Valentin Silvestrov

“Music continues to be music, even if 1 cannot literally sing it: it isn’t a philosophy, not really a world-view. It really is, most importantly, a chant, a music the globe sings about itself, it’s the musical testimony alive.” — Valentin Silvestrov It isn’t whatsoever hard to listen to the picture of the “world performing itself its music” in Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s functions. His string quartets, his tracks, and his masterful symphonies all radiate using the sluggish steady force of the rotating planet, rotating lonesomely in the void. The idea that these huge, lethargic physiques sing to themselves because they switch, and we listen to their music like a symphony or music cycle, admittedly bears an element of Romantic elegant to it. However the picture also voices a significant metaphor for Silvestrov — the idea of “meta-music,” a music which hovers around, above, and specifically after all various other musics, as an atmosphere encircling a post-apocalyptic world. Silvestrov has created very much about the thought of “coda” and “epilogue” in his music, that place where there is certainly “a gathering of resonances, an application which is open up.” This coda-state is perfect for Silvestrov “not really the finish of music as a skill, however the end of music, a finish in which it could linger for a long time. It’s very very much in the region from the coda that huge life can be done.” Therefore Silvestrov’s “metaphorical design” in the 1970s onwards: a body of gradual, wonderful, and astoundingly complete “postludes,” emanating the environment of the Mahler adagio through huge waves of your time and simple decay. Valentin Vasil’yevich Silvestrov was created in Kiev, Ukraine, on Sept 30, 1937, probably the darkest calendar year in the Russian background. He emerged rather past due to music, starting research at 15, initial privately and at an night time music college. By 1955, he graduated having a yellow metal medal and enrolled in the Kiev Institute of Building Engineering; but 3 years later on Silvestrov began significant quest for music in the Kiev Conservatory, learning with Lyatoshyns’ky and Revutsky. Despite having earliest works just like the Piano Quintet (1961), Silvestrov had been attracted to the dramatic potential in contrasting solid tonality with solid atonality; in his substantial Third Symphony “Eskhatofoniya” (1966), this preoccupation with polarities got the proper execution of “social” (firmly notated) noises and “secret” (improvised) types. The area of magic and invocation — those components that constantly defy materials, that arise just along the way and later on — started to rest even more securely in Silvestrov’s functions. 1971’s gigantic Crisis for piano trio — “practically a clinical research of an creative problems,” Silvestrov’s biographer creates — was a breakthrough function. And it had been from 1973 that Silvestrov embarked on his “metaphorical” or “allegorical” design, strongly similar to late-Romantic cliché, to which he still adheres today — “metaphorical” because Silvestrov understands these sounds to become irrefutably “previous” and does not have any interest in simply “resurrecting” them; and “allegorical,” because Silvestrov desires to utilize this music obliquely, as an estranged means rather than predictable end. Silvestrov’s Symphony No. 5 of 1982 could very well be an ideal sign of this design: in its three-quarter-hour routine of nine sluggish motions, it “recycles” a complete globe of banal, nearly kitschy melodies on its scarred, cloudy surface area. But underneath this floating music is situated a tremendous difficulty, both theoretically and psychologically; the accumulative expressive impact is usually undeniable and unpredicted. Malcolm MacDonald maybe put it greatest when he published that this “Russian feeling of lamentation…gets to in Silvestrov a fresh expressive stage: he appears to compose, not the lament itself, however the lingering memory space from it, the feeling of sadness it results in.”