Silvina Milstein (born 12 February 1956, in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine composer and scholar of twentieth-century music, living in the United Kingdom and teaching at King's College London.
[5] Over the past fifteen to twenty years she has explored musical forms arising from heightened states of awareness, borrowing from a wealth of artistic media and spiritual traditions.
These preoccupations are evident in two works written for the London Sinfonietta – tigres azules, in which by her own account Milstein sought to investigate "the compositional potential of treating the 'present moment as an infinite dream'", and surrounded by distance …, an exploration of "the indefinable, yet seemingly precise manner in which musical shapes and configurations arise spontaneously as evocative appearances and illusory continuities, as described in the Lankavatara Sutra.
The core of the book consists of detailed analytical studies, which rely heavily on factors outside the score (such as the sketch material, the composer's theoretical and philosophical writings, his musical development and cultural milieu).
For instance, her article on the first movement of Alexander Goehr's Schlussgesang (2003)[9] is an attempt to provide a hypothetical reconstruction of the compositional process, from an embryonic sketch (displaying many technical annotations) to its fully fledged realization.