Mažulis

Rytis Mažulis is an ‘intellectual, neo-avant-garde’ Lithuanian composer, some of whose striking works have been released on a couple of CDs from the Belgian Megadisc label. The first release, Cum Essem Parvulus comprises four choral works, and the second, Twittering Machine, a further quartet of pieces, this time for ‘computerised piano.’

The pieces on Cum Essem Parvulus range from Canon Solus, an opus modelled on mediæval liturgical music & composed for the Hilliard Ensemble, to ajapajapam, an austere 35-minute composition for 12 voices, string quartet and electronics, which struck my ears as vaguely reminiscent of some of Giacinto Scelsi’s works, with a vocal texture not unlike that in Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna. My favourite piece on this disc is Sybilla in which ‘a brief stanza from Petronius’s Satyricon is set to a shimmying microtonal palindromic canon which gradually mutates, widening in intervallic range before retreating.’

Twittering Machine, on the other hand, necessarily evokes the player-piano works of Ligeti and Nancarrow. The titular composition is one of Mažulis’s earliest works in this vein, having been composed between 1984-86, and seems to have been ‘futurist’ in conception, intended to celebrate the urban and the industrial. In the piece Clavier of Pure Reason, we are invited to listen to a ‘computer-age super-pianist playing with 48 hands.’ The recentest work on this disc, Hanon Virtualis, is the most uncompromising: almost twenty minutes of incessantly percussive music.

Mažulis creates graphic prototypes for his scores, often on a single page, which exemplify the symmetrical (and even palindromic) nature of his compositions. The two images above are details of scans of a couple of these scores as reproduced in the Megadisc CD booklets. Megadisc plan to release one further CD of Mažulis’s music next year…