Designation & Expulsion

CD Between Music and Ritual. - Music Information Centre Lithuania, MICL CD111, 2021

Having completed her Master’s degree in composition at the Paris Conservatoire, JUSTINA REPEČKAITĖ (b.1989) embarked on the Cursus program for composition and computer music at IRCAM. Her Cursus piece Transduced for percussion and live electronics was presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2020.

In 2018, while still a student, she was immensely taken by the book Lietuvių užkalbėjimai: gydymo formulės (Lithuanian Verbal Healing Charms) edited by Daiva Vaitkevičienė, offering folk texts of healing charms and a classification of them. The composer used such texts in her pieces Incantare for flute and electronics and Designation & Expulsion for mezzo-soprano, bass and percussion. According to her, the latter “explores the relationship between the sounding and emotional colouring of words. While specifically exploring how Lithuanian diphthongs sound, words get stretched until they lose their meaning and create an entirely different effect. Percussion and voices harmoniously complement each other, using but a few recurrent intervals throughout the composition, while the rich array of Lithuanian consonants is orchestrated by using non-pitched percussion instruments. The composition draws inspiration from the repetitive and austere manner of saying charm formulas, which is different from saying prayers in that the former are explicitly dominated by the healer’s individual powers.”

Vítězslav Mikeš