Gubaidulina dead at 93

Rest in peace, Madam. A living legend till today. Greatest female
composer of our time.
From The New York Times:
<< Sofia Gubaidulina, Composer Who Provoked Soviet Censors, Dies at 93
Blacklisted at home but finding acclaim abroad, she sought to bridge
East and West, the sacred and the secular, in vivid, colorful
compositions.
By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
March 13, 2025
Updated 3:13 p.m. ET
Sofia Gubaidulina, a Tatar-Russian composer who defied Soviet dogma with
her openly religious music and after decades of suppression moved to the
West, where she was feted by major orchestras, died on Thursday at her
home in Appen, Germany. She was 93.
Carol Ann Cheung, of Boosey & Hawkes, Ms. Gubaidulina’s publisher, said
the cause was cancer.
Ms. Gubaidulina (pronounced goo-bye-doo-LEE-na) wrote many works steeped
in biblical and liturgical texts that provoked censors at home and,
beginning in the final decade of the Cold War, captivated Western
audiences. She was part of a group of important composers in the Soviet
Union, including Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, who
found disfavor with the authorities but acclaim abroad.
She explored the tension between the human and the divine, and sought to
place her music in the service of religion in the literal sense of
repairing what she believed to be the broken bond between man and God.
Using musical terms, Ms. Gubaidulina often spoke of her work bringing
legato, a sense of connected flow, into the fragmented “staccato of
life.”
Soloists who performed her work, among them the violinists Gidon Kremer
and Anne-Sofie Mutter, often spoke of the emotional intensity that the
music required. Conductors, including Valery Gergiev, Charles Dutoit and
Kurt Masur, were strong advocates for her music.
Folk traditions also fascinated Ms. Gubaidulina, who credited her Tatar
roots with her love for percussion and shimmering sound colors. She
favored soft-spoken or tenebrous instruments including the harp, the
13-stringed Japanese koto and the double bass.
She collected instruments from different cultures and founded a
collective of performers, which she named Astreia, that improvised on
them. Later, she developed an interest in Japanese music and wrote
compositions that utilized both Western and Japanese instruments.
Ms. Gubaidulina had a special affinity with the bayan, a Russian button
accordion normally more at home at folk weddings than in the concert
hall. As a 5-year-old, she fell under the spell of an itinerant
accordionist in her impoverished neighborhood of Kazan, the capital of
what was then the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Her
improvised dances to his music drew the attention of a neighbor and
landed her a spot in a school for musically gifted children.
Years later, she wrote concert works — including “De Profundis” and
“Seven Words” — with parts for the bayan that expanded its sound
palette, ranging from wheezing death rattles to blindingly bright
filaments of sound. She exploited the expressive potential hidden in
between notes in the pulmonary action of the instrument’s bellows.
“Do you know why I love this monster so much?” she once asked, referring
to the bayan. “Because it breathes.”
Audiences responded. Performances of “De Profundis” often reduced them
to tears, the bayan player Elsbeth Moser said in an interview for this
obituary in 2018.
Ms. Gubaidulina looked to natural laws to establish form in her
compositions. She drew on the mathematical Fibonacci series (in which
the first two numbers are 0 and 1 and each subsequent number is the sum
of the previous two) to determine the proportions of a work’s component
movements. She experimented with alternate tuning systems rooted in the
natural overtone series and considered the Western convention of
dividing an octave into 12 equal steps a violation of nature. Sometimes
she had groups of instruments tuned a quarter tone apart, in order to
evoke a spiritual dimension hovering just out of reach.
To Soviet critics, her microchromatic tunings were “irresponsible” and
Astreia’s improvisations a form of “hooliganism.” The dark sound palette
and mystical spaciousness of her music ran counter to the tuneful
optimism favored by Soviet officials. In 1979, Tikhon Khrennikov, the
head of the powerful Composer’s Union, added Ms. Gubaidulina to a
blacklist.
Until the 1980s, Ms. Gubaidulina witnessed few performances of her own
music. She earned money writing scores for films and cartoons. She was
repeatedly denied permission to travel to festivals in Poland and in the
West.
The watchful eye of the K.G.B. followed her. After her home was searched
in 1974, she took to speaking in a near-whisper to foreign visitors.
Around the same time, she was assaulted in the elevator of her building
in Moscow.
