Human life is a continuous search for meaning. Today, as technologies, information flows, and globalization increasingly shapes our reality, our experiences, ideas, texts, and images of the world are constantly refracted through countless contexts, perspectives, and cultures. All of it reaches us through the languages of different media (not only in the technological sense). This raises a crucial question: how does this affect the very essence of ideas, texts, and stories themselves? And does it change us: how we hear, see, and understand each other?

The festival “Muzikos Ruduo” invites us to view intermediality not only as an artistic practice, but also as a cultural and existential phenomenon. Its programmes explore diverse forms of transformation of meaning and significance, tracing processes of change and revealing how, depending on the medium, entirely new semantic fields may open – sometimes even fundamentally reshaping the original sense of a text.

The theme of this year’s festival, “Transformations of Meaning”, was chosen deliberately: year 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. In his work, music and painting intertwine synesthetically, offering one of the most striking examples of how different artistic languages can extend, reinterpret, and transform one another. This phenomenon is significant not only for Lithuania – today it resonates within a wider cultural dialogue.

The theme also unfolds in an international dimension. This year, the universality of intermediality will be reflected by the festival’s guest and partner, the Baltic Music Days. Four programmes of this strand will bring together Lithuanian composers and performers with guests from Latvia and Estonia, creating a shared space of artistic dialogue across the Baltic region.

“I would like to compose a symphony out of the roar of waves, the mysterious speech of a centuries-old forest, the twinkling of stars, our folk songs, and my boundless longing.”

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis