Rūta Vitkauskaitė

Programme Note

Stabai, meaning Studs, or Idols, was my Masters graduation piece at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Threatre. It has that poinly, static gesture, that is in fact the essence of the whole piece, and the material continuously comes back to it, while navigating through different worlds of music. The technique is very obviously influeced by spectralism which I was very much interested in at that time, although the methods are not used strickly, but influece the attention to timbral changes within the orchestra. When composing this, I was thinking a lot about archair elements although not in a direct animated way, and only many years later, when living in Scotland, I connected my then mental imagery with ancient Standing Stones. One could think, this piece was my vision, or intuition, of my own life almost two decades later.