I'm Seeing My Friend Off and We Are Taking One Last Look at the Snow-covered February Trees...

Vilnius: Vaga, 1985
CD The Coming One. - Kaunas String Quartet, 2009
CD Lithuanian Music in Context II. Landscapes of Minimalism. - Vilnius, Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Centre LMIPCCD067-068, 2011

Vidmantas Bartulis’s minimalist idiom was largely shaped by his effort to cherish every single sound, to oppose expressive modernism with the chamber quality of Romantic music. One of his early works, I’m Seeing My Friend Off..., has become not only the author’s calling card, but also marked the advent of ‘neo-romantic’ generation of Lithuanian composers. In this particular sense, it was a manifesto piece. To achieve the state of such slow pace and lucidity one must stay inwardly calm. This pursuit of calmness is related to his interest in Oriental cultures. The composer recalls: “My interest in exotic cultures stretches back to my school years. My further interest in the Orient was initiated by Algirdas Martinaitis. I remember the occasion of my birthday when he sent me a very short poem by the Chinese poet Wang Wei. The funny thing was that the title of the poem was much longer than the poem itself... and it led me to create a piece for cello and piano – I’m Seeing My Friend Off and We Are Taking One Last Look at the Snow-covered February Trees... It is very difficult to be concise, while it’s rather easy to create a large-scale work, with elaborate development. But writing Japanese haiku is much more challenging than writing an opera. With Wang Wei or Basho, I could live with one triplet of them for a month or a year, without reading any other book.”

Another fellow composer, Faust Latėnas, called this work “a finest example of minimalist music – not of its technical type characterised by mere mechanical hammering of a few notes or rhythmic patterns, but of a much deeper kind, when the minimum of means is required to achieve the highest tension. I call it meditative minimalism.” In Bartulis’s music, silence is often as important as sound. The composer believes that “it is not so important whether you are using a lot of sounds and instruments, or just a few; whether the principles according to which they are being composed are conventional or innovative. All it takes to turn all these sounds into unheard-of ideas and unfamiliar states of mind is a new personality.”

Rūta Gaidamavičiūtė