Tapestries brings together works written over more than a decade, yet it never feels like a retrospective. From the opening bars of “Chartres” to the closing “La muë,” the album displays an unmistakable coherence of language even when each composition retains its distinct character. From the architectural “Chartres” to the guttural “Incantare,” from the hallucinatory “Datura” to the metamorphic “La muë,” Justina Repečkaitė‘s music unfolds patiently, asking the listener to focus on the smallest changes in resonance and colour.
Its range of references makes this a highly rewarding journey. Medieval stained glass, manuscripts, birdsong, healing charms, poisonous plants and eighteenth-century medical treatises all become starting points for the music. None of these references is treated as programme music or illustration. Instead, Repečkaitė translates them into musical structures that develop according to their own internal logic.
The opening “Chartres” immediately establishes this approach. Strings emerge from silence with a cold, almost glacial sonority, creating an acoustic space that expands incrementally. Throughout the album, the ensemble often behaves as a single resonating body rather than a collection of individual instruments. Voices, strings, winds and electronics continually merge, dissolve and reappear, producing a remarkably fluid sound world.
One of the album’s most striking works is “Sturnus vulgaris cohibitus.” Inspired by the silence of the pandemic lockdown, Repečkaitė recorded starling calls and plays them back through tiny speakers hidden inside the piano. The electronics become inseparable from the instrument itself, creating the impression that the bird has become trapped within the piano’s resonating body. As the keyboard gradually expands across its register, the birdsong remains dependent on each hammer strike, allowing a simple compositional idea to become a reflection on confinement and the desire to break free.
Transformation also lies at the heart of “Datura,” the shortest track on the album. Here the trombonist simultaneously plays, sings and recites botanical descriptions of the poisonous plant whose two principal alkaloids induce either delirium or numbness. Once again, the extended techniques never feel demonstrative. They emerge naturally from the musical idea, allowing the instrument and the voice to occupy the same expressive space.
That permeability between voice and instrument runs throughout the album. Singing performers, hybrid timbres and discreet electronics continually broaden the acoustic field. The closing “La muë” brings many of these ideas together. Drawing on an eighteenth-century treatise on the changing adolescent voice, the work combines children’s choir, electronics and the extraordinary sound of the serpent, played and sung simultaneously by Patrick Wibart.
Listening to Tapestries, one gradually realises that Repečkaitė is not interested in translating images into music. She is interested in translating systems of thought. Architecture becomes form, birdsong becomes resonance, botanical knowledge becomes gesture, and the changing human voice becomes an evolving sonic landscape.
Justina Repečkaitė at Ircam, 2024. Photo Kristijonas Naslenas
To expand on the album, Justina Repečkaitė has answered a few questions for us by email.
Tapestries spans compositions written between 2012 and 2024 and traces a path from solo works to orchestral and interdisciplinary pieces. Looking back across these twelve years, what threads do you now see connecting these seemingly different works into a single artistic tapestry?
I believe that already in “Chartres” (2012) one can recognise the foundations of my musical language, which becomes progressively more complex in “La muë” (2024). My compositions have pre-compositional keys, in the album there is only an exemple of “Chartres”, because its link with the stained glass window is visually speaking. Across the works, different musical parameters are tightly interconnected, often generating a sense of pulsation, cyclical time and organised harmony, governed by arithmetic logic.
In purely instrumental pieces such as “Chartres” (2012), “Tapisserie” (2015), and “Vellum” (2020), there are structural affinities in which the ensemble builds a shared architectural form, rather than a collection of individual parts, individualities. This architectural thinking also persists in “La Cité des Dames” (2018) and in the vocal writing of “La Muë”, though there it is articulated through the presence of text – whether as resistance in “La Cité des Dames” or transformation in “La Muë”.
Another recurring thread is the permeability between voice and instrument. My instrumental writing is often described as vocal, while my vocal writing is conceived in a similarly instrumental manner. Singing while playing the instruments appears in several works: the trombone in “Datura” (2021), the serpent in “La Muë” (2024), and the flute in “Incantare” (2018). Even “Sturnus vulgaris cohibitus” can be understood as “singing,” since its electronics are derived from a short starling song that resonates with and colours every piano gesture.
In the works with electronics, its function is an expansion of the instrument, opening its acoustic space and extending its resonance. More broadly, many of my works reference manuscripts, traditions, or historical practices because they feed my imagination.
Architectural and visual forms appear throughout your work, from the stained glass of “Chartres” to the textile references of “Tapisserie” and the manuscript imagery of “Vellum”. What attracts you to these material and architectural metaphors, and how do they influence your compositional thinking?
