Vytautas Montvila

Vytautas Montvila (1935–2003) was a Lithuanian composer and bassoonist. He graduated from the Lithuanian National Conservatory in 1959 after finishing bassoon class of Kazys Paulauskas. Montvila continued his studies in composition for another five years with Julius Juzeliūnas. In 1959, Vytautas also started working as a music editor and sound engineer for the National Radio and Television Committee. He left in 1975 to become a sound engineer of Lithuanian Composer's Union and remained at this position till the late nineties. As a composer, Montvila developed his individual aesthetic often labeled as neo-folklorism. In the sixties, the composer had been combining sutartinės, ancient Lithuanian polyphonic chants, with novel avant-garde compositional techniques, such as micropolyphony, aleatory, serialism, sonorism, and pointillism. The elements of folk music have infiltrated his work on the different levels, inspiring tone sequences, sonorities, and complex polyphony in the symphonic triptych Poems of Vilnius. In the late seventies, Vytautas turned his compositional style towards neoromanticism.