Galina Ustvol­skaya is, in her small and unique way, one of the most mys­te­ri­ous and com­pelling com­posers of the 20th cen­tury, dif­fer­en­ti­ated even from the likes of Harry Partch, Giac­into Scelsi and Karl­heinz Stock­hausen. We know lit­tle of depth about her life, and what we do know, and pos­si­bly could know, offers no insight into or expla­na­tion of her music, which stands on its own. Last Sat­ur­day at Miller The­ater, Chicago’s Fifth House Ensem­ble pre­sented the lat­est Com­poser Por­traits con­cert, ded­i­cated to her rig­or­ous, unspar­ing and uncom­pro­mis­ing art.

She was born in 1919 and died at the end of 2006, but had essen­tially stopped com­pos­ing in the early 1990s, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union and at the moment when her work was first being heard in the West. She stud­ied for a period of time with Shostakovich, and one early work on the con­cert pro­gram, the Trio (1949) for clar­inet, vio­lin and piano, shows the influ­ence of her teacher, but her coher­ent, mature meth­ods are one of a kind, tak­ing advan­tage of basic fea­tures of musi­cal com­po­si­tion but using a method with no com­par­isons to any­thing else. What can be heard as the key con­nec­tion to Shostakovich is the acci­dent of their births, that they were cit­i­zens of a total­i­tar­ian sys­tem for the dura­tion of their artis­tic lives. Pro­fes­sion­ally, they each wrote music specif­i­cally for pub­lic con­sump­tion and music that was a more per­sonal, and prob­lem­atic, expres­sion. The works were prob­lem­atic in the sense that their style and sup­posed con­tent could be enough to get the com­posers shipped off to the Gulag, pos­si­bly for­ever. With Shostakovich, this prob­lem is finessed through rid­dles, music which sounds like it is con­vey­ing a qual­ity we are famil­iar with through many gen­er­a­tions of sim­i­lar ges­tures sig­ni­fy­ing sim­i­lar things — the finale of his Fifth Sym­phony is an exam­ple, music which seems to be tri­umphant but is also forced and bru­tal. With Ustvol­skaya, we get some­thing dif­fer­ent, not sleight of hand but com­plete impenetrability.

A con­cert of her music leaves one think­ing of Beck­ett. Beck­ett uses words we rec­og­nize to make state­ments that are absolutely clear and com­pletely bewildering:

“Where now? Who now? When now? Unques­tion­ing. I, say I. Unbe­liev­ing. Ques­tions, hypothe­ses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on. Can it be that one day, off it goes on, that one day I sim­ply stayed in, in where, instead of going out, in the old way, out to spend day and night as far away as pos­si­ble, it wasn’t far. Per­haps that is how it began.“

Ustvol­skaya uses famil­iar pitches in sim­i­larly dis­ori­ent­ing ways. She builds phrases, but no real melodies, she uses chords, but eschews har­monies and har­monic struc­tures. There is no coun­ter­point nor rhythm in the sense of a pat­tern of beats which underly other musi­cal activ­ity. Her music speaks with one voice, no mat­ter the num­ber of instru­ments, and that voice says some­thing briefly, then repeats it deter­minedly. Her sense of form is made up of fur­ther sec­tions of rep­e­ti­tion. In terms of tech­ni­cal con­struc­tion the music is as sim­ple as can be, but the tech­nique is super­flu­ous. She said of her work “all who truly love my music should refrain from the­o­ret­i­cal analy­sis of it,” which seems defen­sive. Such an analy­sis pro­duces few results, but the music remains and speaks to us regardless.

It speaks to us with force, insis­tence and deter­mi­na­tion. It repeats its points, some­times louder, some­times softer, but it repeats its points, it repeats its point, it repeats its points. This may seem bor­ing, but the expe­ri­ence is any­thing but. It’s actu­ally fas­ci­nat­ing and also unset­tling, the assertive, relent­less argu­ment never over­bear­ing, mak­ing the case for itself and never inter­ested in win­ning us over through per­sua­sion. We accept it or we don’t. The qual­ity is dark but not malev­o­lent, grim but not defeated, more lim­ited in means than any music I know, even that of Mor­ton Feld­man or Arvo Part, but never ascetic. She said that all her work was “‘spir­i­tual’ in nature,” and one can hear the idea of the soul buf­feted by impos­si­bil­ity and futil­ity, alone in exis­ten­tial angst but some­how find­ing enough belief in the imma­te­r­ial to keep going on. She uses reli­gious sub­ti­tles for her work, Com­po­si­tion No. 3 (“Bene­dic­tus Qui Venit”) and Com­po­si­tion No. 2 (“Dies Irae”), and the mono­phonic rep­e­ti­tion is a rad­i­cally Mod­ern updat­ing of litur­gi­cal, rit­u­al­is­tic chant, but what her actual faith was is impos­si­ble to deter­mine. In that, she is on par with Bruck­ner in con­vey­ing the ambigu­ous com­plex­ity of faith through music, express­ing the nec­es­sary feel­ings of doubt, iso­la­tion and almost ter­ri­fied awe that one must feel to truly grap­ple with the sub­ject of the divine and unknowable.

Within the works on the pro­gram there is an aes­thetic divide. Two of her six piano sonatas were given com­pelling per­for­mances by Adam Marks, who fea­tured in every work, and these come clos­est to a sense of famil­iar­ity. The Sonata No. 4 has pas­sages which are almost con­ven­tional, with iden­ti­fi­able phrases and some accom­pa­ni­ment to the music in the right hand. The Sonata No. 6 is fast, pow­er­ful, rig­or­ously plac­ing notes in place in time, but those notes come to us in smash­ing tone clus­ters, some played with the fore­arms. It is brac­ing and excit­ing. She writes pow­er­ful lines in the bass reg­is­ters and they main­tain a solid cen­ter of grav­ity in all the works and a han­dle for the lis­tener to grasp amidst her bizarre instru­men­ta­tions — the Octet for two oboes, four vio­lins, piano and tim­pani; the two Com­po­si­tions for four flutes, four bas­soons and piano and eight basses, piano and a per­cus­sion­ist strik­ing a wooden box with ham­mers, respec­tively. The box is per­haps a descen­dent of Mahler’s ham­mer blows of fate in his Sixth Sym­phony. This is not tech­ni­cally chal­leng­ing music to play, but requires a con­cen­tra­tion and com­mit­ment beyond that of more famil­iar music. There is no stan­dard style, no sense of famil­iar ges­tures heard through epochs which con­nect musi­cal tra­di­tions. The Fifth House Ensem­ble and musi­cians from the Yale School of Music played with the sense that this music is meant to be heard, and their assured advo­cacy kept the music just at the near edge of over­pow­er­ing the audi­ence. This is music for Beck­ett, the music of mean lit­tle rooms and their soli­tary occu­pants, music of peo­ple seek­ing hope in the grimmest of cir­cum­stances. It is a rebuke to the utopian ideals which threat­ened to over­run the last cen­tury. It strikes me as more than coin­ci­dence that her cre­ative out­put ended after 1989. Soviet com­posers were not only kept from us but the music of the West was kept from them. Her com­pa­triot Alfred Schnit­tke made sim­i­larly dark music that is a riot of the ele­ments of the rich musi­cal his­tory he dis­cov­ered later in his career, while Ustvol­skaya, per­haps hav­ing used her work to main­tain her exis­tence in the same cir­cum­stances, found that it was time for silence.

——
The Com­poser Por­traits series con­tin­ues Tues­day night, Novem­ber 17, with the music of New York City favorite and charm­ingly abra­sive Amer­i­can com­poser Ralph Shapey.