Before I turned to composition, I was preparing to study visual arts, so my artistic education was rooted in images rather than in music. That background has never disappeared. I have a particular fascination with the medieval world, where architecture, manuscripts and textiles reveal systems in which proportion, number and geometry generate beauty. As a composer who often works with rigorous underlying structures, I find it inspiring to see how rules and constraints can produce forms of remarkable richness and expressivity.
These references are therefore more than poetic metaphors or title inspirations. They influence how I conceive musical form. I am inspired by the idea that a score might possess an autonomous existence, almost like an architectural drawing, a textile pattern or a draft manuscript: a carefully constructed object whose internal organisation embodies ideas before it is ever brought into sound. I carefully craft the pre-compositional keys of my works, as they gather the essential logic and structure of a piece on a single page, like a blueprint of the musical form.
Voice occupies a special place in your music. In “Incantare,” “Datura,” and “La muë,” performers sing while playing their instruments, creating hybrid timbres that blur the boundary between body and instrument. What first drew you to this technique, and what does it allow you to express that conventional instrumental writing cannot?
I first experimented with simultaneous singing and playing technique while writing Toro (2015) for electronics and the euphonium player Vianney Desplantes, who taught me a great deal about it. What interests me in this fusion of sounds is the emergence of a hybrid timbre, in which the boundary between body and instrument becomes porous. The voice is the most intimate instrument, and when it is projected through another instrument, it produces a very personal and unstable sound – never identical from one performer to another!
As I am also a singer, I do not separate vocal production from instrumental sound; for me they belong to the same continuum of expression. For example, Incantare has been performed by both male and female flutists, across different vocal ranges and instruments, and each interpretation reveals a distinct version of the piece. In this sense, the work exists less as a fixed object than as a living transformation shaped by performers.
Several pieces transform non-musical materials into musical structures: Lithuanian healing charms in Incantare, birdsong in “Sturnus vulgaris cohibitus,” Christine de Pizan’s feminist text in “La Cité des Dames,” and an eighteenth-century treatise on puberty in “La muë.” How do you approach the process of translating historical, literary, or natural phenomena into sound?
The pieces you mention were written during moments of intense creative momentum. I found the ideas behind them so compelling that the process often felt less like inventing something from nothing and more like uncovering something that was already present. The initial spark of Incantare (2018), La Cité des Dames (2019) , Sturnus vulgaris cohibitus (2020), and La muë (2024) was so strong that my role as a composer was to reveal and shape its musical potential.
For me, music is not separate from other cultural or natural forms; rather, it is a space where they can be transformed and reconfigured into sound. I am not interested in illustrating a text, a historical source, or a natural phenomenon, but in identifying the structures, gestures, rhythms, materials, and energies within them that can generate a musical language of their own. This is perhaps why I never use a text in its entirety, but rather extract fragments that contain the essential qualities I want to transform through composition.
“La Cité des Dames” draws on Christine de Pizan’s visionary text about creating a symbolic city for women, while “La muë” explores transformation through adolescence, voice, and bodily change. Do questions of identity, gender, and embodiment play a broader role in your work, even when they are not explicitly foregrounded?
In these two pieces, identity is primordial. In “La Cité des Dames,” Christine de Pizan’s text describes women creating a symbolic space of their own in a society where their voices were marginalized. The fact that the work is written for six soprano parts makes the female voice itself part of its meaning. In La muë, the subject is the adolescent voice changing during puberty. The voice becomes a marker of bodily transformation and identity. The child singers, the serpent player who sings through the instrument, and the electronics all expand the relationship between body, instrument, and sound.
Beyond these two works, I am often interested in states of transition, where change is still unfolding. This is true both conceptually and at the smallest level of my music, where repetition is never static but constantly transformed through timbre, dynamics, and context.
In “La Cité des Dames” and “La muë,” the body and voice become central because they are themselves sites of transformation: the collective female voice reclaiming a space of expression in the former, and the changing adolescent voice in the latter.
Your music is often described as balancing rigorous construction with organic, almost living sonic processes. One critic compared your compositions to cycles of germination, growth, blossoming, and decay. Do you think of your works primarily as structures to be built, or as organisms that evolve according to their own internal logic?
I begin with rigorously constructed structures, and then let the musical material grow organically within them. The structuring process can be demanding, sometimes involving the abandonment of many ideas, but once the framework is in place, the music begins to move freely inside it, as if the architecture itself begins to sing.
(Gianmarco Del Re)