“He grabbed my throat and slowly squeezed it,” Ms. Gubaidulina later
recalled of her assailant. “My thoughts were racing: It’s all over now —
too bad I can’t write my bassoon concerto anymore — I’m not afraid of
death but of violence. Then I told him: ‘Why so slowly?’” The attacker
relented. At the police station, officers shrugged off the attack as the
work of a “sex maniac.”
Sofia Gubaidulina was born on Oct. 24, 1931, in the Tatar city of
Chistopol. Her father, Asgad Gubaidullin, was a Tatar geodetic engineer
and the son of an imam. Her mother, Fedosia Fyodorovna Elkhova, a
teacher, was Russian.
At home, Sofia and her two sisters learned to play children’s pieces on
a baby grand piano that took up much of the family’s living space. The
girls also experimented with placing objects on the piano’s strings to
draw odd sounds from it, a world away from the United States, where John
Cage was then writing his first sonata for prepared piano, which
involved inserting an assortment of items like metal bolts and rubber
erasers between the instrument’s strings to alter the sound.
The sight of a Russian Orthodox icon in a farmhouse had sparked Sofia’s
interest in religion, but in order not to endanger her family, she
learned to internalize her spiritual side and blend it with music.
Silence unfolded its own magic, especially on surveying trips with her
father, when the two walked wordlessly along streams and through
forests.
Ms. Gubaidulina studied piano and composition at the Kazan Conservatory
before enrolling at the Moscow Conservatory in 1954. Her teachers
included Yuri Shaporin and Nikolai Peiko, an assistant of Shostakovich.
In 1959, Peiko introduced his student to Shostakovich. After hearing Ms.
Gubaidulina’s music, Shostakovich told her: “Don’t be afraid to be
yourself. My wish for you is that you should continue on your own,
incorrect way.”
Ms. Gubaidulina married Mark Liando, a geologist and poet, in 1956. They
collaborated on a song cycle, “Phacelia,” and had a daughter, Nadezhda,
who died of cancer in 2004. The marriage ended in divorce, as did a
second marriage, to the dissident poet and samizdat publisher Nikolai
Bokov. In the 1990s, Ms. Gubaidulina married Pyotr Meshchaninov, a
conductor and music theorist, who died in 2006. She is survived by two
grandchildren.
Ms. Gubaidulina’s breakthrough came with her first violin concerto,
“Offertorium,” completed in 1980, a work of grave beauty that
ingeniously disassembles and rebuilds the “Royal Theme” upon which Bach
based his “Musical Offering.”
The work’s Christian underpinnings were a thorn in the side of Soviet
censors. It didn’t help that the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, for
whom she had written it, incensed officials by overstaying an approved
trip to the West.
In the end, her West German publisher, Jürgen Köchel of Sikorski
Editions, smuggled the score out and “Offertorium” received its premiere
at the Wiener Festwochen in Austria in 1981. An orchestral work,
“Stimmen … verstummen” (“Voices … fall silent”) made it only to a
festival in West Berlin because the West German Embassy in Moscow had
sent the score out by diplomatic pouch.
“Offertorium” was also the introduction to Ms. Gubaidulina’s music for
many American listeners when the New York Philharmonic programmed it,
with Mr. Kremer as soloist, in 1985. Around this time, she began to
receive permission to travel and visited festivals in Finland and
Germany.
In 1992, Ms. Gubaidulina moved to Germany and settled in the village of
Appen, outside of Hamburg. Commissions began to roll in, including an
invitation from the International Bach Academy Stuttgart to write her
own version of “St. John Passion” for the 250th anniversary of Bach’s
death.
That 90-minute work, almost entirely built out of the diminished minor
interval, sounds like a musical sigh. A reviewer called it
“claustrophobic and doom-laden.” Many critics also found the length of
some of Ms. Gubaidulina’s works excessive.
The conductor Joel Sachs, who invited her to visit New York in 1989,
remembered being struck particularly by one of her works performed
there, “Perception,” a 50-minute piece for soprano, baritone and strings
that dramatizes a dialogue about art and creation using texts by the
Austrian-born poet Francisco Tanzer. As in much of Ms. Gubaidulina’s
work, some of the argument is played out in purely instrumental moments.
“It really is dramatic in the way we assume a Western cantata to be,”
Mr. Sachs said, “but the sounds she generates are almost more important
than the actual notes.” >>
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/arts/music/sofia-gubaidulina-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1
--