Today's Listening: Gubaidulina

A fine performance by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra:

 

A great composer passes: Sofia Gubaidulina

From the New York Times obituary:

The Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who died on Thursday at 93, was that rare creature: an artist both fully modern and sincerely spiritual. “I am convinced that religion is the kernel of all art,” she said in a 2021 interview.

That is hardly a universal worldview these days. The era of Palestrina and Bach, who aimed to glorify God with their work, is centuries past. Music that is adventurous, religious and great is unusual in our secular time, and some of the most significant was written by Gubaidulina.

I started a long series of posts on Gubaidulina, but I never completed them. I think this is the first one: Approaching Sofia Gubaidulina. And here is the part one of the long series.

Let's end with a quotation from Gubaidulina that appears at the very beginning of the Kurtz biography:

It is not my desire to express an idea, but to give

expression to the spiritual form of an emotion

steeped in life itself.

It does not matter to me whether or not I am modern.

What is important is the inner truth of my music.

I have no doubt that women think and feel differently

than men, but it is not very important whether I am a

woman or a man. What matters is that I am myself and develop

my own ideas strictly toward the truth.

--Sofia Gubaidulina

The New York Times piece, a pretty good survey, ends with this comment:

Gubaidulina made music that manages to be both uncompromising and accessible. Its strange colors are so alluring and changeable, its sense of drama and timing so sure, its desire to communicate — even if enigmatically — so evident that it’s irresistible. She kept on writing until a few years ago; her 90th birthday was celebrated with recordings and performances around the world.

Let's end with her lovely piece for guitar: the Serenade in an excellent performance by Marcin Dylla:

 

 

Sofia Gubaidulina, part 18!

After being reminded of my series of posts on this composer by a commentator, I decided to try and finish the series. Looking back, I was astonished to see that the last one in the series was posted in February 2019! Now that's a hiatus. Here is that post: Sofia Gubaidulina, part 17 and there is also a link to the first one if you want to go back and pick them up from the beginning. I started this series because I feel that Gubaidulina is one of the most important composers working today.

Sofia Gubaidulina

To write this series of posts I am mostly working my way through the biography by Michael Kurtz (English edition 2007) from Indiana University Press.

Picking up where I left off, we are in 1987 and after her successful concerts in Germany and the US, her next appearance was at the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland. This festival, founded by the cellist Seppo Kimanen, commissioned Gubaidulina's String Quartet No. 2 for the summer of 1987. The piece uses timbral contrasts and the Fibonacci series as structural elements. This was followed by the premiere of the String Quartet No. 3 at the Edinburgh Festival in August. Let's have a listen to these two pieces.

No-one could accuse this piece of being atonal--at least not in the beginning where it is very firmly focussed on G!

The String Quartet No. 3 was given its US premiere in September by the Muir Quartet at a festival organized by the Louisville Orchestra.

This was a rich time for chamber music as after a visit to Paris in November 1987 she was commissioned  to write a string trio by Radiodiffusion Française which was premiered by members of the Moscow String Quartet in the Salle Gaveau in March 1989.

Sofia Gubaidulina, part 17

If you have not seen this series of posts before, you can go back and read them from the beginning. Here is the very first post: https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2017/12/approaching-sofia-gubaidulina.html

In the mid-1980s her career really started to take off outside the Soviet Union. In 1985 the West-Deutscher Rundfunk produced a studio recording of Perception that was broadcast in January 1986. Also in 1985 the Berliner Festwochen commissioned a new orchestral piece. The result was Stimmen ... verstummen, a symphony in 12 movements based on numerical proportions and silence--one movement is a silent solo for conductor. Here is a performance by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, the dedicatee:

In July of 1986 Gubaidulina made her second trip to the West to attend the Lockenhaus Festival near Vienna in Austria. The two composers featured in the festival were Schubert and Gubaidulina whose Perception was given its concert premiere. In September 1986 Stimmen ... verstummen was premiered in Berlin. On this occasion Gubaidulina met and received praise from a number of Western composers including especially Luigi Nono who was very impressed with her music. In 1988 Stimmen ... verstummen received premieres in London and Denmark. The big year of 1986 also saw Gubaidulina attending the big contemporary festival in Huddersfield, UK. On this occasion she met some English composers for the first time including Peter Maxwell Davies and Oliver Knussen.

