Justė Janulytė is a composer in her thirties born in Lithuania. She has a fairly close connection with Italy because she studied with Alessandro Solbiati and Luca Francesconi.
She defines her own music as monochromatic, where chromatism stands for color: her pieces consist of a single large block of sound that is created from nothing, gradually grows larger, reaches a great climax towards the middle of its course (or shortly after) and then, slow as it first appeared, fades away. The mass writing, based on very dense textures of thick movements, reminds me somewhat of Ligeti's micropolyphony from the sixties, but unlike Ligeti, where colors (to continue with the metaphor) veer towards acid at the most unexpected moment, where the mass suddenly empties, where the atmosphere can change from one moment to the next, permeated by drama or irony, in Janulytė I find softer hues (diatonism contributes a lot), almost like watercolor, Northern European temperatures, and an attitude that I would define as contemplative (I wonder if the climax I was talking about somehow breaks the contemplation!).
This is the presentation of Elongation of Nights.
The structure of the two-layered score of “Elongation of Nights” reminds of the elongation of night while the day is getting shorter: one layer is setting down and getting quieter which makes way for the second layer that becomes louder and pulsates with elongating sounds. Every player has its own part (21 in total) similar to the echoes of a canon, thus such a monochromatic orchestra sounds like a utopian 84 string instrument. The harmony of the piece is based entirely on fifths, derived from the natural tuning of strings. Morton Feldman would have probably called such piece as “Fifths in my Life”.