Osvaldas Balakauskas, one of the leading Lithuanian composers, graduated from the Vilnius Pedagogical Institute in 1961, and from Boris Lyatoshinsky’s composition class at the Kiev Conservatory in 1969. From 1992 to 1994 he was ambassador of Lithuania, the first after fifty years of foreign rule, to France, Spain, and Portugal. In 1996 Balakauskas was honoured with the Lithuanian National Award, the highest artistic and cultural distinction in Lithuania. He is head of the Composition Department of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.

Balakauskas is one of the very few Lithuanian composers who have developed their own unique and precise compositional system. The composer named his technique “dodecatonic”: it can be defined as the formation and elaboration of new tonal connection within strict serial structures, along with no less strictly calculated rhythm progressions. Nevertheless, Ba