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Sofia Gubaidulina: Life and Education in Soviet Russia

Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931) is one of the most representative composers to emerge from the Soviet avant-garde. However, since her music often embraced an anti-Soviet ideology, her works were rarely performed in the Soviet Union. Marina Lobanova describes the milieu into which Gubaidulina was born:

After the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians turned into the official censor in 1930, having established together with the NKVD (later the KGB) and the Communist Party control over musical culture, achieved the banning of “ideologically hostile” organizations (first and foremost, the Association of Contemporary Music), publishers, magazines and compositions, and repressed some of its political opponents as “enemies of the people,” while forcing others to renounce their convictions, connections with the West were broken, as were the threads linking the past, present and future in Russian culture. All “modernistic,” “formalistic,” “decadent,” “religious,” “bourgeois,” and "reactionary" works were banned from cultural usage. . . . East-West was interpreted by official ideology in accordance with the canons of mythological description as “them and us,” “left and right,” “bad and good.”

Gubaidulina, Edison Denisov, and Alfred Schnittke were known as “the great three” and formed the primary core of young avant-garde composers in the 1960s-80s, making their names known internationally. Despite the intense effort to force her away from pursuing a career in composition, Dimitri Shostakovich encouraged her.

And although we were accepted to the graduate school [in 1954], the Conservatory officials declared that, despite our giftedness and capacity for hard work, we had chosen the wrong way, or what they called “a false way” (the “right way,” of course, meant Socialist Realism). . . . [Shostakovich] told me personally: “Everybody thinks that you are moving in the wrong direction. But I wish you to continue on your ‘mistaken’ path.”

Even with the encouragement of her teachers and peers, the social oppression along with the censorship of her works eventually forced her to relocate to Hamburg, Germany, where she currently resides.

Aesthetics

For Gubaidulina, music was an escape from the terrifying socio-political atmosphere of Soviet Russia. For this reason, she associated music with human transcendence and mystical spiritualism. She claims that the socio-cultural leaps made by modernism caused humans to lose sight of their humanity, moving quicker than it was prepared to. In her view, this manifested itself as a longing inside the soul of humanity to locate its true being, a longing she continually tries to capture in her works. These abstract religious and mystical associations are concretized in Gubaidulina’s compositions in various ways. She is particularly preoccupied with mystical/unusual sonorities and novel uses of instruments.

Her penchant for novel sounds and sonorities can be seen in her early affinity toward film music and improvisation. For Soviet composers, film music offered the greatest freedom from censorship since the governmental focus was on the film narrative itself. The film studio not only offered a safer environment, it also allowed Gubaidulina access to special musical and electronic equipment otherwise off limits. Along with film music, her fascination with novel sounds and textures led to her co-founding of the improvisational group Astreya, of which she is still an active member and performer. The group utilizes folk instruments from various cultures combined with modern techniques to produce creative new sounds.

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- 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 three different instrument—Koto, Bass Koto, and Chang. The Canticle of the Sun is a cello concerto/choral hybrid, dedicated to Rostropovich. The use of the lowest possible registers on the cello opens new possibilities for the instrument while the limited use of chorus also adds a mystical ambience to the work. Another influence of improvisation techniques can be found in her fascination with percussion instruments. She associates the indeterminate nature of percussive timbres with the mystical longing and the potential freedom of human transcendence.

She was also preoccupied by experimentation with non-traditional methods of sound production, and as already mentioned- with unusual combinations of instruments. For instance, 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).

Concerning influence, Gubaidulina notes that, although she was attracted to a number of composers during various periods of her life, including Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Josquin and Gesualdo, the two composers to whom she experiences a constant devotion are J.S. Bach and Webern. Among some non-musical influences of considerable import are Carl Jung (Swiss thinker and founder of analytical psychology) and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev (Russian religious philosopher, whose works were forbidden in USSR, but nevertheless found and studied by the composer)

Musical Elements of Individual Style

Being a profoundly religious person, Gubaidulina defines “re-ligio” as re-legato or as restoration of the connection between oneself and the Absolute. She finds this re-connection through the artistic process and has developed a number of musical symbols to express her ideals. She does it through narrower means of intervallic and rhythmic relationship within the primary material of her works, by seeking to discover the depth and mysticism of the sound, as well as on a larger scale, through carefully thought architecture of musical form.

Melodically, Gubaidulina’s is characterized by the frequent use of intense chromatic motives rather than long melodic phrases. She often treats musical space as a means of attaining unity with the divine—a direct line to God—concretely manifest by the lack of striation in pitch space. She achieves this through the use of micro-chromaticism (i.e., quarter tones) and frequent glissandi, exemplifying the lack of “steps” to the divine. This notion is furthered by her extreme dichotomy characterized by chromatic space vs. diatonic space viewed as symbols of darkness vs. light and human/mundane vs. divine/heavenly. Finally, the use of short motivic segments allows her to create a musical narrative that is seemingly open-ended and disjunct rather than smooth.

Harmonically, Gubaidulina’s music resists traditional tonal centers and triadic structures in favor of pitch clusters and intervallic design arising from the contrapuntal interaction between melodic voices. For example, in the Cello Concerto Detto-2 (1972) she notes that a strict and progressive intervallic process occurs, in which the opening section utilizes successively wider intervals that become narrower toward the last section.

