‘Justė Janulytė’s music is recognisable by long, slow expositions, gradual enrichment of texture; thanks to her relished canon technique large sound layers create impression of twinkling, rippling, flashes of light and colour. The music as if emerges from unseen distances and gets closer to the listener without notice, then finally pierces into the listener, passes through all the cells, moves the atoms, and then slowly recedes until disappearing completely in the horizon. Sometimes it seems that Justė’s works do not have a beginning or an end and that over there, behind the horizon, the music keeps on moving…’
– Jūratė Katinaitė
Justė Janulytė first came into public view in 2004, when her graduation work white music for 15 strings was awarded the best chamber piece at a competition organised by the Lithuanian Composers’ Union. Consecutively, she has won the prize for the Best Orchestral Work (textile, 2008), the prize for the Best Chamber Work (Elongation of Nights, 2010), and the Grand Prix (Sandglasses, 2011) at the same competition. In 2009, she also became a winner in the Young Composers category (with aquarelle for mixed choir) at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. Within the span of several short years her experimental and highly visionary works earned her wide internal recognition and cemented her place as one of Lithuania’s greatest cultural exports within the contemporary arts scene. In 2017, Janulyte was awarded the Lithuanian National Arts and Culture Prize, the highest artistic distinction in Lithuania.
Janulytė’s work was first seen in Huddersfield in 2010 with Sandglasses, a breathtaking performance installation for four cellos, live electronics and video. Viewers are submerged in an immersive, audio-visual environment which is at once beautifully meditative and strikingly powerful. The four cellists are shrouded in transparent columns. As they play, traces of light flit down the columns like grains of sand. Sandglasses was a huge international success, appearing at major festivals across Europe, and in 2013 was honoured as the closing event in Brussels of the Lithuanian Presidency of the Council of Europe.
The majority of Janulytė’s work continues this exploration of ‘monochromatic’ ensembles (e.g. four flutes or saxophones, 21 strings etc.), representing slow metamorphoses of textural, dynamic, timbral and ornamental gestures while balancing between the aesthetics of minimalism and sonorism. She composes acoustic metaphors of optic ideas (Pendulums, 2001; textile, 2008) and researches the visual nature of musical phenomena in the works where sound and image are fused together – such as Sandglasses or Breathing Music (2007) for four cellos, live electronics and kinetic sculptures.
At hcmf// 2022 we first encounter Janulytė through Unanime, her 2020 work for Marco Blaauw’s trumpet ensemble The Monochrome Project – a more perfect match it is hard to imagine. In Unanime, the trumpet octet takes on the mantle of an organ made of different pipes, sharing the same breath and soul. The following evening, Janulytė’s Sleeping Patterns weaves hypnotic, repetitive patterns of slightly differing tempos throughout the players of London Sinfonietta.
To give the last word to Janulytė:
‘One of the reasons why I like composing so much is that it allows embodying of the most utopian ideas, in spite of any rules of logic or, all the more, laws of physics: white reflection in the mirror facing black colour in front of its own image (white music), or objects casting shadows transforming into shadows without corresponding objects themselves (let’s talk about shadows), etc. Certainly, the listener is not being bothered with this kind of information. All this stays between my music and me.’