This residency is dedicated to fostering deep artistic collaboration between composers and performers, ensuring that newly created works have a lasting life beyond their premieres. By providing space for slow, immersive rehearsal processes, it allows for the organic development of ideas, refining and strengthening the connection between music and those who bring it to life. The project aims not only to commission and present new works but also to support their continued existence through additional performances, recordings, and international dissemination. All the works respond to the overall theme of the concert – “The Arrow of Time.”
Elo Masing
,,…becoming with… III’’
My musical practice encompasses both composition and free improvisation in equal measure. In my compositional work, I place a lot of importance on live performance – I consider a work to be realised at the nexus between the score, the performer, and the performance situation. It can be said I compose not scores, but frameworks for occurrences that manifest differently from performance to performance, as the context and conditions change. My compositions often explore alternative approaches to time and material organisation, inciting creative freedom in the performers to choose and shape their material, and at times to make structural decisions.
Liepa Vozgirdaitė
parachutes
While writing this piece, I was thinking a lot about diversions, about historical examples of pieces conceived as “music in between”, pointing to something other than themselves, to cleanse the palette.
In the piece parachutes, I take up the divertimento – one of the so-called diversion genres – from which the string quartet later developed, along with the institution of the string quartet itself. In the piece, I take the idea of lightness and multiple movements, the main supposed components of divertimenti, quite literally, and work with “light-weight” sounds of reduced vibrational amplitude, exploring different trajectories of muffling, detuning, and softening the resonances of the strings.
Anna Fišere
„ouroboros“
Time is often symbolised by the wheel, whose centre is regarded as the motionless aspect of existence – the pivot that makes movement possible, standing in contrast to motion itself, as eternity stands to time. This reflects St Augustine’s definition of time as the shifting image of motionless eternity. This interpretation is supported by representations of the ouroboros as part black and part white, expressing the union of opposing principles such as heaven and earth, night and day, and the Chinese yin and yang, along with all the qualities associated with these opposites. The serpent biting its own tail forms a circle, breaking from linear development and marking a transformation comparable to emergence onto a higher, celestial or spiritualised level of existence, symbolised by the circle. At the same time, ceaselessly revolving within its own enclosed cycle, it becomes an image of samsara, the wheel of life, suggesting a condition in which one is condemned never to escape the cycle or rise to a higher plane; thus, the ouroboros symbolises eternal return – the endless cycle of rebirth and continual repetition. Anna Fišere works with precise textures, repetitions, and subtle variations that gradually alter the perception of time, always keeping in mind that human time is finite, while divine time is infinite.
Twenty Fingers Duo
The contemporary music ensemble was founded in Vilnius in 2016 by sister and brother, violinist Lora Kmieliauskaitė and cellist Arnas Kmieliauskas.
Twenty Fingers Duo actively participates in and initiates contemporary art projects, with a strong focus on collaboration with artists from other fields. The main task of the ensemble’s musical activity is to foster and promote Lithuanian music, while the gamut of their activities ranges from standard concert appearances and interdisciplinary performances to collaborations in contemporary opera, theatre, dance, and film productions.
The music they perform emerges at the intersection of extended playing techniques and graphic scores. In 2020, they released their debut album Performa. In recent years, they have released two more albums – Dualitas and Two Sides: West/East – as well as an interdisciplinary stage work Orpheus, Eurydice, which was nominated in four categories of the performing arts awards “Golden Crosses” and won the award for the best interdisciplinary work of the year in the Lithuanian Composers’ Competition (both in 2023). In 2025, Orpheus, Eurydice was also released as an album. That same year, the duo was awarded the Young Artist Prize by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and launched their first international artistic residency, In Between Silence, in collaboration with the British ensemble GBSR Duo.
Performers:
“Twenty Fingers Duo“
Arnas Kmieliauskas
Lora Kmieliauskaitė
Produced by Tarp tylos
Curated by Arnas Kmieliauskas
Partners: Sapieha Palace, Lithuanian Composers’ Union, Latvian Composers’ Union
Media partners: LRT Klasika, Radio Vilnius
Funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and LATGA