1987 saw Gubaidulina visit Cologne where her Hommage à T. S. Eliot was premiered. This is a work for soprano and octet in seven movements inspired by the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poetic works in English of the 20th century. Here is a performance of the first four movements, credits in the YouTube description:

Sofia Gubaidulina, part 16

The last post on this topic was way back in August, so time to follow up, I think! In the early 1980s Gubaidulina encountered the thought of music theoretician Pyotr Meshchaninov, who lectured at the Moscow Conservatory on the evolutionary history of music. Meshchaninov proposed that the foundational source of musical pitch was the overtone series and that the Fibonacci series served a similar function with regard to rhythm. Meshchaninov was influenced in his thinking by his study and performance of the music of Bach, particularly the Art of Fugue. The Fibonnaci series is a sequence of numbers, each one of which is the sum of the two previous. Bartók also used the series to structure some of his pieces. Here is an illustration:

Gubaidulina approaches music from a different perspective. For her artistic form is a distillation of spirit, an organic, living process both fluid and moving. In a discussion with musicologist Olga Bugrova, Gubaidulina explained how she views the three realms of melody, harmony and rhythm, or, more organically, the root, trunk and leaves of a tree:

Mulling over which of the three fundamental elements of musical fabric within the sonorous complex might be seen as the "roots" of the tree I realized that it was rhythm. All of the harmonic, the mass of the resonance, forms the "trunk," while the contrapuntal lines exemplify the "leaves." Under the conditions of sonoristics, the melody can no longer be conceived, as in the past, as the means for developing, elaborating the material. Instead, it must manifest itself as a transformation of the material itself, and the consequence of growth from the "roots" through the "trunk." ... But with all that, one must not suppress intuition nor lose imaginative spontaneity. But, why rhythm? Because it alone presupposes the agency of laws that do not conflict with a system that embraces all possible sonic and timbral conceptions. [this quote comes from Kurtz' biography, p. 175]

I'm not sure what she means by the last sentence, but the rest is implying that rhythm is like a deep movement in the earth's crust that generates the harmonic waves of a tsunami while melody is the waves crashing on the land. Choose your own metaphor! Valeryia Tsenova has written an essay on the numerical aspect of Gubaidulina's music and I will take up that paper in a later post.

Gubaidulina, due to her non-compromising attitude, had been prevented for many years from traveling outside the Soviet Union to attend performances of her music. Finally in 1984 she was able to attend a special edition of the Helsinki Festival devoted to Soviet and Russian culture. The authorities were still unwilling to allow her to travel, but gave in when Veijo Vapio, the artistic director, stated that if Gubaidulina was not allowed to attend, the whole festival would be canceled! The first evening concert of the festival featured two pieces, Offertorium by Gubaidulina, followed by the Symphony No. 8 by Shostakovich. We have talked about the Offertorium before, a violin concerto written for Gidon Kremer, but let's listen to it again, re-creating this concert by hearing clips of the Offertorium followed by the Shostakovich symphony.

Now that's a concert! This event really was the beginning of a widespread recognition of Gubaidulina's importance. The Finnish composer Kalevi Aho wrote about the great impression she made on him when he visited Moscow in early April 1984:

I thought to myself that composers like Gubaidulina can only come from Russia. Perhaps it was fortuitous for her development as a composer that she had been confronted by many ... difficulties in the course of her career. Without these struggles she might not have developed her mind as much as she did; if everything had gone smoothly she might not have pushed herself to understand the reasons for being a composer or to thing about the higher purpose of her compositions. [op. cit. p. 180]

The first fruits of Gubaidulina's new understanding of the rhythm of musical form was a commission for percussion ensemble, In the Beginning There Was Rhythm:

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 15

Sofia Gubaidulina continued to be regarded with animosity by the Soviet authorities. She was invited to attend a special fiftieth birthday concert in her honor in Dusseldorf in 1981, but was refused permission and when musicians from Moscow tried to perform her music in concerts in the West they were routinely eliminated from the program. Gubaidulina continued to be inspired by religious themes and her next major work follows from that and from hearing a performance of Haydn's unique piece the Seven Last Words of Christ in an arrangement for cello and strings by her friend Vladimir Tonka. Gubaidulina's piece is for cello, bayan and strings. You will recall that the bayan is a type of Russian chromatic button accordion often used in folk music.

