Biography
Alexander Shchetynsky (or Shchetinsky) is a Ukrainian composer, born in Kharkiv, Ukraine on 22 June 1960. Since the late 80s, his music has been presented at festivals and concerts in Europe and America, performed by internationally acclaimed artists and ensembles, such as the Arditti String Quartet, the Moscow Helikon-Opera, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, and Ensemble Wiener Collage.
Influenced by the Soviet avant-garde, the Second Viennese School, Olivier Messiaen, and György Ligeti, his style is essentially that of a structuralist, relying on a synthesis of a variety of modernist techniques and exploring, in many of his pieces, a particular musical metaphor. This method explains his reliance on pieces with descriptive titles. The influence of an especially eastern European variety of minimalism (more meditative and less didactic) is also apparent in the carefully worked out relationship between different degrees of sound and silence, the predominance of soft dynamics, and in the smallest details and changes in pitch, timbre and rhythm.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.