Rhythmically, Gubaidulina places significant stress on the fact that temporal ratios should not be limited to local figuration; rather, the temporality of the musical form should be the defining feature of rhythmic character. As Gerard McBurney states:

In conversation she is most keen to stress that she cannot accept the idea (a frequent post-serial one) of rhythm or duration as the material of a piece. . . . To her, rhythm is nowadays a generating principle as, for instance, the cadence was to tonal composers of the Classical period; it therefore cannot be the surface material of a work. . . . [S]he expresses her impatience with Messiaen, whose use of rhythmic modes to generate local imagery, she feels, restricts the effectiveness of rhythm as an underlying formal level of the music.

To this end, Gubaidulina often devises durational ratios in order to create the temporal forms for her compositions. Specifically, she is prone to utilizing elements of the Fibonacci sequence or the Golden Ratio, in which each succeeding element is equal to the sum of the two preceding elements (i.e., 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.). This numerical layout represents the balanced nature in her music through a sense of cell multiplication between live and non-live substances. She firmly believes that this abstract theory is the foundation of her personal musical expression. The “Golden Ratio “between the sections are always marked by some musical event, and composer explores her fantasy fully in articulating this moments.

The first work in which Gubaidulina experiments with this concept of proportionality is Perception for Soprano, Baritone, and Seven String Instruments (1981, rev. 1983-86). The 12th movement, “Montys Tod” (Monty’s Death), uses the Fibonacci series in its rhythmical structure with the number of quarter notes in individual episodes corresponding to numbers from Fibonacci series.

Individual Works

Gubaidulina’s output covers a broad spectrum of genres, including orchestral works (with and without solo instruments), chamber music, compositions for solo instruments, works for choir or with choir, and electronic music.

Piano Music

Gubaidulina’s entire piano output belongs to her earlier compositional period and consists of the following works: Chaconne (1962), Piano Sonata (1965), Musical Toys (1968), Toccata-Troncata (1971), Invention (1974) and Piano Concerto “Introitus” (1978). Some of the titles reveal her interest in baroque genres and the influence of J.S. Bach.

The Piano Sonata is dedicated to Henrietta Mirvis, a pianist greatly admired by the composer. The work follows the classical formal structure in 3 movements: Allegro (Sonata form), Adagio, and Allegretto. Four motives (pitch sets) are utilized throughout the entire sonata, which also constitute the cyclical elements upon which the rhetoric of the piece is constructed. Each motive is given a particular name: “spring”, “struggle”, “consolation,” and “faith.” There are two elements in the primary thematic complex of the first movement: (1) a “swing” theme, characterized by syncopation and dotted rhythms and (2) a chord progression, juxtaposing minor and major seconds over an ostinato pattern in the left hand. The slower secondary theme introduces a melodic element associated with the ostinato element of the previous theme. In the development section, these sets are explored melodically, while the dotted rhythm figure gains even more importance. In the recapitulation, the chord progression of the first thematic complex is brought to the higher registers, preparing the coda based on secondary theme cantabile element, which gradually broadens.

The second movement shifts to a different expressive world. A simple ternary form with a cadenza–AB (cadenza) A, the B section represents an acoustic departure as the chromatic figurations in the left hand, originating in section A, are muted. In the cadenza the performer improvises within a framework given by the composer, inviting a deeper exploration of the secrets of sound. It consists of two alternating elements– open-sounding strings, stroke by fingers, with no pitch determination, and muted articulation of the strings in the bass register—separated by rests marked with fermatas. The third movement is constructed of 7 episodes, in which there is a continuous liberation of energy accumulated during the previous movement.

Musical expression in this work is achieved through a variety of means. Rhythm is a very important element in the construction of the work, articulating a distinct rhetoric, as well as in the development of the musical material. Exploration of a wide range of sounds, within the possibilities of the instrument, involving both traditional and nontraditional methods of sound productions are another important mean. Some examples of the nontraditional sounds produced are a glissando performed with a bamboo stick on the piano pegs against a cluster performed on the keyboard, placing the bamboo stick on vibrating strings, plucking the strings, glissando along the strings using fingernail, touching the strings creating a muted effect.

Two distinct aspects of the sonata—the driving force and the meditative state—can be seen through the architecture of the work as portraying the image of the cross. The first movement is related to the “horizontal” line, which symbolizes human experience while the second movement reflects the “vertical” line, which represents man’s striving for full realization in the Divine. The meeting point of these two lines in music happens at the end of second movement, and that reflects transformation of the human being at crossing this two dimensions. The third movement “celebrates the newly obtained freedom of the spirit”.

Selected chamber works- Garden of Joy and Sorrow, String Quartets

Garten von Freuden und Trauigkeiten (Garden of Joy and Sorrow) for flute, harp, and viola (1981) is dedicated to German poet, Francisco Tanzer. Although the instrumental combination is rather traditional, Gubaidulina’s compositional technique broadens the performance possibilities of each instrument and opens a new path to unique sounds. As the title hints, there are two literary connections between the music and her inspiration: Russian writer Iv Oganov’s poem Sayat-Nova (eastern storyteller, singer) and the verses of Tanzer, a twentieth-century German poet whose poem is to be recited ad libitum at the end of the performance. The lines from Oganov’s poem (The revelation of the rose, the ordeal of a flower’s pain, the peal of the singing garden grew, the lotus was set aflame by music, the white garden began to ring gain with diamond borders) are the answers to the philosophical questions recited at the end of the piece—When is it really over? What is the true end?