Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Žibuoklė Martinaitytė’s Search for “Lost Beauty”

At the beginning of this month, Starkland released its latest album. It presents the premiere recording of “In Search of Lost Beauty…,” a 70-minute composition by Lithuanian-born composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė. Martinaitytė graduated from the Lithuanian Music Academy, but her studies and activities as a composer continued in Europe and subsequently in the United States. She now is based in New York.

Those studies included work with Brian Ferneyhough, Magnus Lindberg, Tristan Murail, and Jonathan Harvey; but it is also worth citing those names dropped by those writing about her music. These include both Arvo Pärt and György Ligeti, to whose names may be added Ingram Marshall, who contributed to the booklet for the new recording. Here in San Francisco she received a fellowship for the Other Minds festival in 2011 and a commission from Volti in 2018.

The result of that commission was performed in May of last year; and I had the good fortune to be present (as she was) at the world premiere performance of “Chant des Voyelles” (incantation of vowels). In a full program that was almost literally saturated with originality, Martinaitytė’s composition left a deep impression with its innovative approaches to working with the nature of sound itself. Here was my attempt at the time to explain what was going on in that composition:
Those on the technical side of speech understanding systems appreciate the extent to which vowels are recognized through different patterns in the frequency spectrum. By having different voices sounding different vowels based on different pitches, Martinaitytė could synthesize her own individual frequency spectra, which would result in new sonorities not representative of any recognizable vowel. In other words the piece emerged from the composer’s ability to create new sounds almost as if she had been working with electronic synthesis equipment.
In retrospect I would say that my attempt at analysis probably reflects Murail’s influence, but that is purely a personal impression.

In the composer’s words, “In Search of Lost Beauty…” was conceived as “an evening-long immersive experience with synchronized video projections.” This is a strictly instrumental composition performed by the FortVio piano trio, whose members are lndrė Baikštytė (piano), Rupaitė-Petrikienė (violin), and Povilas Jacunskas (cello). However, their performance is embedded in a “sonic environment,” which may have involved real-time transforms applied to the instrumental sonorities or electronic synthesis by other means. (The accompanying booklet does not go into such details, just as the technical discussion of “Chant des Voyelles” came from my own background, rather than the composer’s.)

When I encounter a recording of unfamiliar music for the first time, I always try to listen to it at least once before reading any background material. As a result, I was not surprised to read about how this music was first performed. From the very first sonorities of the prelude (subtitled “subliminal”), my reaction was that this was music ideal for an installation; so reading about those “synchronized video projections” did not surprise me in the least. Nor was I surprised to read Martinaitytė’s description of walking by Notre-Dame de Paris at night after it had rained and looking at “fragments of the Cathedral reflected in the puddles, in multiple formations.” It is worth noting that those impressions seem to have inspired the cover of the album:

courtesy of Starkland

On the basis of my experiences to date, I feel inclined to describe Martinaitytė as a composer of connotations. In “Chant des Voyelles” those connotations involved the underlying sonorities of speech itself. “In Search of Lost Beauty…,” on the other hand, offers connotations of visual stimuli transformed through fragmented reflections. Those connotations are, for the most part, expressed through the fragile sensitivity of quietude; but the music still rises to an intense climax around the halfway mark in a movement that is entitled (perhaps ironically) “Serenity Diptychs.” (It is worth noting that this movement involved self-appropriation. “Serenity Diptychs” had been composed in 2015 as a stand-alone work for violin and electronics, augmented with the projection of photographic diptychs by Philip Van Keuren.)

The bottom line is that I was as glad to encounter this recording as I had been with experiencing the world premiere of “Chant des Voyelles;” and I am definitely curious as to where Martinaitytė’s activities will take her next.

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