For Gubaidulina the cello is associated with Christ on the cross and the bayan with God the Father while the orchestra represents the Holy Spirit. The work was premiered at a concert on October 20, 1982 as part of the fourth "Moscow Autumn" festival. This performance was not entirely successful, perhaps because of its placement in the overlong program and the performers scheduled another outing in the Spring as part of a program of works entirely by Gubaidulina. Since then it has seen a host of successful performances. This one is by Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello; Geir Draugsvoll, bayan and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra:

One aspect of Gubaidulina's approach to music that I have perhaps not emphasized enough is her work with the improvising trio Astraea. After Victor Suslin, one of the members, emigrated to West Germany in 1981, the trio dissolved. But in 1983, as part of another all-Gubaidulina program, she organized a group improvisation in which the role of each performer was determined by the Chinese book of changes. If you recall, one Western composer also used this book, the I Ching, as a compositional tool--that was John Cage. Here is a photo of Gubaidulina, Laurel Fay (author of a biography of Shostakovich) and John Cage in Leningrad several years later, in 1988.

The problem with a composer like Gubaidulina is that you might ask her for some short piano pieces and receive instead, much later, a fifty minute piece for soprano, baritone and seven string instruments. Such was the case when she wrote Perception, a thirteen-movement piece that explores the relationship between male and female concepts of art and between human beings and God. After two years hard work on this piece, a staff member at Sikorski, the Soviet publishing house, told her that the piece would likely not be published due to its length and troublesome texts. The piece as a whole is not available on YouTube, but the separate movements are. Here are the first three:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOMw_t5jSRw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hj_WprZjGo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLCVcoY3FBM

At this point, Gubaidulina, fifty-two years old and with very little recognition or success in her own land, is having some rather dark thoughts.

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 14

I see that I have not put up a post on Gubaidulina since April 9! Past time to continue this series which began in December last year.

The next piece in her series of religiously inspired works is In Croce (1979, revised in 1992). This was written quite quickly, commissioned for a performance in Kazan. The original version was for cello and organ, but it has also been performed with bayan and accordion replacing the organ part. Gubaidulina says:

In that particular combination I imagined the organ as a mighty spirit that sometimes descends to earth to vent its wrath. The cello, on the other hand, with its sensitively responsive strings is a completely human spirit. The contrast between these two opposite natures is resolved spontaneously in the symbol of the cross. I accomplished this first of all by criss-crossing the registers (the organ takes the line downward, the cello upward); secondly, by juxtaposing the bright major sonorities of natural harmonics, played glissando, and expressive chromatic inflections.

Here is a performance with cello and accordion with Julius Berger, violoncello and Stefan Hussong, accordion:

After a couple of intervening works, the next piece in the series is Offertorium for violin and orchestra which brought the composer world-wide recognition. The seed for the composition probably came from a casual remark by violinist Gidon Kremer, just becoming famous in his own right, when he shared a taxi with the composer after a concert in Moscow: "Wouldn't you like to write a violin concerto?" She made a study of what she called his "musical signature," the way he handled extreme contrasts and the transitions between them, but above all the surrender to and focus on the tone. In keeping with the idea of offering, the work uses the "Royal theme" from Bach's Musical Offering.

The violin concerto consists of three continuous movements. In the first movement the theme disintegrates step by step in a succession of variations: in each instance one single note of the theme is omitted at both the beginning and the end, until, in the second movement, which is not thematically related, only the pitch E remains. "You cannot be reborn until you have died." In the third movement, in the "Chorale," a seemingly new theme emerges one note at a time in the bass line of the harp and the piano which eventually--in the closing violin passage--turns out to be the original theme in retrograde. "The first shall be last and the last shall be first." [quoted from Kurtz, op. cit. pp 149-50]

The way the theme is orchestrated in the beginning, in pointillistic style with each note on a different instrument, is a homage to the other main influence: Anton Webern's orchestration of the Musical Offering.

