Sofia Gubaidulina

"I am a religious person...and by 'religion' I mean re-ligio, the re-tying of a bond...restoring the legato of life. Life divides man into many pieces...There is no weightier occupation than the recomposition of spiritual integrity through the composition of music." -- Sofiya Gubaydulina

In Russian composer Sofiya Gubaydulina's 1986 symphony Slïshu...umolko ("I hear...silence"), the composer writes a cadenza for conductor. The orchestra is largely silent save for a few rumblings from bass drums, during which the conductor melds this quasi-silence into strong but delicate contours; with agonizingly slow precision, the conductor eventually brings his hands upwards, tracing a Christmas-tree shape, until they are fully stretched towards the heavens. He flips his hands upwards, and the organ, nestled deep in the orchestra, catches the gesture and begins the symphony's apocalyptic final movement. The gesture is wonderfully symbolic of Gubaydulina's work in general, obsessed as it is with the "other sides" of music -- with "re-tying the bonds" between gesture and sound, sound and silence, silence and noise, this sensate world and the super-sensate next. From early works like Night in Memphis (1968) through the now classic Offertorium and Seven Last Words of the early '80s, and up to the Double Viola Concerto "Two Paths" from 1999, Gubaydulina's music traces an impassioned commitment "to restore a sense of integrity" to both art and life. In this sense her music is unabashedly re-ligious: it finds and binds the fissures which mark human solitude, with a brazen honesty rare in music even today.

Sofia Asgatovna Gubaydulina was born on October 24, 1931, in Chistopol', in the Tatar Republic; growing up there, Gubaydulina would bind peculiar fusion of Eastern and Western into dramatic polarities in her later work. She graduated from the Kazan' Conservatory in 1954 having studied composition and piano; she then left for Moscow, where she studied at the Conservatory with Nikolay Peyko until 1959, and then with Shebalin until 1963. Already by this time, Gubaydulina was marked as an "irresponsible" composer on "a mistaken path"; Shostakovich, among others, supported her however, advising her to "continue along [her] mistaken path." By the mid-1970s Gubaydulina founded a folk-instrument improvisation group with fellow composers Victor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov called Astreja, still active in the late 1990s. Today Gubaydulina is a successful freelance composer, having won a number of prestigious composition prizes and grants.

In many ways, the cross is the most potent symbol in Gubaydulina's work -- it is the consummate node of intersection, the site of re-tying both as a mark of salvation and greatest suffering. So many of her works contain cross imagery, often through elaborate, predestined meeting-and-diverging points for distinct sounding bodies or musical concepts. Hence the great "crossings" of 1979's In Croce (between cello and organ), 1981's Rejoice (cello and violin), 1982's Seven Last Words (cello, bayan, and strings), and 1980's Offertorium (violin and orchestra). And in the 12-movement symphony, the crux occurs between sound (the orchestra) and silence itself (the pantomiming conductor), each on its own desperately etched trajectory. But what perhaps most astonishing about Gubaydulina's music is how, amidst such formally rigorous edifices (the cross, the mass-sequence, the Fibonacci series), a voice of such supple, passionate directness arises. Gubaydulina's work, even while unfolding an apocalyptic itinerary, often sounds breathed out in the moment, in- and ex-pired, systolic and organic; filaments or melody float, buffet, and fall, even as a musical cataclysm ferments. This tight religious knot of opposites may well account for Gubaydulina's success in the West in the late twentieth century; she is now certainly considered one of the most important composers alive today.