Psalms from Sandglasses by Justė Janulytė

'Psalms' for solo cello and pre-recorded cellos (2008)

Commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and written for cellist Anton Lukoszevieze.

This piece is the synchronization of different versions (played by one or different cellists) of the same musical line. The result of these 'vertical/variations resembles the effect of different voices, silently reading the same text or perhaps telling an orison, a psalm or a mantra, with individual intonations, timbres, tempos etc. This creates a polyphony of interpretations, in which individual voices either come closer, or move away from each other.

'Psalms' is based on a 'melody-labyrinth/or a 'melody-circle'. The cellist plays just a short monophonic line in the shape of a circle (it begins and ends in the sound C). However, it is performed according to the principle of a cyclical spiral: after some progress the melody returns to the preceding section and thus unfolds in stepwise motion. The whole melody is performed in several stages — not in a consecutive manner, but in fragments. Every time the line is repeated, the final sound (which coincides with the opening one) is raised a register higher, as if entering a new plane of the cello sound, its next metaphysical level. The heterophonic texture is created by suspending certain tones so that the tetrachords are most frequently heard in a vertical combination and horizontal arrangement of the four cello parts. Voices constantly swap positions in a canon, some running faster or slower than the others.

Justė Janulytė

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