The score was completed in March 1980 but not performed until May 1981. Gubaidulina's disfavor with the Soviet authorities (not to mention Gidon Kremer's refusal to return to the Soviet Union) meant that the score had to be smuggled out. Kremer, the dedicatee, managed to arrange a first performance at the Wiener Festwochen. The conductor was the Finnish conductor and composer Leif Segerstam. After this performance, which perhaps suffered from insufficient rehearsal time, the composer made some cuts in the work. The new version was given by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Charles Dutoit a year later and in this iteration has been enormously successful.

Here is a performance by Gidon Kremer with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Dutoit:

And here is a live performance by Vadim Repin, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski:

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 13

In 1978 Gubaidulina wrote the first in a series of pieces with a religious inspiration. This piece, Introitus for piano and chamber orchestra, begins with a flute cadenza. When the soloist enters, nearly three minutes later, it is with slow chords and repeated notes. This confounds one's expectations of a piano concerto, of course. The music uses four different realms of pitch: quarter-tones, chromatic, diatonic and pentatonic. These correspond to a range of experience from the most sensual (quarter-tones) to the most spiritual (pentatonic). Alexander Bakhchiev, the piano soloist in the premiere, commented:

Introitus is not a common piece of piano music. It requires exceptionally airy, immaterial playing, which she showed me because it came quite naturally to her. But I had to learn it and get used to it, and at the first performance I succeeded only partially. An Introit is the beginning, the introductory item, of the Mass, but the Mass, of course, does not take place in the work itself; and it is difficult to move toward something that does not actually occur but must be prepared for spiritually. This preparation has to take shape in the course of about twenty minutes, and the audience expects something, but nothing tangible happens. I've played this concerto on several occasions and in each instance, no matter whether the audience was made up of professional musicians or the general public, the long trill at the end would be followed by a long silence. The audience was as under a spell ... and then they burst out in applause. [quoted in Kurtz, op. cit., p. 137]

Let's listen to a performance. This is Filipe Pinto-Ribeiro, piano and Mikhail Agrest, conductor with the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra. The concert was in 2011:

Here is another performance, from 2009, with Drosostalitsa Moraiti, pianist with Goldsmiths Sinfonia under the conductor Alexander Ivashkin.

It would be safe to say that this is the exact opposite of a Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov piano concerto! I am often fascinated with the ways composers find to end pieces in the absence of the traditional grammar of the cadence. The long trill here is very effective.

Both of these videos together have little more than 1,500 views!

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 12

Not premiered until 1976, Gubaidulina's cantata for baritone and chamber orchestra, written in 1968, on texts from the Rubiyat is a single-movement work in seven sections. The use of the voice is quite original, utilizing pitched sounds, breathing sounds, spoken words, glissandi, whispering, falsetto and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XayLDVpyIw

The premiere in the Hall of the Composers Union was very successful and was followed by a banquet for all the participants (for which the composer borrowed the funds from somewhere!).

Soon after, in April 1977, Gubaidulina completed a piece for flute quartet for the ensemble founded in the 60s by Pierre-Yves Artaud in Paris. Artaud was a specialist in 20th century repertoire and attended composition classes by Messiaen and Jolivet. The piece was premiered in February 1979 in the church of St. Denis on the outskirts of Paris. Gubaidulina was more and more unsuccessful in getting premieres of her new works inside the Soviet Union so risked premiering works in other countries. As a protection from political retaliation, her name was not listed on the program! This piece was one of a group of works written for instruments in the same family that included the Trio for Three Trumpets and the Duo Sonata for two bassoons.

In October 1977 the members of Astraea, the composer's improvisatory trio that included Gubaidulina, travelled to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where they collected a number of folk instruments including the tar, Gubaidulina's favorite. Persian in origin, the tar has a figure-eight shaped body of mulberry wood and nine to eleven metal strings.

