Silvina Milstein facts for kids

Silvina Milstein was born on February 12, 1956, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a talented composer and a music expert who now lives in the United Kingdom. She teaches music at King's College London.

People have described her music as "exciting and sometimes dreamy." They also say it is "very poetic," "rich," and "full of ideas." In 2018, her musical piece called shan shui was nominated for a special award, the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Chamber-Scale Composition. This shows how important her music is.

Early Life and Education

Silvina Milstein moved to Britain after a big political change in Argentina in 1976. She had already started her music education in Buenos Aires at the Collegium Musicum and the Escuela de Bellas Artes.

When she went to Glasgow University in Scotland, her main teachers for composing music were Judith Weir and Lyell Cresswell. She was even given an award for being the best female student in the Arts department. Later, she studied with Alexander Goehr. She also worked with him to learn a lot about the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

In the late 1980s, she was a special researcher at Jesus College. After that, she worked as both a researcher and a teacher at King's College, Cambridge. Today, she is a professor of music at King's College London.

Besides creating her own music, Silvina Milstein is very interested in the music and ideas of the Second Viennese School. This is a group of composers from the early 1900s, especially Arnold Schoenberg. She teaches students about composing, the history of 20th-century music, and how to understand modern music.

Her Work as a Composer

For the last 15 to 20 years, Silvina Milstein has explored new ways to create music. She often gets ideas from different art forms and spiritual traditions. She tries to make music that shows "heightened states of awareness."

For example, she wrote two pieces for the London Sinfonietta, a famous music group. One piece is called tigres azules. Silvina said she wanted to explore "the idea of the present moment as an infinite dream" in this music. Another piece, surrounded by distance …, explores how musical shapes can appear suddenly and feel like a dream.

A special part of Milstein's music is how she uses sounds and rhythms from Buenos Aires. She started doing this in her pieces musica ciudadana (1995) and a media luz (2000). She uses parts of popular Argentinian music, like tango, milonga, and bolero. She mixes these sounds with musical ideas from the Second Viennese School. This creates a unique and colorful sound.

A writer and music expert named John Fallas noticed a change in her music around 1992. Before that, her pieces often had names like those used by Schoenberg. After 1992, she focused more on different musical colors and fantasy.

Many top orchestras, music groups, and performers have played her music. These include Ensemble Modern from Germany, the London Sinfonietta, Lontano, the BBC Singers, the Endellion String Quartet, and Jane Manning. Conductors like Oliver Knussen and Odaline de la Martinez have been very supportive. They have helped her get many of her pieces commissioned and performed.

Her Research and Ideas

Silvina Milstein also writes books about music. In her book, Arnold Schoenberg: notes, sets, forms, she tries to figure out how Schoenberg created his twelve-tone music. This is a special way of composing. Her book looks at more than just the written music. She also studies Schoenberg's notes, his ideas, and how his music developed. This helps us understand how composers think.

Even though composing is her main focus, her research and her own music often connect. For example, she wrote an article about the first movement of Alexander Goehr's Schlussgesang. She tried to show how Goehr created this piece, from his first ideas to the finished work. This study helps us understand Goehr's modern musical style. It also shows how he combined French and German musical ideas with Schoenberg's twelve-tone method.

Milstein has also thought about how different cultures influence her work. She said that after writing about Schoenberg's music, she thought about using traditional Western music methods. She wondered how these methods could work when she was using ideas from non-European traditions.

Selected Compositions

Here are some of Silvina Milstein's musical pieces:

• Janus for clarinet and electronic tape (1984, premiered by Lontano)
• Sombras (1985; won an award from the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust/SPNM)
• String Quartet (1989, premiered by the Bingham String Quartet)
• Piano Phantasy after Mozart K. 475 for solo piano (1992, revised in 2017)
• Music of the City - Musica Ciudadana (1993; premiered by BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra)
• A love song for Psyche and Cupid* for mezzo-soprano, violin, cello and piano (1994; premiered by Jane Manning, Darragh Morgan, Kim Mackrell and Robert Keeley)
• Nova Polska for chamber chorus, solo tenor and chamber orchestra (1995; premiered by the BBC Singers and the London Chamber Symphony)
• Book of Shadows for string quartet and narrator (1998; commissioned by the Endellion String Quartet)
• of lavender light for chamber ensemble (1999; commissioned by Lontano)
• a media luz (2000; premiered by BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra)
• The Unending Rose for solo violin (2001, commissioned by Darragh Morgan)
• So light upon the wind … (Dante, Inferno, Canto V): aria for twelve instruments (2002, commissioned by Lontano)
• fire dressed in black (2002, commissioned by Vanitas)
• tigres azules (2004; commissioned by London Sinfonietta)
• cristales y susurros – whispering crystals (2005; commissioned by Lontano)
• surrounded by distance ... (2008; second London Sinfonietta commission)
• a thousand golden bells in the breeze for double-manual harpsichord (2009, commissioned by Chau-Yee Lo; separate trio version for harp and 2 double basses, 2012)
• de oro y sombra ... (2011; commissioned by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, world premiere 25 September 2011)
• ochre, umber and burnt sienna (2012; written for Lontano)
• in a bowl of grey-blue leaves for two pianos (2014)
• ushnarasmou / untimely spring for mixed choir a cappella (2015), a setting of extracts from the Kumārasambhava commissioned by The Choir of King's College London
• fretted sounding-boards for mezzo-soprano and piano (2015), a setting of John Fuller's 'A Short History of the Piano'
• while your sound lingered on in lions and rocks for 2 trumpets and harp (2016), after a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
• shan shui (mountain – water) for mixed nonet (2017); nominated for the 2018 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Chamber-Scale Composition
• y la eternidad golpeteando por siempre en relojes de piedra (and eternity forever striking on clocks of stone) for piano and string quartet (2018), after a poem by Osip Mandelstam

Discography

Here are some recordings of Silvina Milstein's music:

• fire dressed in black: chamber works performed by Lontano, conducted by Odaline de la Martinez
• In Memoriam (includes Milstein's ushnarasmou / untimely spring), Choir of King's College London conducted by Gareth Wilson, Delphian DCD34146
• of gold and shadows Volume 1, Lorelt LNT 141
• of gold and shadows Volume 2, Lorelt LNT 142