A highly private person, she chose to live her life largely outside of the public eye, rarely conducting interviews as she found it unpleasant to talk about her own music.
In an interview for the TV program Tsarskaya Lozha, which celebrated Ustvolskaya's 80th birthday, she said, "It is sad that Shostakovich and myself were not ‘soul mates’; I know that he liked me and always treated me with respect, but I never reciprocated his feelings."
[5] Despite this earlier proximity, she vehemently rejected Shostakovich’s impact on her later in her life and made it clear that she did not want any association with Shostakovich, calling his music “dry and lifeless” and writing to her publisher, “One thing remains as clear as day: a seemingly eminent figure such as Shostakovich, to me, is not eminent at all, on the contrary, he burdened my life and killed my best feelings.”[3] Ustvolskaya’s early works over the 1930s and 40s showed many similarities to the socialist realism and modernism prevalent in the Soviet Union at the time, necessitated through the Soviet Union’s systematic censorship of any music that failed to fully support the state from 1948 onwards.
As a result of this, the Leningrad Union of Composers organized performances of her music in the late 70s, which received high praise from listeners and critics.
Her teaching style was more focused on aesthetics and feeling instead of harmony or scientific technique, and often encouraged students to experiment with modes instead of the typical major or minor scales.
"[8] Among its characteristics are the use of repeated, homophonic blocks of sound – which prompted the Dutch critic Elmer Schönberger to call her "the lady with the hammer"[9] – unusual combinations of instruments (such as eight double basses, piano and percussion in her Composition No.
6); the employment of groups of instruments to introduce tone clusters; sparse harmonic textures; and the use of piano or percussion to beat out unchanging rhythms.
While her propensity for a grandiose attitude was seemingly present in her personal life, and noted by several students and colleagues, she never composed "for the table" (for money) and mainly thought of herself and her music as being misunderstood by those around her.
In an interview, Voronina said that Ustvolskaya's use of rhythmic, repeating crotchets expressed a ‘dark, somewhat schizophrenic worldview.’ This sentiment was echoed by Soviet musicologist Ekaterina Ruchevskaya, who claimed of Ustvolskaya's alleged mental instability, "Whether or not there were some mental problems, I cannot say for sure, but I knew of one suicide attempt [...] She also had two students, one of whom, Alesha Nikolaev, an incredibly gifted boy, committed suicide aged 18".
[16] Ustvolskaya's relationship with Shostakovich from her time as a student through the 1950s is fictionalized in William T. Vollmann's National Book Award-winning historical novel Europe Central.
In 1998 she gave a description of her life to an interviewer that serves as a kind of thesis statement about her music: “The works written by me were often hidden for long periods.
I just live my lonely life.”[3] Ustvolskaya died on the 22nd December, 2006 in Saint Petersburg, leaving behind her prolific and infamous legacy as the "Lady with the Hammer."