Biography:

Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina (Russian: Софи́я Асгáтовна Губaйду́лина listenⓘ, Tatar: София Әсгать кызы Гобәйдуллина;[1] 24 October 1931 – 13 March 2025) was a Soviet and Russian composer. Major orchestras around the world commissioned and performed her works.[2] She is considered one of the foremost Russian composers of the second half of the 20th century,[3] along with Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov.[4]

Early life

Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol, Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (now the Republic of Tatarstan), Russian SFSR, to an ethnically mixed family of a Volga Tatar father and a Russian mother of Jewish Polish descent.[5][6] Her father, Asgat Masgudovich Gubaidulin, was an engineer and her mother, Fedosiya Fyodorovna (née Yelkhova), was a teacher. After discovering music at the age of 5, Gubaidulina immersed herself in ideas of composition. While studying at the Children’s Music School with Ruvim Poliakov, Gubaidulina discovered spiritual ideas and found them in the works of composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Gubaidulina quickly learned to keep her spiritual interests secret from her parents and other adults since the Soviet Union was hostile to religion.[6] These early experiences with music and spiritual ideas led her to treat these two domains of thought as conceptually similar and explains her later striving to write music expressing and exploring spiritually based concepts.

Career

Gubaidulina studied composition and piano at the Kazan Conservatory, graduating in 1954. During her early conservatory years, Western contemporary music was banned almost entirely from study, an unusual exception being Bartók. Raids even took place in the dormitory halls, where searches were conducted for banned scores, Stravinsky being the most infamous and sought after. Gubaidulina and her peers procured and studied modern Western scores nonetheless. “We knew Ives, Cage, we actually knew everything on the sly.”[7]

In Moscow she undertook further studies at the Conservatory with Nikolay Peyko until 1959, and then with Vissarion Shebalin until 1963. She was awarded a Stalin fellowship.[8] In 1961, she joined the Union of Soviet Composers.[9] Her music was deemed “irresponsible” during her studies in Soviet Russia, due to its exploration of alternative tunings. She was supported, however, by Dmitri Shostakovich, who in evaluating her final examination encouraged her to continue on her path despite others calling it “mistaken”.[10] She was allowed to express her modernism in various scores she composed for documentary films, including the 1963 production, On Submarine Scooters, a 70mm film shot in the unique Kinopanorama widescreen format.[citation needed] She also composed the score to the 1967 Soviet animated film Adventures of Mowgli, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling‘s Jungle Book.[9]

In the mid-1970s Gubaidulina founded Astreja, a folk-instrument improvisation group with fellow composers Viktor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov.[5][11] In 1979, she was blacklisted as one of the “Khrennikov’s Seven” at the Sixth Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers for writing “noisy mud instead of musical innovation, unconnected with real life”.[5][12]

Gubaidulina became better known abroad during the early 1980s through Gidon Kremer‘s championing of her violin concerto Offertorium.[9] In 2003, Jonathan Walker, in the Oxford Companion to Music, noted that “she sprang to international fame in the late 1980s”.[13] She later composed an homage to T. S. Eliot, using the text from the poet’s Four Quartets. In 2000, Gubaidulina, along with Tan Dun, Osvaldo Golijov, and Wolfgang Rihm, was commissioned by the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart to write a piece for the Passion 2000 project in commemoration of Johann Sebastian Bach. Her contribution was the Johannes-Passion. In 2002, she followed this with the Johannes-Ostern (“Easter according to John”), commissioned by Hannover Rundfunk. The two works together form a “diptych” on the death and resurrection of Christ, her largest work to date. The work was performed at the Royal Albert Hall in the 2002 BBC Proms.[5]

Invited by Walter Fink, she was the 13th composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2003, the first female composer of the series.[14] Her work The Light at the End preceded Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in the 2005 proms.[15] In 2007 her second violin concerto In Tempus Praesens was performed at the Lucerne Festival by Anne-Sophie Mutter.[16] Its creation was depicted in Jan Schmidt-Garre‘s film Sophia – Biography of a Violin Concerto.[17]

