The spare, grey-toned home page of Juste Janulyte describes her simply as “composer of monochrome music.” Her compositions bear that out. Monochrome, however, does not mean simplistic. Where colors fail, textures prevail. Hence her “Textile for symphony orchestra,” which over the course of seven and a half minutes grows from slender layers of symphonic tonal material. Strings and horns eke out small phrases. As time passes, the meager parts grow, and the orchestra summons a gargantuan swell, and yet “Textile” never gains momentum, only density. True to the work’s title, these slivers of sound are like threads in a piece of fabric that gets larger and larger as the piece progresses.
In a brief description of the piece, she writes:
Textile (2006-2008) for orchestra is a single gesture, one metamorphosis of register, timbre and dynamic. There are no sound attacks used in the score; the only gesture which reflects also the macro form of the piece is the sound emerging and submerging into the silence. The layers of dense texture are based on this gesture, thus evoking an image of underwater pulsations. Even though “Textile” is written for different instruments, the author, who usually writes for the ensemble of the same timbres, is is trying to achieve the “monochrome” aestetics of the sound.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/juste-janulyte. More from Janulyte, who is Lithuanian, at janulyte.info.