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Often associated with Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, in a troika of Russian composers considered to be the most emblematic of post-war Soviet musical modernity, the name Sofia Gubaidulina today is haloed by an almost iconic aura. Perhaps because of her emphasis (much stronger than that of her compatriots) on the deep link she felt between music and religious faith, she has become a symbol of resistance to spiritual and artistic assimilation in a time and place where the aesthetic horizons were harshly bounded by the doctrine of socialist realism. Gubaidulina also incarnates the ways in which the Russian musical avant-garde were able to make their isolation, and thus their late, passionate, and ultimately distanced discovery of the fields being explored by composers in Western Europe into a strength and a source of originality.
The first works in the composer’s catalogue are written for piano or involve the piano in some way. Her early Allegro rustico for flute and piano and her Chaconne for piano, written the same year, both show the firm influence of her elders – Prokofiev in the former and Shostakovich in the latter. The rhythmic energy and dramaturgy in Chaconne are early indications of Gubaidulina’s strong musical character. Written two years later, her Sonata for piano has a freedom flavoured by a strong lean toward swing rhythms and by an ad hoc experimentation with serial technique – as well as an exploration of playing directly on the strings. Eleven-sound rows appear in two of the seven movements of the cantata Nacht im Memphis which, in spite of its use of ancient Egyptian texts translated by Anna Akhmatova and Vera Potapova, opens the way to a certain expressionism. Similarly, in the cantata that followed, Rubayat, Medieval Persian texts contrast with passages for baritone written in a style close to that of Sprechgesang. Gubaidulina’s literary choices of the 1970s are emblematic of a poetic, spiritual universe that includes ancient civilizations and Sufi mysticism. One is tempted to ask whether it is Gubaidulina’s own spiritual and political positions we see reflected in her interest in Omar Khayyam, whose quatrains often describe his wrestling with religion and scepticism (From doubt to clear assurance is a breath / A breath from infidelity to faith) and unease with the institution of religion and those who uphold it. Two other authors of tremendous importance to Gubaidulina were Marina Tsvetaeva and Gennady Aygi, whose work features in her Roses, five romances for soprano and piano, and Stunde der Seele, for mezzo-soprano, percussion, and orchestra. Along with Rilke (a poet for whom the composer felt an equally strong affinity), Gubaidulina considered Tsvetaeva one of the rare poets capable of pulling intellect and intuition together into “vibrant substance1”. Aygi, a Chuvash poet and a friend of Gubaidulina’s, wrote texts the composer appreciated for their spiritual rootedness in nature and the sense of “blankness between poetic units2” they maintained – tension in silence.
The composer’s work in the 1970s and early 1980s played with indeterminism, inviting performers into the arena of guided improvisation. This partially open notation features in Rubayat and in Stufen, in which a large orchestra produces numerous clusters, mass effects, and polyrhythms; a pizzicati section in which attacks are statistically distributed, hints at the ways in which the technical achievements of the European avant-garde were filtering into Soviet Russia, where they were studied avidly by a handful of composers. These techniques were, generally speaking, assimilated more on the surface than at the core – more for their overall effect than as independent schools of thought, and most often with an openly pragmatic sense of distance. Gubaidulina often spoke of her “life doctrine”, wherein she sought to master the greatest possible number of composing techniques, giving equal weight to the strict counterpoint of the 17th and 18th centuries and to twelve-tone technique, only to let them fall away when she was writing her own music. Astreia, co-founded in 1975 with the composers Viatcheslav Artiomov and Viktor Suslin, and inspired by Mark Pekarski’s percussion ensemble, embraced group improvisation on traditional Russian, Caucasian, and Central Asian instruments, seeking unusual sounds and intentionally abandoning the reflexes of academic, classical training. The group, though it functioned as a laboratory of timbre and a school of listening, also appears to have offered the opportunity to engage in a kind of group spiritual practice through music, evoking to a certain extent the Sufi tradition and its trance-like states. Astreia’s spirit infuses several of the composer’s works. Concerto for bassoon and low strings, which, inspired by Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat” and the literary figure of the “little guy” oppressed by an unjust system (which the concerto personifies with a crowd of sounds from the cello and double bass), also illustrates a narrative dimension present elsewhere in Gubaidulina’s work. For example, there is a latent dramaturgy in many of her instrumental pieces, such as String Quartet n°1, in which the impossibility of togetherness is figured in the progressive retreat of the performers toward the four corners of the stage. It is tempting to link this penchant for narrative to Gubaidulina’s extensive work in the film industry, for which she began composing in the mid-1960s. Although she scored films as a way to support herself financially, the work had significant advantages: first, it was outside the jurisdiction of the extremely punctilious Composer’s Union, meaning it was not required to meet their standards. Second, it allowed the composer significant latitude for experimentation and made it possible for her to have almost immediate performances of her scores. Gubaidulina did indeed feel that she owed her mastery of the orchestral form to this work, and it is likely that developing so much of her creative technique in a field where the main objective was to use music to suggest a landscape, mood, or atmosphere, rather than to design a structure or offer recognition to a specific grammar, bolstered the composer’s natural affinity for narrative. Concerto for two orchestras, a slightly kitschy combination of jazz band and symphony orchestra, resembles the “jazz-pop” style popular in Soviet movies up to the 1980s.
