Silvina Milstein facts for kids

Silvina Milstein (born on February 12, 1956, in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine composer and a scholar who studies music from the 1900s. She lives in the United Kingdom and teaches at King's College London. People have described her music as "turbulent and hesitantly ecstatic," and also "highly poetic," "rich and dense." In 2018, her music piece shan shui was nominated for a special award called the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Chamber-Scale Composition.

Early Life and Education

Silvina Milstein moved to Britain after a big change in Argentina's government in 1976. She started her music education at the Collegium Musicum in Buenos Aires and the Escuela de Bellas Artes at the University of La Plata.

University Studies

At Glasgow University, her main teachers for composing music were Judith Weir and Lyell Cresswell. She won a prize for being the most outstanding female graduate in the Arts department. Later, she studied with Alexander Goehr. She also did a lot of research with him about the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

In the late 1980s, she worked as a research fellow at Jesus College. After that, she had a job that combined research and teaching at King's College, Cambridge. Today, she is a professor of music at King's College London.

Besides her own music, she is very interested in the music and ideas of the Second Viennese School, especially Arnold Schoenberg. She mainly teaches about composing music, the history of 20th-century music, and how to analyze modern music.

Her Music as a Composer

For the past 15 to 20 years, Silvina Milstein has explored musical forms that come from very strong feelings or deep thoughts. She gets ideas from many different types of art and spiritual traditions.

Exploring New Ideas

You can see these ideas in two pieces she wrote for the London Sinfonietta. One is called tigres azules. She said she wanted to explore "the idea of treating the 'present moment as an infinite dream'" in this piece. The other piece is surrounded by distance …. This one explores how musical shapes seem to appear naturally, like "evocative appearances and illusory continuities," as described in an old text called the Lankavatara Sutra.

Argentinian Influences

An important part of Milstein's music is using sounds and rhythms that remind people of the popular music from Buenos Aires. She started doing this in musica ciudadana (1995) and a media luz (2000). These pieces are like colorful collages made from small, memorable parts of Argentinian popular music. This includes tango, milonga, and bolero rhythms, phrases, and sounds. She combines these with musical textures inspired by the Second Viennese School.

The writer and music expert John Fallas noticed a change in her work around 1992. Before that, her pieces often had traditional music titles. After 1992, she focused more on musical color and imagination.

Performances of Her Music

Her music has been played by some of the best orchestras, groups, and musicians in Britain and other countries. These include Ensemble Modern (from Frankfurt), the London Sinfonietta, Lontano, the BBC Singers, the Endellion String Quartet, and Jane Manning. Conductors like Oliver Knussen and Odaline de la Martinez have strongly supported her music. They have helped many of her pieces get commissioned, meaning they were asked to be written.

Research and Musical Ideas

In her book Arnold Schoenberg: notes, sets, forms, Silvina Milstein tries to figure out how Schoenberg thought about composing his twelve-tone music. The main part of her book looks closely at his music. She uses information beyond just the musical score, like his notes, his writings about music and philosophy, and how his music developed. This means her work goes beyond just analyzing music to look at the history of musical ideas.

Connecting Research and Composing

Even though composing has been her main focus for the last 20 years, her research and her composing ideas often overlap. For example, she wrote an article about the first movement of Alexander Goehr's Schlussgesang (2003). In this article, she tries to show how the piece was created, from an early sketch to the finished work. This was the first study to explain Goehr's modern harmony in its artistic setting. It also explores how he combined French and Austro-German ideas about musical keys and how they relate to his understanding of Schoenberg's twelve-tone system.

Milstein has also talked about how memories from different cultures influence her work. She said that after writing a book about Schoenberg's composing process, she has thought a lot about using traditional Western music methods when working with ideas from non-European cultures.

Selected Compositions

• Janus for clarinet and electronic tape (1984)
• Sombras (1985; co-winner of an orchestral award)
• String Quartet (1989)
• 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)
• Nova Polska for chamber chorus, solo tenor and chamber orchestra (1995)
• Book of Shadows for string quartet and narrator (1998; commissioned by the Endellion String Quartet)
• of lavender light for chamber ensemble (1999)
• 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)
• fire dressed in black (2002)
• tigres azules (2004; commissioned by London Sinfonietta)
• cristales y susurros – whispering crystals (2005)
• surrounded by distance ... (2008; second London Sinfonietta commission)
• a thousand golden bells in the breeze for double-manual harpsichord (2009)
• de oro y sombra ... (2011; commissioned by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group)
• ochre, umber and burnt sienna (2012)
• in a bowl of grey-blue leaves for two pianos (2014)
• ushnarasmou / untimely spring for mixed choir a cappella (2015), a setting of parts from the Kumārasambhava
• 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), inspired by a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
• shan shui (mountain – water) for mixed nonet (2017); nominated for the 2018 Royal Philharmonic Society Award
• y la eternidad golpeteando por siempre en relojes de piedra (and eternity forever striking on clocks of stone) for piano and string quartet (2018), inspired by a poem by Osip Mandelstam

Discography

• 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
• of gold and shadows Volume 1
• of gold and shadows Volume 2