LMTA Professor of Musicology Dr Rima Povilionienė, having been awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship

LMTA Professor of Musicology Dr Rima Povilionienė, having been awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship, spent this academic year in New York, USA, as a visiting scholar. From 1 October 2025, she undertook a six-month research fellowship at the City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY).

Now in its 80th year, the Fulbright Program is one of the flagship initiatives of the United States government for international academic and cultural exchange. Its aim is not only to support American studies and research abroad, but also to bring international students, lecturers, and researchers to the United States. Admission to the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program is highly competitive: applicants submit proposals that undergo expert evaluation and interviews. Each year, only around 800 scholars worldwide receive this award, while just 2–4 researchers from Lithuania are selected annually. Music researchers are particularly rare among Fulbright Visiting Scholars. It is worth noting that several LMTA artists have previously received Fulbright grants for artistic activities, including composer Antanas Kučinskas, violinist Martynas Švėgžda von Bekker, and pianist Eglė Perkumaitė-Vikšraitienė, while composer Vytautas Germanavičius received a Fulbright scholarship for studies.

During her fellowship, Professor Povilionienė explored the processes of modernisation in Lithuanian music during the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on experiments in microtonal and electronic music and their relationship to international avant-garde trends. A key aspect of her research was the historical perspective: how modern musical ideas emerged in late Soviet Lithuania and how they resonated within broader global developments. She was particularly interested in parallel artistic processes occurring in different countries, examining how similar ideas seemed to “be in the air” and emerged independently across diverse cultural contexts.

In New York, Professor Povilionienė had access to archival materials, visited the renowned electronic music studio at Columbia University, and studied unique documents, photographs, and audio recordings that are unavailable through remote access and can only be examined on site. Particularly valuable were the collections of music research centres and archives, including the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation, which provided access to lesser-known aspects of music history. She also conducted research at the Lithuanian World Center in Lemont, the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, the Lithuanian Archives Project in Chicago, the Carnegie Hall Archives, and libraries in New York and Washington, D.C.

Professor Povilionienė made full use of both the academic and cultural opportunities offered by New York. She attended performances in world-renowned concert halls, the Metropolitan Opera, museums, and contemporary music events, and engaged with Lithuanian communities in the United States. She participated in the historic raising of the Lithuanian flag in Manhattan on 7 March 2026, when Lithuania’s tricolour was ceremonially raised for the first time as part of the City of New York’s multicultural flag ceremony ahead of the celebration of Lithuania’s Restoration of Independence Day. She also gave piano recitals, both solo and in duet with Italian pianist Diego Tornelli, in Brooklyn/New York and Chicago, performed with the Philadelphia Lithuanian Choir “Laisvė”, participated in the annual Fulbright Visiting Scholar Seminar “America250: Tradition, Technology, and Innovation in the Mountain West” at Colorado State University, delivered a lecture on the digitisation of Čiurlionis’s piano works at Emory University in Atlanta, and presented a scholarly paper at a symposium dedicated to Čiurlionis at Yale University.

The Fulbright fellowship has provided essential material for Professor Povilionienė’s forthcoming monograph on experiments in electronic and microtonal music in Lithuania, which is expected to be completed soon and published in 2027–2028. The research findings are also being incorporated into her teaching, particularly in doctoral studies focusing on contemporary music theory and analysis, as well as lesser-known aspects of microtonal and spectral music.

The results of the fellowship are already leading to new international initiatives. In cooperation with the Barry S. Brook Center and its director, musicologist Tina Frühauf, who also supervised Professor Povilionienė’s fellowship, an international conference entitled Music, Migration, and the Exchange of Knowledge: The Baltics in Global Perspective is being planned. The conference will take place at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in Vilnius on 22–23 November 2027 and at the Barry S. Brook Center in New York on 19–20 April 2028.