It was during this same extremely fertile period that Gubaidulina began placing overt references to religion in the titles of her pieces – for the first time with Introitus – and she also began making use of the bayan accordion at this time. Although associated with Russian folk culture, the composer’s use of the bayan is resolutely modern, as one hears in solo pieces such as De profundis, or with cello in In croce. The mystical symbolism in her music became more and more prominent in this period, manifesting most often in the contrast between light and shadow (diatonicism versus chromaticism or microtonality), or in the motif of the cross. She expressed the cross motif musically (notably with the use of inverted, BACH-type chromaticism) and sometimes even graphically, as in Sieben Worte for cello, bayan, and strings, where the trinity is embodied instrumentally (bayan = God the Father, cello = Christ the Son, strings = Holy Spirit). She also began to make use of quotation, in the first instance of which she featured elements of a chorale by Schütz. Gubaidulina’s violin concerto Offertorium catapulted her to international renown, and marked the beginning of Gidon Kremer’s active support of the composer. Its symbolism is largely process-based: her use of the subject of the Ricercar a 6 in Musical offering is both a nod to Bach and a clear reference to Webern. As Webern did, the theme is carried in a Klangfarbenmelodie, first deconstructed – sacrificed – by amputating two notes with each variation, then discreetly reintroduced – resurrected – in retrograde, to create a vast ascending line – an Ascension. During this period, Gubaidulina’s relationship with the Composers’ Union changed: on the occasion of its Sixth Congress, Tikhon Khrennikov, the Union’s secretary, published a report in the 23 November 1979 issue of Sovetskaïa Kultura3 denouncing seven composers whose compositions had been performed during a Cologne festival whose theme was “Encounters with the Soviet Union”. Khrennikov saw this as a provocation. Despite the fact that her work had already been banned from official performance since 1970, Gubaidulina was one of the composers on the list4. The seriousness of the sanction seemed only to bolster her aspiration to complete creative freedom.
Even today, Sofia Gubaidulina herself is the main – if not the only – source of her own biographical and musicological information. She divides her work into three creative periods, which are characterized more by new additions than by breaks with past practice. Her creative evolution begins to stand out in the second version of Perception for soprano, baritone, and seven strings, in whose last movement she employs the Fibonacci sequence for the first time (“Montys Tod”). Up to the early 1990s, numeric sequences served as a means of organizing form, both very locally and in terms of overall structure. The idea of “formal rhythm” emerges as the key innovation in this period. The twelve movements of the symphony Stimmen … Verstummen …, a partial reworking of Perception, in a kind of symbolic struggle between the harmonic world of the ever after and the disharmonic world of the here and now, alternate sections featuring a D major chord under attack by the chromatic scale (odd-numbered movements) and sequences whose durations are determined by a descending Fibonacci sequence (even-numbered movements). The ninth movement is silent, a staging by the conductor of scored symbolic gestures, which Michael Berry sees as a “gestural symbolism5” and as a feature mainly of her works for low strings, but they may be considered more generally as an element of her work at this time.