Gubaidulina has made a point of studying the folk music of a number of cultures: Armenian, Georgian, Yakutian, African, Balinese, Indian, Tibetan and so on.

A work from a bit later, 1982, and one that is, after her violin concerto Offertorium, one of the most-performed of her music is her Seven Words (of Jesus Christ on the Cross). The piece has solo parts for cello and bayan, the Russian accordion.

Just to reiterate, what I am doing in this series of posts is just going through the biography by Michael Kurtz and listening to the works in roughly chronological order. At the end I am going to do some closer examination of a few representative pieces with a bit of analysis.

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 11

When I was an undergraduate in my first couple of years, I was at a university with an active composition department. I think the professor of composition was a Czech bassoonist. The students formed a kind of collective that were very active. The music department at that time was camped out in the back of a building largely devoted to visual arts. I think we had three classrooms and the use of an auditorium that sat a couple of hundred people. This was used for student concerts every Friday and a couple of times the student composers commandeered the room for a special concert. This provided, at least, a relief from the brass quintets and shaky attempts at lieder. I was responsible for one of the latter as, at the time, I was enrolled in a vocal techniques class and ended up performing a Schubert lied--"Heidenröslein" as I recall.

So one Friday the composer's collective took over the hall and delivered a "happening." One fellow (who now teaches composition in this very same department) delivered some French nightclub chansons over desultory piano accompaniment; another climbed a high ladder, I don't recall why exactly; another fried up some pork chops in an electric fry pan. There was some other stuff going on, but I don't recall the details. This was followed by a tribute to the French clavicinistes who were accused of a fixation on poultry. Someone might have played "La Poule" by Rameau. Here is a performance by Hank Knox, who teaches at McGill and was a fellow student of mine there in the 70s:

This was followed or accompanied by the rolling of eggs, both raw and hard-boiled, onstage, the tossing of chickens, both raw and BBQed, and the final entry of an indignant rooster who strutted out to mid-stage and proceeded to stare down the audience (who by this point were diminishing rapidly). The next year saw them form their own ensemble, the "Vegteband," consisting of hollowed out vegetables with mouthpieces from wind instruments like the clarinet and trumpet.

This all took place in the early 70s, probably 1972 or 73. I mention this only because in my reading of the biography of Sofia Gubaidulina, I have come to the chapter where a group of young composers in Moscow that included Gubaidulina, Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov, Alexander Raskatov, Vladislav Shoot, Viatscheslav Artyomov and others came together. The last, Artyomov, was a percussionist and collector of folk instruments from Central Asia and the Transcaucasus. Artyomov, Gubaidulina and Victor Suslin formed an ad-hoc trio that improvised together using these instruments. It was a kind of research project in, among other things, timbre. Here is a photo of the group. From left to right, Artyomov on Tár (an Uzbek-Tadzhik plucked instrument), Gubaidulina on Georgian hunting horn and Suslin on Pandura:

They were attracted by the spontaneity of folk music as well as the unusual timbres which they explored in every possible way. They would improvise for hours at a time. Gubaidulina in particular seemed to be guided by an inner voice or "demon" that directed her path and even forced the others to follow her. They gave public concerts, sometimes with other musicians, that attracted the attention of the KGB who, frankly, had no idea what to make of these musicians. "Where did you come from?" and "What did you study?" they would ask. The group, that came to be called Astraea, had weekly sessions between 1975 and 1981.

The later 70s were very difficult for Gubaidulina from a financial point of view as commissions for film scores dried up entirely. At one point she was approached to write a piece combining popular and serious music for a music hall performance. The actual performance did not materialize, but she wrote her Concerto for Symphony Orchestra and Jazz Band for which she did receive a substantial honorarium. It was written in 1976 and first performed in 1978. I think I put this up before, but now we should hear it in its proper historical context. This version is for wind band and jazz ensemble:

It was also used as a ballet piece. In 1976 she also wrote a trio for three trumpets:

I find it fascinating that, during the same decade of the 70s, young composers in Canada and the Soviet Union were engaged in similar kinds of improvisatory work. The group in Moscow were older, of course, in their forties, while the Canadians were in their twenties. They also took different paths. The Canadians were probably influenced by John Cage while the Russians were reacting against the strictures of official socialist realism and the intellectualism of Westerners like Pierre Boulez.

