Галина Ивановна Уствольская

Галина Ивановна Уствольская {Galina Ivanovna Ustvolskaya} (1919–2006) was a Russian composer.

She was born on the 17th June 1919 in Petrograd. From 1937 to 1947 she studied at the college attached to the Leningrad Conservatory (later renamed the Rimsky Korsakov Conservatory). She subsequently became a postgraduate student and taught composition at the college.

On several occasions her composition teacher, Dmitri Shostakovich, supported her in the Union of Soviet Composers against opposition from his colleagues. He sent some of his own as yet unfinished works to Ustvolskaya, attaching great value to her comments. Some of these pieces even contain quotations from his pupil’s compositions; for example, he employed the second theme of the Finale of her clarinet trio throughout the Fifth String Quartet and in the Michelangelo Suite (no 9). The intimate spiritual and artistic relationship between the two composers has been compared to that of Schoenberg and Webern.

She was a pupil of Shostakovich from 1939 to 1947, but retained little influence from his style from the 1950s onwards. As a modernist, she had few public performances; until 1968 none of her works was performed other than patriotic pieces written for official consumption. Until the fall of the USSR, only the violin sonata of 1952 was played with any frequency, but since then her music has been increasingly performed in the West.

She died in St Petersburg on the 22nd December 2006.