Spengla-Ūla

PWM, 1993
CD Lithuanian Music in Context II. Landscapes of Minimalism. - Vilnius, Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Centre LMIPCCD067-068, 2011

Osvaldas Balakauskas, one of the most influential personalities in modern Lithuanian music, once said he has tried out various techniques during his long creative career, of which minimalism was his most short-lived fascination. (Musicologist Donatas Katkus, however, asserts that the first seeds of Lithuanian minimalism may be found in the 1st movement of his Second String Quartet, composed in 1971 and based on continuous repetitions of major second and minor third.) And so, Spengla-Ūla (named after two small rivers in South Lithuania), quite apart from the rest of his music, is one of his most important contributions to the history of minimalist music in Lithuania. This through-composed one-movement piece resembles the unfolding of a single bowing gesture in time and space. The texture of a 16-piece string orchestra is divided into four independent layers – four quartets, which relate to each other in heterophonic counterpoint as four dynamic curves. An asynchronous change of small segments within invariable harmonic progression lends a ‘polyphonic’ feel to the music. Surprisingly enough, complicated rhythmic patterns do not obscure the overall lucidity of sound inspired by the natural scenery, which is quite unusual for this composer. The principal idea behind the work’s construction is the acceleration and deceleration in motion, the reversible process or decomposition.

Rūta Gaidamavičiūtė