I had no attraction to what my fellow students were doing for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I was simply too unsophisticated to understand what they were up to. But more importantly, I was on a trajectory from being a folk, rock and blues musician to being a disciplined classical guitarist. I had spent years doing free-form blues improvisations and what I was looking for was to get away from that! The transcendental austerity of Bach played by people like Andrés Segovia was what was attracting me. My fellow students were rebelling against the strictures of classical music, which is exactly what was attracting me.

Here is what I was aiming for back then:

Talk about being out of step with history!

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 10

As I was only barely aware of Gubaidulina prior to starting on this project, what I am doing first is just taking a journey through her life and listening to pieces along the way in chronological order. When this is done, I will do some more analytical posts on the music. We are in the later 70s. One large project she was engaged in was a large collaborative oratorio with two other composers, Paul-Heinz Dittrich of East Germany and Marek Kopelent of Czechoslovakia. The piece, on a text by Czech humanist Amon Comenius, was titled Laudatio Pacis. Unfortunately the authorities managed to prevent its performance and it wasn't premiered until after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1993.

At around the same time, Gubaidulina was working on a very different kind of piece, her Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings. She has long had a fascination with low-register instruments. The inspiration for this work came from the virtuoso bassoonist Valery Popov of the State Symphony Orchestra. As became her standard practice, once Popov asked her for a piece, she began to study not only his instrument but he himself and his approach to the instrument. She wrote:

I had never heard a bassoon with such a voice and was literally bewitched by the musician's artistry. I attended all his concerts and class lessons at the Moscow Conservatory, where he taught. Gradually I began to penetrate into the essence of the instrument itself, to understand it like some character in a play. It was then that the idea came to me to surround the "personality" of the bassoon with low-register strings--double basses and cellos. The interactions between the soloist and the surrounding instruments are complex, contradictory, as in a dramatic scene full of action. The concerto includes moments of reconciliation and hostility, tragedy and loneliness. [Quoted in Kurtz, op. cit., p. 116]

The piece, despite a flurry of objections from Serafim Tulikov, president of the Moscow Composers Union, and Evgeny Makarov, head of the Artistic Council, was premiered in May 1975 in the Hall of the Composers Union. Here is a performance:

As of this writing, the clip has had only 43 views on YouTube! Also, the performance is curtailed and the other clips I see on YouTube are of single movements. Here is one of the last movement, but I am not sure of how it fits with the clip above:

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 9

In the mid-70s Gubaidulina was commissioned by Vitaly Kataev to write a piece for wind ensemble. She chose an ensemble consisting not only of winds but percussion, harp and mezzo-soprano singing a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva from the cycle Hour of the Soul. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941 after a life of great suffering. The original version of Gubaidulina's portrait of her went thirty years before it was performed. She revised it twice, the last version dating from 1987 for orchestra, percussion solo and mezzo. It is without a doubt a challenging piece, containing great ranges of textures and orchestrations, micro-tones, wide-ranging melodic figures, and a great variety of instrumental techniques. It ends with a cantilena for the singer that begins after the 15 minute mark in this recording:

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 8

Sofia Gubaidulina in 1969 speaking at a Moscow Youth Musical Club concert

I don't have a photo from 1973, so the one above will have to do. The year 1973 was marked by several important events in Gubaidulina's life. She separated from her second husband Nikolai Bokov (nicknamed "Kolya") and wrote her first work for large orchestra "Steps" ("Stufen" in German). Here is the description of the piece from Kurtz' biography of the composer:

The work is composed in the form of seven descending steps: the orchestral timbre and tone color undergo gradual transformation, moving downward from high to low register. A moment of stasis and rest marks the end of each episode. The descending motion is enhanced by a continual expansion of the sound spectrum: from the cold, impersonal sonority of the instruments at the beginning to the rich sound palette of a thirty-part string section at the climax, and, finally, all the way to the dark, chaotically vibrant whisper of the human voice at the seventh step. At this point each member of the orchestra speaks the opening lines of "Vom Tode Mariae," from Rilke's poetic cycle Das Marienleben:

The same great angel, who once

Brought to her tidings of her birth,

Stood there, waiting for her attention,

And said: “Now is the time for you to appear.”