Certain pieces composed the late 1980s cannot quite be considered “pure music:” two 1987 string quartets, and a trio in 1988, for example. One of these, Quartet N. 3, contained the musical transcriptions of the names of Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, and Edison Denisov, which no doubt contributed, in a somewhat coded way, to their emerging reputation as a kind of Muscovite trinity. By contrast, the diptych Pro et contra for orchestra and Alleluja for choir, children’s choir, organ, and large orchestra, marked a return to the expression of religious faith. In both of these pieces, the Russian Orthodox liturgy manifested musically in the use of dualistic symbols.
As Jennifer Denise Milne6 has pointed out, the sixty-nine extant pages of sketches for Silenzio, for bayan, violin, and cello7 are well worth exploring. In them, one observes how the numbers 7/5/2, part of the Fibonacci sequence, organize the entire piece: the sketches document the extent to which the composer remained intentionally evasive. Series of tables associating numbers and pitches, linked to the harmonics of the fundamental note C, are used to create sequences of two to five notes that are used as reservoirs for melodic cells. The theories of Piotr Meshchaninov, a musician and theorist with whom Gubaidulina began working in 1973, and who she married in 1991, nourished the composer’s thinking, and from the early 1990s she employed numeric sequences derived from the Fibonacci sequence, in particular those theorized by Édouard Lucas. She also began using several sequences concurrently in the same piece, allowing her to layer different textures. As her pre-compositional work gained complexity, the composer began affirming greater freedom in her organization of pitch.
As Kadisha Onalbayeva-Coleman8 has recalled, daily life in Russia became very difficult during the economic crisis of the 1990s, a context that complicated Gubaidulina’s plans to emigrate. She finally succeeded in moving to Germany in late February 1991, where she already had a number of contacts. Her use of number sequences became even more intensive, as in Meditation on the Bach Chorale “Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit” or Jetzt immer Schnee for chamber ensemble and chamber choir. In the latter piece, she returned to the poetry of Gennady Aygi. Examining Gubaidulina’s sketches for this second work, Jennifer Denise Milne has noted the use of a complex of five number sequences that provide a matrix for the piece on several levels. In line with the theoretical position of Meshchaninov, who was familiar with Lendvai’s work on Bartók, the referent Fibonacci sequence is taken to be consonant in terms of rhythm and proportion, in contrast with derived sequences (Lucas, Arnoux) which are imagined as dissonant, and thus tension-filled. This principle of opposition, which is the basis of a number of her works, offers Gubaidulina strong dynamic, narrative, and symbolic potential; duality in her music is often linked to the idea of inner struggle, spiritual battle against adversity. The “formal rhythm” created by the number sequences in the work threads through the composition as an overall feeling. By the same token, a more intuitive process is used in the second concerto for cello and orchestra, And: The Festivities at Their Height. Its title, which is just as ambiguous in Russian9, is also drawn from an Aygi poem, which evokes a crowd blindly moving toward the Last Judgement.
A more discreet, but no less significant technique added during this decade was quarter-tone intonation. It appears for the first time in String Quartet N. 4 with tape. Here and in pieces such as Music for flute, strings, and percussion, in which quarter-tones carve out a hyper-chromaticism driven by the figuration of a slow descent into shadow, or in Concerto for viola and orchestra, it is clear that Gubaidulina’s microtonality is not motivated by the widening of pitch space for the purposes of combination, or by a spectral construction of timbre. Rather, it seeks to mark out a darker harmonic zone, which can then, according to the underlying principles of her aesthetic, be contrasted with a chromatic zone.
