MUSIC AUTUMN | BALTIC MUSIC DAYS 2025
- Oct. 6, 2025
Lithuanian Contemporary Music Festival Music Autumn
MEANING TRANSFORMATIONS
9–18 October 2025
Venues:
Energy and Technology Museum
Liepkalnis Water Storage Facility (Reservoir)
“Kablys“
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This year, the Lithuanian Contemporary Music Festival MUSIC AUTUM („Muzikos ruduo“) is joining forces with BALTIC MUSIC DAYS, a festival held annually in a different Baltic country, and, having gained a prominent international dimension, will take place on September 5-18 at the Energy and Technology Museum, the Liepkalnis Water Reservoir, and the Kablys club.
The axis uniting the MUSIC AUTUMN and BALTIC MUSIC DAYS programs is this year's festival theme, MEANING TRANSFORMATIONS, which will be explored by Lithuanian composers and performers, along with guests from Latvia and Estonia!
The programme invites us to look at intermediality and explore various forms of meaning transformation, observe the process of change itself, and discover how a whole new field of meanings opens up depending on the medium.
The theme MEANING TRANSFORMATIONS was not chosen at random: in 2025, we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of M. K. Čiurlionis' birth. In his work, music and painting intertwined synesthetically, creating one of the most striking examples of how different artistic languages can extend and transform each other.
“I would like to compose a symphony out of the roar of waves, the mysterious speech of a centuries-old forest, the twinkling of stars, our folk songs, and my boundless longing.”
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis
MORE INFO and FULL PROGRAMME: www.muzikosruduo.lt
PROGRAMME
Thursday, 9 October, 7:00 PM
The Energy and Technology Museum
OUT OF ČIURLIONIS
CHORDOS String Quartet
Antanas Jasenka, Antanas Kučinskas (laptops)
Džiugas Katinas (live video projection)
ABOUT THE PROGRAMME:
The programme OUT OF ČIURLIONIS creates a space between epochs, where Čiurlionis’s String Quartet in C minor radiates like a distant star, shining with the light of Lithuanian Romanticism – an image of a lost, gentle and intimate world, re-read from today’s perspective: through the languages of electronics, unconventional performance techniques and live visuals.
Alongside the original work, Antanas Jasenka’s and Antanas Kučinskas’s composition OUT OF ČIURLIONIS forms a prism of our own time, through which the rays of Čiurlionis’s music reach us from afar – like starlight, transformed beyond recognition, becoming an entirely new work.
In this confrontation of different temporal expressions, Čiurlionis’s quartet, without altering its score, opens other dimensions and reflects how our relationship with sound, form and aesthetics has changed over the past century.
Let us quietly dream: what if Čiurlionis suddenly found himself here today – among sound effects, code and streams of images – and how might his thought unfold through the means of our time, in the soundscapes of today.
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Friday, 10 October, 7:00 PM
The Energy and Technology Museum
CHAIN OF CHANGES
Contemporary music ensemble LENsemble Vilnius
ABOUT THE PROGRAMME:
“Chain of Changes” is a creative principle in which each new musical stage builds on and develops the one before it. In this way, the concert’s overall sound becomes a single continuous compositional line. This principle of re-composition is characteristic of Vykintas Baltakas’s work, which is why the concert opens with his re(a)Line for saxophone(s) and electronics. With the help of electronics, the soloist creates a single continuous line that, once recorded at the beginning, is subsequently extended and constantly transformed.
The main performers of the concert are Liudas Mockūnas and the younger generation of saxophonists – graduates of LMTA’s Contemporary Music Performance programme, who, during their studies, combined academic music with free improvisation. It is no coincidence, then, that the principle introduced in the first piece is further developed in improvisational form. Through successive cycles of re-creation, the musical material mutates into an entirely new musical expression.
Symbolically, the concert is concluded with Bronius Kutavičius’s opus “Far Away, Till Midnight” (1995). Written for the rare ensemble of five saxophones and strings, the piece reflects the composer’s fascination with Indian musical culture. As is well known, this culture is grounded in a profound improvisational tradition – over centuries, its musical structures and modes have provided the foundation for a constant process of “rewriting.”
Thus, “Chain of Changes” expresses not only a musical principle but also symbolises the transformation of kindred ideas in the light of generational change.
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Saturday, 11 October, 6:00 PM
Liepkalnis Water Storage Facility (Reservoir)
VECERA | FLUX
Paulius Večera
ABOUT THE PROGRAMME:
VECERA | FLUX is an interdisciplinary performance inspired by Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of individuation. The cycle of eight pieces functions as a sonic diary, tracing an inner journey through the shadow, anima/animus, the conflicts of ego and the unconscious, ultimately leading towards integration and inner transformation.
The first half symbolises the pole of light, the second - the pole of darkness. The compositions employ field recordings, experimental sound, and a consciously shaped sonic space in which sound becomes not only something to be heard, but also something to be lived. It is a reflection on fragility, loss, desire, and change – and at the same time, an invitation to dance with them.
