The Lithuanian composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė thinks much more deeply about music than most of us. She respects it, even fears it. It possesses a mysterious gravitational force, she says, pulling you into its orbit, but also offers freedom to push away from yourself, to jettison whatever occupies your mind. Music is "the essence of life," as she puts it. It's an act of transformation.
Martinaitytė, now 52, is slowly gaining visibility outside her homeland. Beginning in 2019, a series of well-received recordings has showcased her imaginative methods in orchestrating ensembles large and small, with last year's Aletheia featuring four compelling choral works in magnificent performances by the Latvian Radio Choir. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020, allowing her to compose the hour-long Hadal Zone, a cinematic deep dive to the bottom of the ocean. In 2022, the New York Philharmonic gave the U.S. premiere of Saudade, her orchestral ode to nostalgia.
Unlike most composers, who live for the day they can hear their music come alive off the page, there was a period early on when Martinaitytė didn't want her music performed. Instead, she first took time to fully understand herself, her relationship to what she was composing and what effect it might have on an audience. Listening to the composer's slow-moving scores, with their intricately woven layers, your mind can play tricks on you — and that's just how she wants it. Time winds down to a glacial pace, harmonies flash in and out of focus, scraps of melody float amid oases of shimmering light or sink in dark shadows. Now, with more recordings, performances and commissions underway — including an upcoming opera made in collaboration with the late Robert Wilson — Martinaitytė is finally poised to become a major figure in her field.
From her generations-old family home and studio in the back country of Northwest Lithuania — where she spends each summer composing, away from her home base in New York — Martinaitytė joined a video chat to talk about the role of music in our lives, the value of silence in composition and why she likes the term "statically dynamic" to describe her own work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tom Huizenga: I'd like to begin with a quote about your music from the late composer Ingram Marshall: "If this music transports you into a haunting, mysterious dream world, don't worry about it — it's only doing its job." I'm curious what you think of that description.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: Ingram Marshall wrote this quote, together with the program notes, for my CD called In Search of Lost Beauty. It's a piano trio with electronics, and the electronics have pre-recorded the same instruments as the live instruments. When you mix those palettes of real and slightly less real, you get this kind of diffused perception, which tricks your brain — I think that was part of what he meant. But another part is the sort of altered state of mind the listener enters, where all the constraints of our reality, of how time flows, is being erased with the help of music.
Why do you want your listeners to be transported in that way?
The older I get, every time I listen to some piece, what matters to me is whether it takes me somewhere, whether it takes me out of myself. I don't want to be in myself. I want to forget about time. I want to be elsewhere, and enjoy that. And I think we deserve that freedom of exploration of places unknown to us. In our daily life, we are very limited beings — there are physical limitations, mental limitations, all kinds of limitations. But art, and especially music being such an ephemeral art, can take you through a lifetime in one hour, no problem.
I do get a feeling similar to Marshall's description when experiencing your music — not only in In Search of Lost Beauty, but in Hadal Zone, Saudade and the entire Ex tenebris lux album. It's a singular feeling where you don't know what's coming next, yet you feel you are in a mostly safe space, like when a book or movie pulls you deep into its world.
I think you understand my intentions behind the music. I carefully craft the emotional sequences of how I, as the composer, feel through the process, but also what the listener's journey will be. It has its own logic and its own transcendence, and sometimes it goes to dark places. Sometimes you have to descend into the darkness of your own existential depth because it's part of being human.
What the listener's mind is experiencing is what they have inside of themselves. Everybody comes to a concert with a different state of mind. Some people are open to going to places of inner experience. Others resist, so it takes time for them to get in. I would like to believe my music helps the listener to enter that space. But what happens with them? It really depends upon them, not upon me.
Marshall said that the music is "only doing its job." What do you think is music's job?
There's no good answer for that, right? Music has so much meaning and functions ascribed to it through history. For me, music encompasses everything. It's the essence of life, the essence of our human mind, the essence of freedom. And freedom is a very important concept for me, because I grew up in Soviet times when there was no freedom.
Music, for me, is not utilitarian. It's not something that fills space so that we feel more comfortable. Music is an act of transformation, and an act of transcendence. We return from it better human beings. We get purified within, and when the music is over, we feel lighter, like we've gained more inner space. Even our gaze widens a little bit — we get that peripheral vision. It expands us in all dimensions.
Let's talk a bit about your early years. You were born in St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, in the Soviet era. But your parents, I take it, were native Lithuanians who moved back to Lithuania?
Yes, when I was 5 years old, because I needed to go to school — and my parents were concerned that I would start speaking Russian instead of Lithuanian.
