Sofia Agatova Gubaidulina was born in Cistopol, in the Tartar Republic, in 1931. She received her advanced musical education at Kazan, and later, in Moscow. In the late 1980s she began to gather acclaim in the West, and has since received commissions from a number of leading international orchestras and other organisations. Gubaidulina now lives in Germany, her country of residence since 1992.
Gubaidulina's self-acknowledged preoccupation with themes of a religious or mystical nature (evident also in her characteristically religious titles) has resulted in a bibliography centred on programmatic concerns, aimed at exposing in her music symbols of her diverse national and religious heritage. Although many of these observations are pertinent, the significance of such phenomena in Gubaidulina's music derives from their function as building blocks of the entire formal strategy. Nevertheless, I shall dedicate the remainder of this chapter to those national and religious influences confirmed as such by the composer's own acknowledgement.
The national influences exerted on Gubaidulina stem from two sources: a childhood spent in Kazan, and her years in Moscow. In an interview with Enzo Restagno, she describes Kazan as a large city with an ancient and profound musical tradition and a universal culture:
"Kazan was one of the centres nearest to the border within which the minorities of the population of Russian empire were able to find refuge, and thus proved to be proportionally rich in artists and intellectuals...In my opinion, centres like Kazan, the cross-roads of such diverse cultures, had a considerable importance, because the artists who came to settle there had a great energy about them, a great desire to work and create, thereby grafting their understanding of the national culture of their homeland."1
With regard to the national Russian culture (as opposed to the multicultural environment of Kazan) Gerard McBurney refers to a distinctly Russian, pre-revolutional religious symbolism which he believes would account for Gubaidulina's openly-religious approach to art, resulting in a style radically different from the more immediate Russian tradition and the oppressed turmoil of the Shostakovichian model:
"For Shostakovich, in common with so many in the Russian tradition, the subject of his music was pre-ordained by the condition of suffering under tyranny... Gubaidulina has remained untouched by that problem. From the beginning, her music dealt in something different, free from the self-pity that is the consequence of so much brooding on a catastrophic past and an unpromising present... The religious nature of her work places her in a certain Russian tradition, albeit one almost entirely extinguished in the wake of 1917... Gubaidulina agrees that the tradition of religious and symbolic speculation which were so prominent in Russian art at the turn of the century are important to her."2
Another sociological factor that seems to have penetrated Gubaidulina's philosophical (and hence aesthetical) conciousness is her experience of life under communist repression. The impact of the Soviet regime upon the development of Russian music hardly requires explanation here. Composers had virtually no alternative to living with state support for their art, which essentially required writing music that exalted socialist happiness. Interestingly, this desperate state of affairs, and the terrorising experience of life in general under such conditions, has left a deep mark in Gubaidulina's philosophical thinking, one which is evident in her interviews, and most probably accounts for her voluntary isolation and her introverted, meditative musical aesthetic: that is, a horror of "mass psychosis". In the same interview with Enzo Restagno, she recalls the atmosphere in Moscow upon the news of Stalin's death:
I remember very well, it was an atmosphere of complete madness, a mass psychosis of all the people who had psyched themselves up to see the dead Tsar, the Tsar who had betrayed and exterminated them. In addition to this was the most terrible fact that the people regarded as some grand personality the very man who had humiliated, terrorised and exterminated the entire nation. In an environment such as this, the understanding of individuals was no longer valid. All were united in the psychotic mass, all wanted to see him, and some even risked their lives in order to go and venerate their dead idol.
"I experienced that atmosphere in which all belonged to a single consciousness - for example, in the street in which we lived, the most good-natured and noble person was the first to be arrested."
