Justė Janulytė

Born in Vilnius in 1982, Justė Janulytė studied composition at the Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy, in Milan at the ‘Giuseppe Verdi’ Conservatoire and in various masterclasses. She has collaborated with some of the world’s leading ensembles and soloists including Teatro La Fenice Symphony, Gothenburg Opera Symphony, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Polish National Philharmonic Orchestra, Brno Philharmonic, French Flute Orchestra, Riga Sinfonietta, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Ensemble Bit20, Orchestrutopica, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber and Male Choirs, Danish Radio Chamber, Kamer, Sequenza 9.3 and Camerata Silesia choirs, Quasar, Xasax and Flotilla saxophone quartets, cellists Mario Brunello,Henri Demarquette, Francesco Dillon, and Anton Lukoszevieze, flutist Manuel Zurria, saxophonist Marcus Weiss, harpsichordist Goska Isphording amongst others. Her music has been performed across Europe, the Americas, and Australia, and has been featured in such contexts as Sydney Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Venice Biennale, Romaeuropa Festival, Holland Festival, Warsaw Autumn, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, SonicA (Glasgow), MaerzMusik (Berlin), Biennale Némo (Gaîté lyrique, Paris), musica festival (Strasbourg), musikprotokoll im steirischem Herbst (Graz), Musicadhoy (Madrid), Vale of Glamorgan Festival (Cardiff), Expositions of New Music, Moravian Autumn (Brno), Gaida (Vilnius) to name a few.

Justė Janulytė first came into public view in 2004 when her graduation work “White music” for 15 strings was awarded as the best chamber piece of the year by the Lithuanian Composers’ Union. Furthermore, her five next compositions also won the same prize. In 2009 “Aquarelle” for choir, won the 1st prize (in the category of composers under 30) at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. In 2011 she was awarded the Young Artist's Prize by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and in 2017 the Lithuanian National Arts and Culture Prize, the highest artistic distinction in Lithuania.

The majority of the works by the author, written for dense monochromatic ensembles (only strings, only winds or only voices), explore musical time/space perception through large-scale multilayered textures and extremely gradual metamorphoses. While balancing between the aesthetics of minimal, spectral and drone music, Justė Janulytė composes acoustic metaphors of optic ideas (“Observation of Clouds” for voices, winds and strings, “The Colour of Water” for saxophone(s) solo and orchestra, and “Here at the quiet limit” for male choir and string orchestra), and researches the visual nature of musical phenomena in the works where sound and image are fused together (“Breathing Music” for string quartet, electronics and kinetic sculptures, “Eclipses” for 4 strings, live electronics and soundproof glass installation, “Sandglasses” for 4 cellos, electronics and video scenography).

Justė Janulytė currently teaches composition at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, lives between Vilnius and Milan.

As of February 2019