Vytautas Bacevičius - In Context

Type: Books

Information

Format: Paperback | 152 pages

Year of Publication: 2009

Publisher: Lithuanian Composers' Union

ISBN: 978-609-8038-00-2

Language: English

Translators: Martynas Aleksa, Veronika Janatjeva, Irena Jomantienė, Artūras Tereškinas

Editors: Rūta Stanevičiūtė, Veronika Janatjeva

Cover and artwork: Rokas Gelažius

Vytautas Bacevičius (1905–1970) is one of the most enigmatic and intriguing figures in the history of 20th-century Lithuanian music. Born into a Lithuanian-Polish family of talented musicians in Poland, he arrived in Lithuania in the 1920s and became an active participant of the local modern music scene. His studies in interwar Paris and contacts he made there with the international community of musicians had a formative influence on him both as a pianist and composer. In the 1930s he was one of the initiators to establish the Lithuanian section of the ISCM (launched in 1936). At the time he advocated some of the most radical ideas on how to modernise Lithuanian music, opposing the locally accepted narrow understanding of musical nationalism. The cataclysmic change in world’s politics and culture in the aftermath of World War II had a direct impact on Vytautas Bacevičius’s later artistic development, as well as on the dissemination of his ideas. During the three decades spent in exile (from 1939), he experienced a painful break in his activities as a pianist and a composer and change in his artistic orientations and reorientations, so characteristic of the European émigré artists who have settled in the new continent.

For a long time the work of Vytautas Bacevičius has been silenced and even prohibited in Soviet Lithuania for political reasons. The return of his music to the Lithuanian music scene was complicated and difficult. It was not until 2005 that a broader retrospective of his works was presented as Vytautas Bacevičius Festival and comprehensive publications of his music were issued (including scores and CDs) on the occasion of his birth centennial. This collection of essays started out at the international conference of musicologists “Vytautas Bacevičius (1905–1970) and His Contemporaries: International Links and Contexts of the First Lithuanian Musical Avant-garde” that was held as a part of the Bacevičius’s anniversary programme at the Lithuanian Composers’ Union in September 2005. For the first time the composer’s international contacts and the contexts of his works and activities were analysed within the broader history of the 20th-century Eastern and Central European music and as its typical case. This collection comprises texts by Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Czech and French musicologists prepared on the basis of their conference papers. Among the main sub-themes of this collection are the sources and parallels of Vytautas Bacevičius’s modern ideas about music; his relationships with the members of the School of Paris and the modern music scene of interwar France; the French contexts of Eastern and Central European composers in the mid-20th century; and their emigration to the United States of America.