The music of Rita Mačiliūnaitė creates an image of natural idyl that is non-existent in reality; the composer says she was pursuing ‘fragility and transparency’, trying to discover the traces of sounds and mark the contours of shadows. Her ‘intuitively born’ works are often assembled from quavering and rustling of strings, blasts of ‘ornithological’ (exotic) woodwinds and onomatopoeic electronic sounds. Similar to many other composers of her generation, the plots of Mačiliūnaitė’s operas are abstract and conceptual, expressing a certain idea (or a complex thereof) rather than a specific life situation.
Asta Pakarklytė
