Organ Concert: Friday, May 19, 7:30 pm
We invite you to hear the organ playing of Vytenis M. Vasyliunas, a world-class organist, pianist, and geophysicist. The concert is free to attend and will feature pieces from Bach, Mendelssohn, Cesar Franck, and Leon Boellmann.
Vytenis M. Vasyliūnas is an organist and pianist as well as a well-known physicist. He was born in 1939 in Kaunas, Lithuania, lived from 1944 to 1950 in Germany and from 1950 to 1954 in Colombia, where he began his musical studies. He took up the study of the organ after moving to the U.S. in 1954; his teachers included Arthur Howes, Catherine Byers, and Donald Willing. He has given numerous organ recitals (446 through 2016) in many countries, including the U.S., Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, Colombia, Norway, Austria, Denmark, Great Britain, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Israel, Taiwan, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.
As physicist, he studied at Harvard University (A.B. cum laude 1962) and received his Ph.D. (1966) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he remained on the physics department faculty. In 1975 he accepted an appointment as scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy (now renamed Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research) in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany; from 1978 until his retirement in 2007, he was one of the Institute’s directors. He is known for his research work in the area of space and magnetospheric physics.