Kačinskas, Jeronimas (EN)

Kačinskas Jeronimas, *17 April 1907 Viduklė in Samogitia (Lithuania), †15 September 2005 Boston, Lithuanian composer, conductor and teacher. He took his first music lessons from his father, an organist. Between 1923 and 1929, he studied piano, viola and composition at the music school in Klaipėda. Between 1929 and 1931, he studied composition with J. Křička and conducting with P. Dědeček at the Prague Conservatoire; he also studied quarter-tone music with A. Hába. From 1932 to 1938, he taught at the music school in Klaipėda and conducted the local symphony orchestra; in 1938, he became director of the Kaunas Radio Orchestra, and from 1940 to 1944, he was conductor of the Philharmonic and Opera in Vilnius. He went into exile in 1944 and settled in Boston, USA, in 1949, where he worked as an organist and choirmaster at St Peter’s Lithuanian Church. Between 1960 and 1969, he led the Melrose Symphony Orchestra, and from 1968 he lectured in composition and conducting at the Berklee College of Music. Before the Second World War, he gave concerts as a conductor in many European countries, promoting, amongst other things, contemporary Lithuanian music; after the Second World War, he performed with, amongst others, the National Broadcasting Company and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra and the Boston University Orchestra.

In the interwar years, Kačinskas, alongside V. Bacevičius (brother of G. Bacewicz), represented a radically modern trend in Lithuanian music that stood in opposition – on the one hand, to the traditionalist trend, and on the other, to the concept of ‘national music’ advocated by J. Gruodis. The accusations of modernism and cosmopolitanism directed at Kačinskas from both these positions were later to persist for several decades in the new political situation in Lithuania. Kačinskas’ music, which eschewed traditional formal structures and was atonal, was shaped in an athematic manner from the very outset under the influence of A. Hába, and in a few instances the composer drew upon the quarter-tone scale (String Quartet No. 2, 1931; Trio for trumpet, viola and piano, 1933). In his later works, Kačinskas remained faithful to an athematic approach to music, based on the principle of uniqueness and constant structural change; he also remained faithful to free atonality. Particularly noteworthy are his attempts to combine the compositional technique he had developed with broadly understood national and sacred elements (archaism). Kačinskas was the most outstanding Lithuanian composer of sacred music, the author of, amongst other works, two masses (a mass composed for the 700th anniversary of King Mendog’s baptism and the Mass of St Stephen); the premiere of the cantata Deus qui inter (1984) took place during the September Music Festival in 1986 in Baranów Sandomierski.