One of the most widely acclaimed composers to emerge from the Soviet Union in its final decades of existence, Sofia Gubaidulina (born 1931) forged a unique musical language marked by such diverse elements as Christian spirituality, musical symbolism, unique structures derived from fragmentation and repetition of simple material, and the use of folk instruments from the Central Asian regions where her own roots lay.
"Every composition is an enormous labor for me," Gubaidulina told Karen Campbell of the Christian Science Monitor. At the beginning, she said, she hears in her head "a vertical sound of colorful, moving, clashing chords, completely mixed up and jumbled. It is wonderful and beautiful, but it isn't real. My job is to turn that vertical sound into a horizontal line. Those two lines, horizontal and vertical, make a cross, and I think about that when I compose." That statement might serve as a kind of compositional credo for Gubaidulina, whose work has successfully merged spiritual influences with extremely original techniques. That combination hampered Gubaidulina's early career, when the repression of creative artists by the Soviet state was at its height, but in the eclectic 1980s and 1990s she became one of the hottest new composers on the international classical scene.
Had Mixed Islamic and Orthodox Background
Gubaidulina was born on October 24, 1931, in Chistopol, in the Tatar Autonomous Republic of the Soviet Union. She grew up in the Tatar capital of Kazan, on the Volga River. Her mother was of Russian, and Russian Orthodox, background, but her father was a Tatar, a member of an ethnic minority group with its own language and a predominantly Islamic tradition. Gubaidulina's father, a surveyor, adhered to the official atheism of the Soviet Union (and never liked Gubaidulina's religious tendencies), but his own father had been a Sunni Islamic mullah. At the height of dictator Josef Stalin's attempts to use his vast gulag to remake the whole of Soviet society, this fact put Gubaidulina's family at risk of imprisonment and death. "Our family lived in permanent stress, expecting his arrest every night," Gubaidulina told Vera Lukomsky in a Perspectives of New Music interview. I remember all the family shivered with fright. Actually, the whole country shivered. Though Gubaidulina had her own troubles with the Soviet state later on, she believed that her own situation was not even comparable to that of her father.
World War II brought the deaths of tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union and tremendous hardship to many more. For Gubaidulina's family the later stages of the war meant extreme hunger and poverty, and when Gubaidulina was sixteen she suffered a case of scurvy, a gruesome disease in which the body begins to break down as a result of vitamin C deficiency. But she survived, and after the war she was able to fulfill a dream she had had since childhood, enrolling at the Kazan Conservatory of Music to study piano and composition.
She impressed her teachers there well enough that she was able to move on to the Moscow Conservatory, one of the premier music-educational establishments in the Soviet Union. There she began to run into trouble almost immediately, for her style, though still developing, bore little resemblance to the Socialist Realism prescribed by the Communist Party, with its overblown choral cantatas and operas celebrating the lives of the proletariat. Gubaidulina and a group of other graduate composition students were subjected to what she called a severe critique. For her graduation exam, the famed composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who had had his own brushes with Party commissars, was the chair of her faculty committee.
Party functionaries on the committee attacked Gubaidulina's work while admitting that it was well made. She was defended by Shostakovich and eventually passed the exam, graduating in 1959. After the exam, Gubaidulina told Lukomsky, Shostakovich told her that "everybody thinks you are moving in the wrong direction. But I wish you to continue on your 'mistaken' path." The words were an inspiration to Gubaidulina, who told Lukomsky that "he supported me in my striving for freedom, my striving to be myself. It means that he defended the right of an artist to be him- or herself and go along his or her own path, even if it seemed 'false.'"
Wrote Film Scores
Hardly in good standing with the Soviet state cultural establishment, Gubaidulina supported herself by writing film scores in the 1960s - an occupation Shostakovich also pursed at various stages of his career. On the side, however, she was moving toward a yet more experimental style. She was one of a group of Soviet composers who circulated around Filipp Herschkowits, an Austrian student of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern who had fled to the Soviet Union to escape fascism in the 1930s. Gubaidulina also studied with composer Vissarion Shebalin. By 1962 she had written the first of her works that later became well known in the West: the Chaconne for piano. Her Piano Sonata of 1965 was a major work showing the sharp contrast between large dissonant masses of sound and passages of seemingly religious calm that were to become characteristic of her work. Though composed during this time, these pieces were not recorded until 1995. In the late 1960s Gubaidulina was part of an experimental improvisation and electronic music group called Astrea.
