"Jauna muzika" Shifts to E-music

The "Jauna muzika" ("Young Music") festival of new music hosted by the Lithuanian Composers' Union will be held for the 9th time on April 13-19, 2002. The festival will appear with the subheading e-muzika indicating that it has become a forum for electronic, electro-acoustic music and media art - the first of its kind in Lithuania. The 9th "Jauna muzika (e-muzika)" festival will present electronic and electro-acoustic works employing state-of-the-art developments in music technology (and mostly composed especially for this event) by Lithuanian, Dutch, Swedish, American, Italian, Latvian, Ukrainian composers, together with live performers, video, movement, lighting, etc.

Works by the youngest of the more than ten Lithuanians who will be premiering at the festival, Vytautas V. Jurgutis (b.1976), are expected to be of particular interest, for he is seen as the most advanced among Lithuanian composers in the field of electronic music at this time. One of his festival compositions, Alpha 10, was commissioned by the Swedish Rikskonserter and written while he was resident at the Visby International Centre for Composers, and working at the recently founded electronic music studio "Alpha" (Gotland, Sweden). Another work, Telomeros, features simultaneous real-time software-generated video sequences on three different projectors, along with a sophisticated soundtrack, all of which he created himself.

Two of the five concerts at the festival will be hosted by prominent performers from abroad: Luc Houtkamp's POW 3, the new force in Dutch electronic jazz, and the multi-media wizards from Sweden, Anders Blomqvist, Åke Parmerud and Josef Doukkali. The overall stylistic range of the festival programme is extensive, and covers highly formalized and stochastically programmed compositions, as well as minimal and intuitive/improvisational music, noise, and experimental "electronica" grooves.

Lithuanian Music Link No. 4