Vytautas Landsbergis Prize awarded to a monograph on music performance art

The Best Musicology Works Awards ceremony took place on May 4, 2015, at the Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy, where the Musicological section of the Lithuanian Composers’ Union handed Ona Narbutienė, Vytautas Landsbergis and Lithuanian Composers’ Union prizes for the best musicological works of the year 2014.

Vytautas Landsbergis Prize was awarded to the performance studies scholar Lina Navickaitė-Martinelli for innovative research on piano performance art in her monograph Piano Performance in a Semiotic Key: Society, Musical Canon and Novel Discourses (in English language, released by the Semiotic Society of Finland). According to the composer and musicologist Ramūnas Motiekaitis, „It is evident that this book will encourage the performers to reflect consciously, and perhaps more critically, about their activities as well as shall help in finding solid arguments underlying one or another interpretative choice. Looking from the pragmatic perspective, it may even offer to someone apt marketing strategies. While looking at the present study philosophically, semiotic consciousness would arise, i.e. realizing that whatever is one‘s identity, it will never exist in a monadic modus for and of itself, but only in a relationship with and through the other. Such prospects should not be overlooked when reflecting our activities as performers, composers or musicologists.”

Ona Narbutienė Prize was awarded to the Lithuanian erudite, essayist, historian Jonas Vytautas Bruveris for the consistent development of aesthetic ideas and the diversity of contexts in the book Historical Contexts of Lithuanian Music (published by the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre). Lithuanian Composers’ Union Prize was awarded to Svetlana Barkauskas for a detailed rendering of the composer’s creative odyssey in her book Seven Symphonies of Vytautas Barkauskas (published by the Lithuanian Composers’ Union).

The contest of the best Lithuanian works in musicology is held every spring since 2004. It offered awards for the last year’s most outstanding work in various fields of musicology, as well as research and popularizing of the Lithuanian musical culture. The founders of the awards are the Lithuanian Composers’ Union and Vytautas Landsbergis Foundation. The musicological works of 2014 were evaluated by the panel of seven experts: Šarūnas Nakas (Chairman), Beata Baublinskienė, Živilė Stonytė-Tamaševičienė, Rima Povilionienė, Jūratė Katinaitė, Ramūnas Motiekaitis and Jonas Vilimas.

Info by the Musicological section of the Lithuanian Composers‘ Union.