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Tuesday, 14 October, 7:00 PM
The Energy and Technology Museum
RICERCARS OF TWITTERING MACHINES
LMTA Electronic Music Ensemble
ABOUT THE PROGRAMME:
In the mid-1980s, a new stylistic current emerged in Lithuanian music, foregrounding the radically mechanical aspects of sound. Its authors – later dubbed the “machinist generation” (Ričardas Kabelis, Šarūnas Nakas, Rytis Mažulis, Gintaras Sodeika, Nomeda Valančiūtė, Tomas Juzeliūnas) - created works that now re-emerge within the context of live electronic music.
In this concert, the music of the “machinist generation” unfolds as a vibrant, multi-layered organism of sound, where the relationship between machine and human is re-examined. It is not merely a recomposition or reinterpretation, but a new dialogue with perhaps the most conceptual phenomenon in Lithuanian music.
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Wednesday, 15 October, 7:00 PM
The Energy and Technology Museum
AFTERSOUNDS
Cello Club
ABOUT THE PROGRAMME:
For this festival, the ensemble “Cello Club” presents a programme of four brand-new works of contemporary music, all united by a focus on sound as an autonomous medium of aesthetic perception. Here, music is not subordinated to narrative or image – it becomes a generator of meaning in itself, shaping the listener’s experience not through representation but through direct acoustic phenomenology.
The festival theme – intermediality – is interpreted in this programme as an inner expansion of the sound medium, arising not through explicit interdisciplinary references but through the relation of sound, as a structure of experience, to space, the body, and the listener’s state of consciousness. Sound becomes not only a channel of transmission but an independent medium of transformation – a “medium” in its own right.
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Thursday, 16 October, 7:00 PM
Kablys
MUSIC AS DIALOGUE
Lithuanian Symphonic Wind Orchestra
Conductor Karolis Variakojis
ABOUT THE PROGRAMME:
Conducted by Karolis Variakojis, the Lithuanian Symphonic Wind Orchestra presents three world premieres in this festival programme, alongside two works being performed in Lithuania for the first time.
The evening features music by Ramūnas Motiekaitis, Mykolas Natalevičius, Marius Salynas (Lithuania), Gatis Jānis Pujāts (Latvia), and Kristjan Kõrver (Estonia). Drawing inspiration from diverse sources – from Charles Ives’s collage-like aesthetic to spiritual themes rooted in Biblical quotations, from natural phenomena to stylised allusions to cinema – these works reflect the festival’s theme through a creative dialogue between such phenomena and the language of music.
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Friday, 17 October, 7:00 PM
The Energy and Technology Museum
RESONANCES OF POETICS
Ensemble for New Music Tallinn (Estonia)
ABOUT THE PROGRAMME:
The Ensemble for New Music Tallinn (“ENMT”) is one of the leading contemporary music ensembles in the Baltic and Nordic region - will present an impressive programme the RESONANCES OF POETICS to the audience of the MUSIC AUTUMN festival.
In this programme, Ensemble for New Music Tallinn explores how poetic text and language itself become objects of creative analysis. The works investigate how the rhythm of language, the diversity of translations, and their semantic contrasts, as well as the overtones of Estonian formants, transform into musical material, where language becomes music and poetry turns into compositional substance. In this way, the original field of meaning is expanded or even transformed, granting it new vitality and dimensions of experience.
This concert is organised in collaboration with the “Baltic Music Days” festival and its organisers, the Baltic Contemporary Music Network.
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Saturday, 18 October, 7:00 PM
Kablys club
SYMPHONY OF METAMORPHOSES
Sinfonietta Rīga (Latvia)
Artistic Director & Conductor Normunds Šnē
ABOUT THE PROGRAMME:
Internationally acclaimed orchestra “Sinfonietta Rīga”, renowned for its conceptual programmes and outstanding artistic quality, comes to Vilnius with a new programme SYMPHONY OF METAMORPHOSES dedicated to the international strand of MUSIC AUTUMN’s programme BALTIC MUSIC DAYS, organised in collaboration with the Baltic Contemporary Music Network.
The festival’s closing programme will feature works by composers from all three Baltic countries (including two premieres!) that explore different transformations of meaning: walking as a spatial operation becoming the foundation of musical structure; the influence of the inner world on the distorted perception of external impulses, creating a world of false reflections; and, inspired by Grisey’s spectral explorations, the pursuit of organically intertwining temporal proportions with sonic spaces through the metaphor of the rainbow.
Organized by: VšĮ Muzikos ruduo
Funded by: Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality
Strategic partners: Lithuanian Composers' Union, Baltic Contemporary Music Network
Information partners: LRT, Latvijas Radio 3 – Klasika, Klaasika Raadio
Partners:
Energy and Technology Museum, Kablys, Lithuanian Music Information Center, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater, Latvian Composers' Union, Estonian Composers' Union, Estonian Cultural Council, GoVilnius.
MORE INFO: www.muzikosruduo.lt | FB | IG