts of a ‘super-instrument’ of some sort. This lends her sound vocabulary a certain homogeneity, which prompted the composer to define it as ‘monochromatic.’ This is also characteristic of her piece The Colour of Water (2017) for saxophone and chamber orchestra dedicated to the Sinfonietta Riga, the conductor Normunds Šnē and the Lithuanian saxophonist Arvydas Kazlauskas now based in Riga, which happens to be the final part in her ‘Latvian trilogy’ along with The Elongation of Nights (2009) and Observation of Clouds (2012). Janulytė reveals that “the piece is an attempt to poetically reflect on the illusory colour of water (which is actually colourless in nature) by seeking answers via the musical metaphors of reflection, and to generate musical material by applying the principle of a mirror, which predetermines the work’s macro and micro levels.”

Vítězslav Mikeš