Juozas Gruodis (20 December 1884 in

Rokėnai Rokėnai is a village in Zarasai district municipality, Lithuania Lithuania, officially the Republic of Lithuania, is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic S ...

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...

– 16 April 1948 in

Kaunas Kaunas (; ) is the second-largest city in Lithuania after Vilnius, the fourth largest List of cities in the Baltic states by population, city in the Baltic States and an important centre of Lithuanian economic, academic, and cultural life. Kaun ...

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) was a

Lithuania Lithuania, officially the Republic of Lithuania, is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, bordered by Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, P ...

n classic, composer, educator and professor.

Biography

His father was a

woodworker Woodworking is the skill of making items from wood, and includes cabinetry, furniture making, wood carving, joinery, carpentry, and woodturning. History Along with stone, clay and animal parts, wood was one of the first materials worked by ea ...

who also made musical instruments. He worked as a church organist until the age thirty. He then studied at

Moscow Conservatory The Moscow Conservatory, also officially Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory () is a higher musical educational institution located in Moscow, Russia. It grants undergraduate and graduate degrees in musical performance and musical research. Th ...

from 1915-1916, then studied

composition Composition or Compositions may refer to: Arts and literature *Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography * Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include ...

and

conducting Conducting is the art of directing a musical performance, such as an orchestral or Choir, choral concert. It has been defined as "the art of directing the simultaneous performance of several players or singers by the use of gesture." The primary d ...

Leipzig Conservatory The University of Music and Theatre "Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy" Leipzig () is a public university in Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1843 by Felix Mendelssohn as the Conservatorium der Musik (Conservatory of Music), it is the oldest music ...

. After completing his time at Leipzig Conservatory, he then worked as a conductor at Kaunas State Theater, and starting in 1926, taught at the Kaunus Music School. The Music school was reorganized into Kaunus Conservatory in 1933, with Juozas being its first director and its first professor of composition. Because of his influential years of teaching, Groudis has been called the founder of the Lithuanian school of composition. His students included: Antanas Budriūnas (1902–66), Juozas Gaidelis (1909–83), Julius Juzeliūnas (1916–2001), Vytautas Klova (1926–2009), Jonas Nabažas (1907–2002) and Antanas Račiūnas (1905–84). As a composer, Groudis found his own individual style through a merging of "moderate modernism and elements of Lithuanian folk music". A recording of his Violin Sonata (1922), along with other works for violin and piano, was released in 2014. In 2024 Toccata Classics issued a CD of his piano music performed by Daumantas Kirilauskas, including the Piano Sonata No. 1 (1919) and No. 2 (1921), and the Variations in B Major (1920).

J. Gruodis Memorial Museum

In 1931, Juozas purchased a plot of land on the outskirts of

. He built a house on the site in 1932, where he would live with his wife until his death in 1948. The house was taken over by the Culture Department of the Kaunas City Executive Committee in 1967, where it would spend a few years as a music library, before the memorial museum of J. Gruodis was established at the site in 1974. The museum contains exhibits about Juozas's life, as well as several of his

manuscripts A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has c ...

References

1884 births 1948 deaths Musicians from Kaunas Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour Lithuanian composers Burials at Petrašiūnai Cemetery Moscow Conservatory alumni {{Lithuania-composer-stub