What kind of music did you hear around the house? What captured your interest?
My mother used to sing me lullabies, but she's not a very musical person. Every time she sang, the lullabies would sound different, as if she was composing melodies — and because she didn't have a good ear, she was singing almost Schoenberg-like melodies. I loved the quality of her voice as an instrument, and I could follow that instrument anywhere she went, all those meanderings. That's what I loved the most in my childhood. I always asked her to sing for me so that I could relive the experience.
Were your parents interested in classical music?
My father was a big admirer; he definitely had musical abilities. He could actually read scores and even conducted a military choir, and he also played accordion.
Then everything changed when I went to school. It was a school for musically gifted children; I was surrounded by music all the time. You heard it in the corridors — always Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin. You could hear it all day long.
The piano was, and is, your instrument, but was there a point at which you knew you wanted to become a composer?
I remember that moment very vividly. I was 13 years old and there was, I suppose, a lot of hormonal fluctuations happening at that time. I was experiencing moods that were too strong for me to handle. One day I was extremely unhappy with myself and didn't know how to channel it, and all of a sudden I saw a piece of paper and was like, "That's it. I'm going to write it out."
I was surprised the idea came to me, because I didn't even know that living composers existed at that time. We were not exposed to any contemporary music. I wrote that first piece for the piano, and afterward I felt so relieved and transformed. I looked into the mirror and saw a different person completely. And I understood that this is going to be my life — not as a performer, but as a composer.
Soon after that experience, a composition teacher came to our school. He was a very young composer who just graduated from the music academy. After the first few lessons, when I started composing more and more, he said very clearly, "You are a composer. That's your future." I was like, "You can't know that." He said, "I know it. I see it. You cannot fool yourself."
I know there's a vibrant history of classical music in Lithuania, but those composers are still virtually unknown here. Why is that?
Lithuania is a small country, so it can be known only to a certain degree. The spread of a culture is very often connected to the political power — how a country represents itself, where the funding goes. Unless a small country has some kind of genius, the country just doesn't have the structure and political support to become more widely known. We had one, Mikalojus Čiurlionis, who was a composer and painter. But today, it's easier because we have a lot of opera singers who have become well-known in the world — Asmik Grigorian, for instance. And now we have a lot of female conductors coming from Lithuania, like Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. There's a whole generation of young conductors who are making Lithuania famous.
And now you are making Lithuania famous — as a composer, you're the face of Lithuanian classical music worldwide. No pressure, right?
[Laughs] Of course there's pressure! Before I came to the United States, which happened almost 20 years ago, I never thought of my identity — whether I am Lithuanian or a European composer. It just didn't matter. And then when I came to the U.S., I realized that, in fact, I carry with me some identity, whether I wanted it or not, and I have to be responsible for that identity. I cannot ignore it and say, "No, I'm on my own." Because we are part of our own cultural context; we are not appearing out of nowhere. We come from some roots, and those roots are very important.
As we speak, you are in an old family home in the back country of Lithuania, in the midst of nature. Do we hear Lithuania in your music?
I think you do. How it comes about is through intonations of the native language. When you are born, the first exposure of your native tongue forms some kind of understanding of what the music of the language is, and therefore we are drawn to those particular intonations. The Lithuanian language has a lot of downward intonations and minor intervals, so that is reflected in the folk music and in all the composers' harmonic choices. Whether you want it or not, you are attracted to a certain sound, harmonically speaking. And the same applies to the rhythmic organization, because the language also carries some inherent rhythmic patterns in the way it punctuates time. I think that also affects our understanding of music, and why we choose to listen to something that does the same thing as our language.
Speaking of language, I've often returned to Aletheia, your album of choral works. You can hear the complex layering of high Renaissance choral music, but also distinctly modern harmonies that remind me of Ligeti. Oddly, it's a choral album without words.
The Lithuanian language has a lot of vowels, even double vowels. In my choral works, I use a lot of vowels, and you can hear the connection with the language — but once again, I am aiming for ultimate freedom of expression. I don't want to be limited by the text, because any text would define the meaning and therefore make it more narrow. If you don't have text, the inner experience can be much more varied, and people have more freedom to hear how the voices are combining, how the time flows and what happens harmonically.
On March 11, 1990, Lithuania declared independence from a soon-to-collapse Soviet government. Your first compositions date from about 1990. Having grown up under Soviet rule, what were your thoughts when you started composing? Was music a safe space for you then?
I was really lucky — my creative path coincided with the country's liberation and freedom. That was the attractive part about being in music, because music didn't need to say anything, it could be just itself. As a teenager, I was staying up late at night, composing when everybody was asleep, and I felt so free. Music was a promise of freedom for me, always.
Is music still a safe space for you today?
I would say so, yes. It's also a refuge from all the troubles and complexities of the world, because it doesn't matter what happens around you. Of course, we have to react and respond and process everything that appears in our environment. But once you go into that musical creative space, you can let go of all those things and just be with sounds. And sounds don't have to represent a message, necessarily. They can be a very powerful tool, but they don't have to be.
I'm guessing you must have felt a different kind of freedom when you moved to the U.S.?
In 2006, we moved to San Francisco because my husband is from the Bay Area, and in 2009 we moved to New York. I wanted to be in a larger context, because coming from a smaller country, you always want to expand, and the creative community is so much larger in New York than anywhere else.
I imagine not too many people in New York were aware of your music back then.
Yes, it took some years to get heard. But it was an amazing experience, because nobody knew who I was — I could create anything, and nobody cared. That was an interesting inner test. It really matured me as an artist, because I quietly decided it doesn't matter whether anybody wants my music. I relaxed and started composing, and music was flowing freely without any preoccupations.
Can you point to a breakthrough piece for you in terms of your visibility, something that helped boost your career?
There were a lot of small breakthroughs, in 2004 and 2006, but I wasn't happy with those. The one that mattered most to me was In Search of Lost Beauty, that I started in 2015. That was a real turning point for me.
That's the piece I was thinking about, too. Were you, indeed, in search of lost beauty at the time?
I was in search of lost time, like Proust was, because I'd had an accident. Without going into details, I was living in Paris and I wasn't functioning properly because I had a concussion, so everything was slowed down for me. I started paying attention to the smallest details of the everyday, and I noticed how beautiful everything is once you start paying attention to it. I realized that it's our attention that creates the beauty — that things are not beautiful in themselves, but once we turn our gaze to them, they all of a sudden become something extraordinary.
That transformation of perception, from ordinary reality into extraordinary reality, that's what I experienced through my healing after the concussion. And then I thought, in music, I could do the same thing — take the smallest particles of sound, the smallest gestures, and by placing extra attention onto them, I could create that sense of what I called beauty.
A different kind of turning point came for you earlier, in 2006, when your father passed away. You've said that your music became more direct, more emotionally raw and more accessible.
Before he died, I was at the peak of my existence, my happiest time. I was a newlywed and I was just at the height of my power in every respect. And then when he passed, I wasn't ready for it. I had so many emotional layers that opened up within me. It was like the Grand Canyon — you see all those layers of time. I was like, "How do I deal with it now?" And then I understood that other human beings are experiencing the same thing when they encounter the loss of their loved ones. I thought to myself, "The music definitely cannot be just sounds; it has to be a tool to help unravel those emotional states." You have to have some kind of safe environment to face those new rules within yourself, to finally acknowledge them and maybe somehow transform them.
I remember an old gentleman came to me crying after my piece Saudade was performed at the New York Philharmonic in 2022. He said, "You can't imagine what I experienced through your piece. Everything came back, all my memories that I never wanted to think about, all my painful things I was avoiding, all the traumas of my life I was successfully dealing with. I don't know whether to thank you or what." I'm very grateful to have had this experience, because I didn't know it was possible.
That's the immense power of music. Perhaps you can think of your musical breakthrough as your father's final gift to you.
I think so. Somehow his departure helped this immersion and opening into the music. He was very instrumental in my development. When I was a child, I didn't have a metronome, so he was sitting next to me at the piano, being my metronome.
Oh, that is sweet.
He came to every concert of my music. Even at his funeral, I noticed something sticking out from the pocket of his suit. I thought, "What's this?" And it was a ticket to one my concerts.
After his death, I was writing the piece Completely Embraced by the Beautiful Emptiness. At every page I was writing, I was seeing his face — it was as though, with the notes, I was creating the contours of his face. Because the emotional landscape was so strong, I didn't question my means of expression. I was just going for what I felt in those moments, and it was as raw as it can get. I cried and cried through the process of writing that piece, but when it was over, I felt that I could continue to live somehow.
I'd like to talk about the process of writing music. It can be vastly different for composers. Some treat it very much like a 9 to 5 job, going to the studio. Others have a more flexible relationship with process. I've heard you describe composing as "mysterious."
Yes, it is a mysterious process because you cannot guarantee the outcome. It doesn't matter how many hours you put in — it can happen, but at the same time, it might not happen. I compose every day in one way or another. Even if I don't write notes, I still compose in my head.
