In Search of Lost Beauty

In Search of Lost Beauty is a 2019 composition by NY-based, Lithuanian-born composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė. The piece is composed for piano, violin, cello, electronics, and synchronized video projections. 

Martinaitytė is probably my favorite contemporary composer.  Her Hadal Zone came out right around the time that a submersible went missing near the wreck of the Titanic, and her composition captures the intense pressure, darkness, and cold of the extreme depths that the doomed explorers must have encountered (although to be clear the piece was not written about them). Her previous Ex Tenebris Lux was a collection of various compositions written primarily for strings and included a suite, Sielunmaisema, revolving around the four seasons. But it was only today that I discovered In Search of Lost Beauty.

The piece was described by Martinaitytė as "a sequence of audiovisual novellas" on the elusive subject of beauty. The experience of time is slowed down to transport the listener into an alternate dimension where commonly apprehended reality is inverted into an otherworldly mystique of reflections and shadows. The full composition consists of 10 sections, which are woven into one structural entity:

I. Prelude (Subliminal)

II. Blue

III. Ephemeral

IV. Longings in Perpetual Motion

V. Interlude (Transient)

VI. Serenity Diptychs

VII. Shadows of Memories

VIII. Interlude (Fleeting)

IX. Inhabited Silences

X. Postlude (Evanescent)

You can watch a performance of IX. Inhabited Silences from October 26, 2019 at the Dresher Ensemble Studio in San Francisco on YouTube (Karen Bentley Pollick, violin, Monica Scott, cello, and Marja Mutru, piano). I highly recommend checking it out. 

The full In Search of Lost Beauty is available at Bandcamp and can be streamed on Spotify.