"It is not I who have influenced you, but you who have influence me."—Dmitri Shostakovich to Galina Ustvolskaya

What could not be done if time itself was reversible? As just one of many suggestive impossibilities, the question haunts the biography, mindset, and 19 published works of composer Galina Ustvolskaya. One stumbles into her music as into an inverted universe, where an opposite physical and temporal logic rules all action: emptiness attains a content, crushing darkness procures the vast spectrum of a midday sun, the scream acquires an impossible sustain.

But nothing seems to approach the temporal wonder of Ustvolskaya's music, its gift for sounding so outside its time. The three-movement Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano, while an early work (1949), is characteristic in this regard: it sounds less like Western music's last six centuries than like some primordial strain of expression, mired in more unmediated materials—pre-social, pre-aesthetic, fabricated before myths of self began to erode direct speech. But its pre-historic aura also doesn't really echo the voguish "neo-primitivism" of Ustvolskaya's contemporaries. Rather, each turn of phrase feels tattooed with desperate personality, too eclipsing in its tortured presence to allow topical attitudes; it still sounds unlike anything since written as well. And so, in its sheer gravity and inwardness, this trio jumps past the past, and beyond the future, operating proudly on its own dark principles.

But this fascinating independence did not secure Ustvolskaya's trio from casting an influence itself, and of a most fascinating kind. During the work's composition Ustvolskaya was a pupil of Shostakovich, who eventually became so taken with his student as to propose to her. She promptly rejected, and has since asserted that "Then, as now, I determinedly rejected his music...he burdened my life and killed my best feelings."

Shostakovich, however, maintained a fixation on the younger composer, and her trio figured prominently—Shostakovich would go on to quote a melodic fragment from its third and last movement in two of his most personal works, the Fifth Quartet (1952) and the song "Night" from his late Michelangelo Sonnets (1974). Perhaps more strikingly, the trio's utterly unique sound-world seems to cast its shadow on Shostakovich's late music in general: both have that similar, paradoxical tone of empty fullness; their harmony oscillates with terrifying effect between the tonal and atonal, and between the intimate and alien. The ability to draw tears with desiccated two-line counterpoint seems a rare gift of both composers; but while it appears as the tragic fruit of an entire lifetime for Shostakovich, this sound came early and forcefully to the young Ustvolskaya.

So Ustvolskaya's trio successfully wreaks havoc on our notions of time: it feels older than memory and stranger than the unknown future; and yet it affects us like a recollected trauma or a prophetic sentence. It is a 1949 student piece that determined its composer's teacher in the 1970s, and yet it manages to sound utterly contemporary, as if speaking directly in the now.

© Seth Brodsky, Rovi