How does that work, composing in your head?
I hear music, I develop music, and then I take notes in the voice memos on my phone — sometimes singing a melody, usually more just describing the process or a structure or a gesture of some sort. It's always happening on some level. And then, of course, there are dreams that also come into the picture. I hear music very often in dreams.
Then I spend a lot of time just doing the work, facing the blank page and all that. I've noticed that, let's say you have two or three weeks where you compose every day, then the flow is much easier — everything is more organic. I do prefer staying put, especially in the summertime when I come to Lithuania. I tend to go into this kind of deep-focus phase; it lasts two months or so, and I just compose every day. There are no breaks, nothing else but music. Sometimes I don't even have any outer life, just composing.
One important inspiration for you, it seems, is the natural world. You're not alone — history is filled with composers inspired by nature, from Vivaldi's summertime thunderstorms in The Four Seasons to John Luther Adams' Become Ocean. What do you get from the outdoors?
First of all, silence — which, of course, is full of sounds, but is still silence compared to the noise of our urban environments. Within that silence, there are so many subtleties of sounds, so many simultaneous new layers, an incredible polyphony of microscopic gestures happening. I think I'm listening to nature as I would listen to music; my ears are always attuned to something, and I make up structures from what I hear.
One piece of yours, inspired by nature, that I find endlessly fascinating is Hadal Zone, a journey down through the deepest depths of the ocean. It's scored for low instruments — bass clarinet, tuba, contrabass, piano and electronics.
In the trajectories of the journeys in my pieces, the directionality is twofold — it's either going towards the light or going towards darkness, so it's either ascending or descending in various proportions, in various scenarios.
In Hadal Zone you start lighter, and then go darker.
I do. Even though it's called Hadal Zone, which is the name of the deepest zone in the ocean, the entire piece is about all the ocean zones traversed from the surface to the depths.
I came up with the idea from reading a book about archaeological excavations deep into the earth. I came across a description of ocean zones and thought that was perfect for a piece, and I wrote it out as a project proposal for my Guggenheim fellowship. I thought, if they give me the Guggenheim I will do the piece — because it's just too much to take on by myself. And then I not only got the award, but also the pandemic started. So it was within those dark times when we all descended to our depths that this piece was happening.
It's a piece that benefits from listening from beginning to end and letting the music wash over and through you. I feel there's an increasing interest, in the last 10 years or so, in what we might loosely call ambient music — instrumental music that's slow and fosters introspection and serenity. Some of your music has these qualities — Hadal Zone and the pieces on Ex tenebris lux for instance. Are these meditative qualities something you're actively trying to put on display in your music?
I think it's more a reflection of the particular time when those pieces were created. Because the pieces you mention were from the outcome of the pandemic — this kind of slow, suspended time with not much happening.
I would say there's a lot going on in these pieces, actually.
That's the thing — even though those characteristics you described are fitting for ambient music, at the same time there is a lot happening. Even with Hadal Zone, at some point there's a climax, which has nothing to do with calming down or an ambient atmosphere. There's always some kind of restlessness; however much I try to go for those more meditative states, at some point I still need energy.
I like to call my music "statically dynamic." In some ways it's very static, but there's a dynamism within it. I like to have this kind of ambiguity of both, because that's also the duality of our human existence. We have body and mind, right? And we are never without this duality. We can go for a long time in this static mode, but at some point it just has to break through.
We began this conversation with a quote from somebody else about your music. I'd like to end with a quote of your own: "With music, I always feel like I'm touching something much larger than myself, like a big force or an energy field. And when you come closer, it pulls you in like gravity." To me, that sounds both amazingly inspirational and a bit frightening at the same time.
[Laughs] It is both. Frightful, because it's the unknown and unreliable nature of that force. That's what creativity is within ourselves — we have this immense power to create something out of nothing, and when we experience it in its most acute state, it's like the universe is expanding within us. But in fact, you are only a participant in that huge force. It's the same as our relationship to the entire universe; it's huge and we are so small. That creative power or force, it's nothing individual. It's not something we can attribute to ourselves and say, "I am a creator." No, we are not the creators. We are merely participants in that bigger thing that is happening, and you can see that it comes and goes in waves, and has its own logic in how certain pieces of music or certain pieces of art are appearing at certain times as they are needed by us. Right now I'm composing an opera, which is a huge endeavor — but two years ago, before even starting to compose it, I already heard it all in my mind, in my dreams. So it seems like it already exists somewhere, and now I just have to make it happen.
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