In 2019, she served as composer-in-residence at Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.[9] She was a member of the musical academies in Frankfurt, Hamburg and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.[18]

Personal life

In 1973, Gubaidulina was attacked and strangled in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow, but she survived.[9][19] Her friends later theorized the attacker was a KGB agent.[19]

Gubaidulina was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox church.[20] She lived in Appen, Germany, near Hamburg, from 1992, following the fall of the USSR.[9][21] The Steinway grand piano in her home was a gift from Rostropovich.[22] She was married three times;[23] her second husband was writer and dissident Nikolai Bokov.[19] Gubaidulina paused composing in 2012, after the deaths of her third husband, her daughter, and Viktor Suslin, a friend and fellow composer and Appen resident.[19]

Gubaidulina died from cancer at her home in Appen on 13 March 2025, at the age of 93.[24][25]

Aesthetic

For Gubaidulina, music was an escape from the socio-political atmosphere of Soviet Russia.[26] For this reason, she associated music with human transcendence and mystical spiritualism, which manifests itself as a longing inside the soul of humanity to locate its true being, a longing she continually tries to capture in her works.[27] These abstract religious and mystical associations are realized in Gubaidulina’s compositions in various ways, such as writing in bowing directions that cause the performer to draw a crucifix in the final movement of “Seven Words” for cello, bayan, and strings.[28]

The influence of electronic music and improvisational techniques is exemplified in her unusual combination of contrasting elements, novel instrumentation, and the use of traditional Russian folk instruments in her solo and chamber works, such as De profundis for bayan, Et expecto, the sonata for bayan, and In croce for cello and organ or bayan. The koto, a traditional Japanese instrument is featured in her work In the Shadow of the Tree, in which one solo player performs on three different instruments—koto, bass koto, and zheng. The Canticle of the Sun is a cello concerto/choral hybrid, dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich. The use of the lowest possible registers on the cello opens new possibilities for the instrument.[29]

Further influence of improvisation techniques can be found in her fascination with percussion instruments. She associated the indeterminate nature of percussive timbres with the mystical longing and the potential freedom of human transcendence.[30] In a 2021 interview with The New York Times, she said that percussion instruments “contain the essence of existence”.[31] In a 2012 interview with the modern British composer Ivan Moody, Gubaidulina provided an explanation for how percussion is utilized in her works to show spiritualism. She said,

… percussion has an acoustic cloud around it, a cloud that cannot be analyzed. These instruments are at the boundary between palpable reality and the subconscious, because they have these acoustics. Their purely physical characteristics, of the timpani and membranophones and so on, when the skin vibrates, or the wood is touched, respond. They enter into that layer of our consciousness which is not logical, they are at the boundary between the conscious and the subconscious.[32]

She was also preoccupied by experimentation with non-traditional methods of sound production and, as already mentioned, with unusual combinations of instruments, e.g. Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings (1975), Detto – I, sonata for organ and percussion (1978), The Garden of Joy and Sorrow for flute, harp and viola (1980), and Descensio for 3 trombones, 3 percussionists, harp, harpsichord/celesta and celesta/piano (1981).[33]

Gubaidulina noted that the two composers to whom she experienced a constant devotion were J. S. Bach and Anton Webern, although she had periods of devotion to Wagner, the Second Viennese School, and 16th century music, most notably Gesualdo da Venosa and Josquin des Prez.[7] Among some non-musical influences of considerable import are Carl Jung (Swiss thinker and founder of analytical psychology) and Nikolai Berdyaev (Russian religious philosopher, whose works were forbidden in the USSR, but nevertheless found and studied by the composer).[34]

Gubaidulina also drew from a number of literary traditions, including but not limited to: ancient Egyptian poetry (Night in Memphis, 1968), Persian poetry (Rubayat, 1969), German poetry (The Garden of Joys and Sorrows, 1980, and Perception, 1983), English works by T.S. Eliot (Homage to Eliot, 1987), and contemporary Russian poetry (Hour of the Soul, 1974, and Homage (1984)).[35]

Credits:

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