Discussion
Speaking in interview in 2019, the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937) expressed his interest in ‘Zen Buddhist aesthetics’ during the 1970s and 1980s. This was apparently linked to a declining interest in Soviet politics during the 1960s amongst the so-called ‘Unofficial’ generation of composers to which Silvestrov belongs, coinciding with a concomitant rise in the use of west-European avant-garde techniques that had previously been overwhelmingly condemned in Soviet music criticism. In the same interview, Silvestrov also intimated a connection between ‘Zen aesthetics’ and his own richly elaborated aesthetic concept of the postlude, or ‘postlude-ness’ [
postlyudiynost’]. This paper investigates what exactly Silvestrov means by ‘Zen aesthetics’ and considers how this might be expressed musically, taking as a case study his 1972 composition for solo violoncello and chamber orchestra,
Meditation.
