Variations on the Theme Galina Ustvolskaya

Book excerpt: There is neither in the music history nor in the history of art such a closed and contradictory composer and creator as Galina Ustvolskaya. The music of Galina Ustvolskaya (excepting commissioned works written not for internal reasons but for necessity) is a kind of mysterious ritual. What is her music about? What ideas dominate it? Ustvolskaya’s music art is not big in volume, but with a huge degree of tension, it has concentrated the main ideological problems and contradictions of our time. What is culture? What is spirituality? What is the role of art in life? Do we need them? Is it possible to exclude these phenomena and concepts from our being? And why is our era passing away? The book is full of allusions. This is a kind of deductive method, with the help of which the author tries to understand and explain the talented composer who is a drop of water in an ocean reflecting the leading trends and tendencies of twentieth-century art.