Dave replied to me:

>Achim Breiling wrote:
>
>> ..... I would never dare to call Mrs. Ustvolskayas music ugly.
>
>I'm sorry if it seemed I was implying otherwise.  My response was to Robert
>Peters' observations on the subject.

I understood that, though I felt Daves finger also pointing at me....

>I think I'd like to hear more about this.  When I listen to Ustvolskaya's
>music I do not hear a struggle against ugliness, I hear a submersion in it,
>a pontification upon it, in essence, I guess, a glorification of it as if
>it was something perhaps we should all desire.

The recognition of Ustvolkayas works (especially in the US) suffered and
still suffers from two quotes of rather famous composers.  One was by
Roy Harris who said in 1958 after hearing Us sonata for violin and piano:
*what a dreadful kind of thing, dissonant from the beginning to the end*.
The other quote is by Stravisnky who declared in 1962 that after hearing Us
music he understands what the Iron curtain actually means.  As Denis Fodor
pointed out in his recent posting that muisc lovers generally find atonal
and serial stuff unpleasant (you have statistically significant numbers for
that, Denis?) Harris and Stravinskky must have been right and we should
better forget about Mrs. Usvolskaya.  Nevertheless there are a few (just
a guess, as I have no numbers for this assumption) CM listeners (lovers?)
who seem to appreciate Mrs. Ustvoskayas pieces.  One of them a certain
Dimitri Shostakovich said about his former student: *Its not me who
influenced her, but she who influenced me!* and cites her work (the Trio)
e.g.  in his 5th string quartet and the Michelangelo cycle.  I wrote that
U seems rather to fight against ugliness in her works and not glorify it
because: firstly it immediatly came to my mind while listening to this
music and secondly I do not think that any intelligent person would want
to glorify ugliness.  Dave wrote in one of his postings that he does not
accept the claim that people need to understand the life of the artist in
order to appreciate their art.  I have to disagree, partly!  I think the
artist/composer is the center of each of his works and his compositions are
replies to his life.  But, I also think a really good piece of art should
work also without knowing much about the composer (and in fact we usually
do not know much about composers lifes).  U seemed to have had a pretty
isolated and sad life, which might explain the way she writes music.
Nevertheless I learned that after I heard her music and got interested.
I do not think that a person who had to suffer a lot during her/his life
would want to express also/again ugly things in his/her artworks.  She/he
would rather fight against them!  And to fight ugliness an artist might
choose also rather rude means (all that atonal stuff!:-).  Anyway, I can
not tell why, but this music impressed me deeply, it has for me a
rare/bizarre beauty and is defenitly not ugly, nor does it glorify anything
negative.  Take a listen to this 5th symphony!  Using words from the Lords
prayer spoken by a deep male voice together with the ascetic
instrumentation ...  it made me shiver (of delight!)!

Achim Breiling