Many years ago, when I was a student, there was one (1) composer in the music faculty who happened to be a woman. She was preparing her PhD at the time. She was a live wire - a ferociously intelligent Argentinian who had left her home country after the 1976 coup - and a rare, shining example to us toiling undergraduates. Her name was Silvina Milstein. I'm delighted to support her forthcoming premiere at King's College London on Tuesday with this guest post from Silvina herself, now a professor at King's, in which she reflects on the great value to today's composers of consistent, long-term artistic engagement with their work from conductors and performers - in this case, Odaline de la Martinez and her ensemble Lontano. Please note, tickets for the concert are FREE, but should be booked in advance at the links below. JD
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| Silvina Milstein |
Silvina
Milstein was born in Buenos Aires in 1956. After the Argentinian military coup of
1976 she emigrated to Britain. At Glasgow University her composition teachers
were Judith Weir and Lyell Cresswell, and at Cambridge University she studied
with Alexander Goehr. In the late
eighties she held fellowships at Jesus College and King's College (Cambridge),
and is currently a professor of music at King's College London.
In addition to
composing Silvina has a distinguished career as a teacher and scholar. Her book Arnold Schoenberg: notes, sets, forms was
published by Cambridge University Press.
She has received
commissions from leading ensembles and the BBC.
A selection of her chamber works has been recorded by Lontano conducted
by Odaline de la Martinez and issued by lorelt. Several of her most recent pieces for large
chamber ensemble --tigres azules (London Sinfonietta and Ensemble Modern), surrounded
by distance (London Sinfonietta)
and de oro y sombra (Birmingham Contemporary Music Group)-- were
premiered under Oliver Knussen.
Here you can view an illustrated lecture that she gave in 2012 about her compositional processes, which includes excerpts of her music.
BCMG and Oliver Knudsen rehearse her de oro y sombra
Silvina Milstein writes:
On
18 October the ensemble Lontano conducted by Odaline de la Martinez will
premiere my Shan Shui (mountain/water)
for nine instruments alongside works by George Benjamin, Ed Nesbit and Rob
Keeley, at the Great Hall, King's College London, WC2R 2LS, as part of the Arts
& Humanities Festival 2017.
It
has been said that the shan shui
style of Chinese painting goes against the common definition of what a painting
is: it refutes colour, light and shadow and personal brush work.
"Shan shui
painting is not an open window for the viewer's eye, it is an object for the
viewer's mind, it is more like a vehicle of philosophy."
"The
Western mind appears to work in straight lines; the Oriental, in wonderful
curves and circles," wrote Lafcadio Hearn, the late 19th-century writer of
Greek and Irish descent, strongly anchored in American literature, and
fascinated by French and Eastern cultures, who married a samurai's daughter,
took Japanese citizenship, and became a Buddhist practitioner.
Paradoxically in
the 1960s, Lafcadio Hearn's retelling of several Japanese ghost-stories became
the source of Masaki Koyabashi's film Kwaidan, featuring a sound-track by Toru Takemitsu, whose music brings
together traditional Japanese and contemporary European art music. Treading on
the footsteps of these intercultural encounters, diachronic "shadowings", and
transpositions between art forms, my Shan Shui plays around with notions of time and imagery from films by Kenji
Mizoguchi and Kaneto Shindo.
Shan Shui is part of a long string of
works that I have written for Lontano over the past three decades: Of
lavender light and cristales
y susurros have been included in my first LORELT CD, while the septet ochre,
umber and burnt sienna, and the two trios with harp (and
your sound lingered on in lion and rocks and a thousand golden bells in the breeze), as well as Shan
Shui will be part of a new double-CD to be released in early 2018.
This
type of long-term artistic engagement and substantial support is at the core of
what makes Odaline de la Martinez’s commitment to the music of women composers
so uniquely precious. By presenting
several of my pieces together in concerts and CD, it effectively addresses a crucial
difficulty often encountered by composers in the current
concert-programming climate.
Not only has this approach allowed me to undertake
ambitious and often rather bold projects (such as a work scored for two double
basses and harp), but more importantly has offered me platforms for the
presentation of my work as groups of pieces with common compositional concerns,
like renderings of a mountain from many sides, under
different lights, and at different scales. On this occasion, Dominic Saunders will perform the recently revised
version of my Piano Phantasy after Mozart
K475 written in 1992.
My
pre-concert talk will introduce Shan Shui placing it in the context
of my earlier compositions and its sources of inspiration in contemplative
Chinese landscapes and Japanese cinematography (room SWB21 in the Music
Department, King’s College London, Strand, WC2R 2LS, at 16:45). All attendees
are invited to a drink-reception before the concert.
Entrance
to the talk, reception, and concert is free, but tickets should be booked from
the following site: https://shadowingsconcert.eventbrite.co.uk