Gubaidulina remained virtually unknown for the first part of her career, and in Russia much of her music remained difficult to obtain until around the turn of the millennium. Things began to change, though, when Gidon Kremer, a Latvian-born violinist who had moved to the West but kept in touch with Soviet developments, began to champion her work. Kremer focused on the works of composers, such as Estonia's Arvo Pârt, who cultivated simple yet rigorous styles with an aspect of spirituality, and Gubaidulina's Offertorium, a piece for violin and orchestra originally contemplated as part of a setting of the Mass, seemed tailormade for his concerts. He often performed that work and others by Gubaidulina in the 1980s. Gubaidulina also made an international impression with The Seven Words, a work that fell into a long tradition of classical compositions that used instruments to evoke the seven last words of Jesus Christ as he was crucified. The work was written for cello, accordion, and string orchestra, with the expansion and contraction of the accordion symbolizing Christ's breathing. Musical representations of the cross were also woven into the work at various points, and its forces included a bayan, a Central Asian instrument. Other Gubaidulina works also used musical symbolism over the course of a structure that often seemed to end with some kind of state of enlightenment.
In 1985 Gubaidulina was allowed to leave the Soviet Union for the first time, traveling to Europe. She came to the United States in 1987 to attend a "Sound Celebration" performance by the Louisville (Kentucky) Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble with a long history of presenting contemporary music, and she returned the following year for Making Music Together, a Boston, Massachusetts, event designed to featured cooperation between American and Russian musicians and to capitalize on the new freedoms Russian creative artists enjoyed during the glasnost period of cultural openness promoted by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1990, Gubaidulina began to experiment with specifications of colored lighting in the score for her Alleluia, a work for chorus, boy soprano, and orchestra.
Gubaidulina's music remained better known in the West than in her homeland. After receiving a series of prizes that included the Prix de Monaco in 1987, she moved to Germany in 1992, making her home near Hamburg. Commissions from top Western orchestras and small ensembles began to flow her way, and her String Quartet No. 4 was premiered by San Francisco's hugely popular Kronos Quartet in 1994. Gubaidulina's scores sometimes called for unorthodox instrumental techniques, a longtime hallmark of the concert-music avant-garde; in her Dancer on a Tightrope, also from 1994, the pianist must strike the instrument's strings with a thimble or drinking glass. She refused to be labeled as an avant-garde composer, however, arguing that composers should strive for depth rather than innovation. In 1997, Gubaidulina's Viola Concerto (a concerto is a work for soloist and orchestra) was showcased on a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with violist Yuri Bashmet.
Composed Massive Religious Work for Millennium
Well into senior citizenhood, Gubaidulina showed little sign of slowing down. For the turn of the millennium in 2000, she composed a huge work for chorus and orchestra, the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ According to St. John, mixing texts from the Gospel of John with others from the Book of Revelations and the Book of Ezekiel. "The result," wrote Guardian critic Gerald McBurney, was "an apocalyptic vision in which, despite sumptuous musical resources used with almost cinematic grandeur, the words dominate…. However imposing and colorful the accumulating thunder of voices, orchestra, and organ, the score of Gubaidulina's Passion and Resurrection is still at heart … 'poor' stuff, disturbingly stripped down and made of very simple things." A 2005 work called The Light of the End, composed for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, "describes a journey from confusion and darkness - in the form of blurry clouds of orchestral color at the beginning - to a radiant close, dominated by the piercing brightness of the clearest bell sounds," McBurney wrote. Gubaidulina began work on another large composition, slated to be performed by the combined Philadelphia and Pittsburgh symphony orchestras in 2006.
Gubaidulina's list of prizes continued to grow, and in 2002 she shared the Polar Music Prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, with South African vocalist Miriam Makeba. The two artists were picked because they had both made music under politically oppressive conditions. "In my case," Gubaidulina told Jeffrey de Hart of Billboard, "it was ideological oppression. Those artists who decided to be true to themselves had to face very difficult living conditions. We were able to write and paint what we wanted, but we knew that we would be poor people." Indeed, despite her $100,000 proceeds from the Polar Music Prize, Gubaidulina continued to live modestly in Germany. What mattered to her was the importance of music in contemporary society. "The whole world is threatened by spiritual passivity, an entropy of the soul, a transition from more complex energy to a simpler form … amorphousness," she told Karen Campbell. "What puts the brakes on that process is the human spirit, and, in part, art, and that is a matter for serious music." Although Gubaidulina's works were quite distinct from one another, she was fairly prolific; her catalog numbered close to 100 works as of 2005.
Books
Contemporary Musicians, volume 39, Gale, 2003.
Sadie, Stanley, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., Macmillan, 2001.
Periodicals
Billboard, June 15, 2002.
Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 1997.
Guardian (London, England), August 12, 2005.
Perspectives of New Music, Winter 1998.
Online
"Sofia Gubaidulina," All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (December 20, 2005).
Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
