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Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina was born on 24 October 1931 in Chistopol in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Her father, a mining engineer, was Tatar, and her mother, a teacher, was Russian, of Polish-Jewish origin, making her parents a typical example of Soviet-era assimilation - but also of the cultural intermixing common in the capital city of Kazan, where the family settled the year following Gubaidulina’s birth. Kazan was both a crossroads and a metropolitan center, with a prestigious university that drew many intellectuals. Gubaidulina, whose paternal grandfather was a mullah, would later say, “I am the place where East encounters West1“. At the age of five, while on holiday in Ninji Uslon, a village on the Volga River, her discovery of a religious icon led her to a spiritual awakening. Practicing music on the piano her parents had given her was a refuge from what the composer describes as a particularly dull childhood. Rapidly, however, the young Gubaidulina felt a gulf between her own aspirations and her schooling, to the point that she developed a strong taste for improvisation and exploring the broader potential of the piano, notably by playing on its strings. She studied at the Kazan Academy of Music (1946-1949), and then at the city’s conservatory (1949-1954); her own creative activity began in the early 1950s.
In addition to solid training in piano, during the course of which one of her teachers, Leopold Lukomski, introduced her to the music of Denisov, Gubaidulina studied composition with Albert Leman. However, it was only when she began composition studies in Moscow in 1954 that Gubaidulina’s musical world opened up for her. In an era when anything Western was strictly forbidden, Nikolai Peïko, an assistant of Dmitri Shostakovich, introduced her to Mahler, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Already, Gubaidulina was showing a tendency to stray from the straight and narrow cultural path traced by the Zhdanov Doctrine – which had become only minutely more flexible since Stalin’s death in 1953 - a tendency that Shostakovitch encouraged discreetly during a final exam. During her Aspirantur, supervised by Vissarion Chebaline (1959-1962), Gubaidulina experimented with Tatar folk traditions and electronic music. She became interested in Yevgeny Murzin’s ANS synthesizer, which used artificially drawn sound waves to synthesize sounds, and composed an electronic piece with it in 1970. In the 1960s, Philipp Herschkowitz, a Romanian Jew who had studied with Webern and taught clendestinely in Moscow, played a key and obvious role in Gubaidulina’s development as a composer, although she never rigorously applied the principles of serialism in her work.
At the time, all new musical works had to be approved by the powerful Composers’ Union, meaning that audacious innovations among composers tended to be stymied. Gubaidulina began expanding her activity as a composer of film scores starting in 1964 (mostly animated films at first), assuring her income at a time - the 1970s - when performances of her own music were officially forbidden, along with fellow composers Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Viktor Suslin, and Viatcheslav Artiomov, among others. In 1975, she founded Astreia, a music group specialized in improvisational performances, with Artiomov and Suslin. Until 1981 – when Suslin’s emigration temporarily put a stop to the group’s activities - this gave her a musical freedom that offset part of the frustration of having to compose in secret. During this era, Gubaidulina was harassed by the KGB because of the underground publishing activities of her second husband, Nicolas (Nikolai) Bokov. Even as her work had begun to be recognized and performed abroad throughout the 1970s, in 1979 she was blacklisted by the Composers’ Union. Nevertheless, in 1981, the Vienna premiere of her violin concerto Offertorium by Gidon Kremer marked the real beginning of her international renown. Gubaidulina traveled outside the USSR for the first time in 1984, for a festival in Finland. When travel restrictions began lifting in 1986, she was able to attend more and more premieres of her compositions in the West, and received an ever-growing number of awards and honors. In 1992, she emigrated to Germany, where she settled in Appen, near Hamburg, where she lives to this day.
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