I like Galina Ustvolskaya because she is idiosyncratic and unique. Meanwhile I even find beauty in her compositions. Not an avant-gardist but a loner who initiates a transformation on art itself; a holistic mind, camera-shy, reclusive, uncommunicative, a genius. The great man vs the great artist/mind does not revolve exclusively around art, he primarily revolves around humanity about which he is deeply concerned and empathetic, he wants to find a new solution for humanity, therefore it is necessary to dive into humanity and art and then to initiate a transformation, from the inside out, and art is the medium of expression of the solution he comes up with. The greatest of man is he who carries a sense of responsibility for the cosmos. A deeply spiritual person, like Galina. She was the favorite pupil of Shostakovich. Grandiose were her initial compositions. Difficult to bear seems to be her mature work. You seem to find yourself in the wasteland, as screams out of a black hole, screams into space it has been categorized; exemplified in the second symphony you have the tormented creature, alone in the dark, in confusion, in an environment which is not even uncanny but inherently glueless, crying out for God; more specifically you seem to have the quantum foam of existence, archaic movements emerging from the primal ground, singularities, expression of forces which are older than the subject, the ego, which precede consciousness, where there is no difference between the criminal and the saint, they are not distinguished yet, proto-embryonic, innocent, pure, blind, the meta level of gloom, primal scream, you have proto-subjective movements of fluxes who try to connect to each other, to form a unity, prone to failure, as you also have it in the art of Beckett (Comment C´est) or in the music of Swans or in the paintings of Francis Bacon; people who understand existence at such a level are good people; the music of Galina offers no solutions, no resolutions, no catharsis, there is no harmony, there are no spheres. Yet you find out that there is much more glory in that like, for instance, in the final movement of Beethoven`s Ninth as you comprehend that it is the duty of you, and your personal melody, to establish the spheres, to create harmony, and you do so in being kind. And basically, what you have in the music of Galina is birth, not death. I have read somewhere that Galina used to admire Gogol, for his language being unique. Alas, also with Gogol you are under the impression someone let language dash into itself, resulting in enormous intensity and plasticity, as well as his vision of humanity a result of dashing into itself, misfortunately, Dead Souls is the most hellish and nightmarish vision of humanity anyone ever created, no wonder Gogol had frequent meltdowns and snapped over. Since I am the new Gogol I think I would have had a good channel to Galina, yet, as Turbonegro sing, all my friends are dead.