By the 2000s, the composer had settled into a life in Germany, and was receiving numerous commissions. During this period, she began working more intensively on religious pieces, such as oratorios and large-scale orchestral, symphonic, or concertante compositions. As a corollary to these often large formations, one can observe a more marked tendency to seek out a certain form of hedonism in her sound. As a result of this, one observes greater lyricism, both instrumental and vocal. In Sonnengesang, a song of glorification on a text by Saint Francis of Assisi, the idiomatic image of pealing bells associated with a major triad seems almost to nod to Gubaidulina’s Russian heritage. The concerto Two paths, in which the voices of Mary and Martha are brought to life by two solo violas, the material is based on a foundational motive (E-F-A) which is then polarized along symmetrical axes, mostly made up of pairs of notes a half-tone apart10. The monumental Saint John Passion represents a kind of aesthetic and theological paradox, in the sense that it is sung in Russian and draws on the Russian Orthodox tradition – in which representation is considered secondary to direct experience. Gubaidulina resolves this paradox with a second text, the Book of Revelation, pulling it into the music alongside the Gospel of Saint John to create a metaphorical dialogue between the earthly experience of the Passion and the celestial one of the apocalypse. Following this, a major series of works with orchestra underline her taste for an orchestration which, while remaining extremely refined, operates in families more than it does through fusion or orchestral mass, whether in the form of blocks, clusters, micropolyphony, or spectral elaboration. At multiple moments, Der Reiter auf dem weissen Pferd, The Light Of The End, and the triptych formed by the flute concerto …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair, Das Gastmahl während der Pest, inspired by Pushkin – in which techno-style samples offers an unexpected rejoinder to a typically Russian pealing of bells – and The Lyre of Orpheus, all hint at connections with the composer’s experience with film scoring. Work with combination tones provides the theoretical backdrop to this triptych, blazing out in an exceptional passage with spectral coloring. The violin concerto In Tempus Praesens, which was commissioned by the Paul Sacher Foundation and premiered in August 2007 at the Festival de Lucerne in a performance by Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Berlin philharmonic, conducted by Simon Rattle, marked Gubaidulina’s definitive entry into the global musical canon.
Her orchestral work does not overshadow her compositions for chamber ensembles and other smaller formations, which sketch out a more obvious link to the composer’s deepest roots, with their explorations of instrumental timbre and their more or less improvisational spirit – through which improvisation itself becomes a kind of ritual. While it is completely written, Am Rand des Abgrunds11 resonates particularly strongly with this spirit, in the sense that, when it premiered in Russia with an ensemble of seven cellos, Gubaidulina and Viktor Suslin12 each played a waterphone, in what is hard not to see as a parallel to their long-ago sessions with Astreia.
Even today, in more recent works such as Fachwerk for bayan, percussion, and string orchestra, whose structure is an attempt to build a musical analogy with the truss architecture evoked in its title, Sofia Gubaidulina still strives in her composition to turn musical structure into an aesthetic element, seeking to foster symbiosis between formal constructivism and spirituality. It is tempting to see this duality, which is the bedrock of all of her music, as a polarization of faith and theory. She has adopted a religion for her faith: Gubaidulina was baptized as a member of the Russian Orthodox Church on 25 March 1970. Although her religious devotion is not exclusive, it is overt. Religion is directly linked, for her, to its etymology, the Latin religere – a means of re-establishing connection and wholeness within the “staccato of life13”. Even more central to Gubaidulina’s thinking than the Eucharist, which is one of the pillars of Russian Orthodox liturgy, is the cross, as evoked earlier in this essay. It is projected symbolically into many of her scores, where it is envisioned as an intersection between the vertical and the horizontal; that is, a point of convergence between an intuitive consciousness that is immediate, global, and totalizing, and a view of the world in its material form. These two axes correspond, respectively, to sacred time and earthly, measurable time. The latter can, with sufficient musical discipline, contain the linear projection of the layered strata of the vertical state14. Gubaidulina’s mistrust of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, her search for personal faith, and, more generally, her refusal of any form of subservience, all show the influence of Christian theologian and philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, whose philosophy of love and liberation were widely read despite censure, censorship, and exile15.
The theoretical dimension of the composer’s thinking is an empirical joining together of the salient features of her academic education. Particularly significant is the question of motive and development/variation that was the core of Nikolai Peiko’s teaching, as well as Piotr Meschaninov’s theories on Fibonacci and the golden ratio, microtonality, and other contributions. Gubaidulina’s “tree theory,” which posited that music can be metaphorically represented by a tree, with its roots, trunk, and leaves – a transfiguration – each corresponding in various ways, depending on three major historical periods, to melody, rhythm, and harmony, owes much to Meshchaninov, as well as to Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants, via Webern. These theories, along with the composer’s own mystical and philosophical syncretism, do not constitute an independent system – rather, they are the result of projecting onto music – both in technical terms and in aesthetic and poetic terms – a cosmic vision guided by faith, in which they cannot, in the end, be considered as dialectically opposed. Gubaidulina has faith, and her music is an affirmation of that faith.
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