In reference to the effect of this situation upon Moscow's musical scene, Gubaidulina explains the reason for the hostility of Soviet officials towards Russian artists, and the consequent need for musicians to withdraw from the public eye, from the horror of that single consciousness:
"The reason [for Soviet hostility] lay in the fact that our whole music was an unwelcome phenomenon of freedom, of the inner freedom of the personality. The position of inner independence was simply unpleasant and unacceptable, and wherever that was detected in music, it was objected to... The majority of musicians are consequently inert and isolated in their particular creativity. No other job demands such a daily, many-houred isolation, or such detachment as ours..."3
From this dark political climate, also, arose Gubaidulina's association of music and spirituality, the awareness of which she dates back to her early childhood:
"As I grew older, music became the single sustenance by which I was able to live and exist... all my life was grey, and I only felt good when I crossed the gate of the music school. From this moment I would find myself within a sacred space. I would hear the sounds coming out of the classrooms, I would feel a bond with all of the pupils, and all would be joined together in this polytonal harmony of sounds, and in this world I wanted to live."4
The spiritual abundance of Gubaidulina's music can be partially accounted for by her childhood influences. A scan of her family's religious beliefs, going back as far as her Grandparents' generation, reveals a diverse collection of faiths, including Judaism, Islam, Russian Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Although she herself is Russian Orthodox, Gubaidulina does not appear to believe in the exclusive right of this faith to spiritual truth. Strongly influenced by the Russian mystical philosophers Vladimir Solovyev and Nikolai Berdyaev, Gubaidulina demonstrates a keen interest in the religious subject-matter of a variety of faiths and creeds, a preoccupation which pervades the titles and the content of most of her compositional output
Gubaidulina even goes so far as to prescribe the general necessity for spiritual presence in composition:
"Composition does not come easily to me. In order to write music, one needs not only spiritual power, but also a great deal of soulful power."5
At the same time, a distinctly objective and constructional element is manifest in Gubaidulina's music, one which runs alongside her subjective persuasions, and "prevents them from degenerating into private speculations."6 According to Gubaidulina's description of her general compositional strategy, elements of objective constructivity combine with psychological or spiritual considerations to form a reciprocal relationship in which form takes precedence:
"Form has an influence on material, not vice versa... What happens in my conception of the end effects the beginning - a sort of simultaneous inner hearing of the compositional whole..."7
This combination of structure and intuition is exemplified by Gubaidulina's most profound musical influence, Bach, a figure whom she warmly describes as: "The ideal: a strong, intellect-driven work, a very well-thought-through sense of form, and a fiery temperament."8
Accordingly, Gubaidulina proposes as her aesthetic ideal a balanced combination of emotional and rational factors, concluding that the most meaningful approach lies in neither one extreme nor the other:
"A composition should, without a doubt, have a logical structure, a drammaturgically-considered build-up, and at the same time should disturb and stir up ruthlessly the listener's feelings."9
Having summarised the main contributing factors underlying Gubaidulina's aesthetic, it now remains to examine the music itself in detail, in order to assess how and to what extent these objectives are put across in her musical language.
1 Gubajdulina, Enzo Restagno, 1991, Torino.
2 Encountering Gubaidulina, Gerard McBurney, "Musical Times", March 1988.
3 Sofia Gubaidulina in conversation with Dmitro Kadanzev, Sowjetische Musik im Licht der Perestroika, "Ogoniok" 33/1989, translation from Russian by Ulrike Patow-Kamenski.
4 Gubajdulina, Estanzo Restagno, 1991, Torino.
5 Sofia Gubaidulina in conversation with Julia Makeyeva, Sowjetische Musik im Licht der Perestroika, "Ogoniok" 33/1989, translation from Russian by Ulrike Patow-Kamenski.
6 Encountering Gubaidulina, Gerard McBurney, "Musical Times", March 1988.
7 Interviews with Soviet Composers, Claire Polin, "Tempo", December 1984.
8 Sofia Gubaidulina in conversation with Julia Makeyeva, Sowjetische Musik im Licht der Perestroika, "Ogoniok" 33/1989, translation from Russian by Ulrike Patow-Kamenski.
9 Sofia Gubaidulina in conversation with Julia Makeyeva, Sowjetische Musik im Licht der Perestroika, "Ogoniok" 33/1989, translation from Russian by Ulrike Patow-Kamenski.
© Fay Neary, 1999