A prolific composer and long-standing dominant figure in new Lithuanian music, Bronius Kutavičius is considered the harbinger of minimalism in Lithuanian music. The way the composer uses many-layered repetitions and reduces the musical material to rather elementary archetypal patterns, may resemble American or early European minimalism, but it sounds quite different. Kutavičius' special kind of minimalism is his own invention, and is rooted deeply in archaic forms of Lithuanian folk music. On the other hand, he is able to develop such an intense drama ouf of minimalist repetitions that the audience is sometimes left almost 'bowled over with sounds'. Kutavičius admits that he started following his own creative vision and writing some of his valuable compositions quite late, towards the end of his thirties. Among them was Pantheistic Oratorio (1970) - now often considered the take-off point of genuinely modern Lithuanian music, and especially oratorio Last Pagan Rites (1978), valued as one of the most important and influential Lithuanian contemporary music works.