In this recording of the piece, the spoken text is by overlapping speakers and, I believe, is delivered in Russian. Blogger won't embed the YouTube clip for some reason, so just follow the link. Currently there are only 48 views of this piece!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyftBrpUvus

I'm still not sure why I find the music of Gubaidulina so listenable even when it uses the most advanced sorts of textures and idioms. But I do. Perhaps it is because tying together all these technical devices is an underlying musical purpose and design.

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 7

Continuing our journey of discovery through the music of Gubaidulina. The Composers Union has a creative retreat in the town of Sortavala in Karelia where she had spent a few weeks in the summer of 1970. In the fall of 1971 she returned there and found the peaceful solitude immensely stimulating. She proceeded to write her first string quartet to test some musical possibilities. She later wrote about the piece in these words:

The idea of disintegration, dissociation, lies at the heart of the First Quartet. I have to say that there is a certain amount of pessimism in it, a metaphor for the impossibility of togetherness, of understanding one's neighbor, a metaphor for the utter deafness of humanity (life itself in those years was so dark, so sad and hopeless...) The work grows out of a single pitch, from a common point. But various aspects of the musical material--the rhythmic and melodic successions, the types of articulation, and the dynamics--gradually begin to contradict one another. [quoted in Kurtz, p. 97]

There is a performance on YouTube by the Molinari Quartet, so let's have a listen. No score, alas!

In early 1972 Boris Berman commissioned Gubaidulina to compose a piece for harpsichord and percussion. She ended up selecting three instruments from the collection of Mark Pekarsky, the chang, a dulcimer-like instrument from Central Asia, byan chung (Chinese bells), and Chinese cymbals. To these she added antique cymbals. The piece was premiered in April 1972 and received a very enthusiastic response from the audience. Sadly, this piece does not seem to be available on YouTube. I have posted this before, but never mind, let's have a listen to In the Beginning Was Rhythm, written in 1984:

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 6

Reading Michael Kurtz' book on Gubaidulina (translated from the German original) the truth that they take music very seriously in the Soviet Union and Russia is underlined again and again. The person that headed the Composers Union was an important figure whose role was to essentially control who got performances and commissions according to political ideology. After the crushing of the "Prague Spring" in August 1968 by Soviet troops, the Party loyalist Serafim Tulikov was chosen to head the Moscow Composers Union. The response of the non-conformist composers like Gubaidulina was to form a tight network of mutual support with both performers and listeners. Despite this there was a continuing problem of getting permission to organize concerts.

Pyotr Meshchaninov was an important organizer of chamber concerts using members of the State Symphony Orchestra. Unfortunately nine out of ten applications were turned down. Programs featuring composers like Gubaidulina and Denisov were typically rejected with the Party representative simply crossing out their names!

Very occasionally Gubaidulina received a performance abroad. In 1971 the Royan festival in France featured Eastern European composers and two works by Gubaidulina were performed, the Piano Sonata and the premiere of Concordanza, a new work for chamber ensemble. I suspect that this piece may be been revised at some later point as one writer, Doris Redepenning, refers to four instrumentalists, but the performances on YouTube have ten players. Here is the Esbjerg Ensemble:

One thing that stands out are the enormous contrasts: between simple unisons and massive dissonances, between soft, slow harmonics and rapid cascades of percussion, between fierce rhythms and lyrical melodic passages, between clearly defined pitches and glissandi. But at the same time, one has the sense that everything is there for a purpose. What I enjoy about this performance is how they handle it as chamber music, without a conductor. You can see the musicians providing one another with cues, which leads to a more unified performance.

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 5

According to a German documentary on her, Gubaidulina's last name is pronounced with the accent on the "du." I don't know if this is the case in Russian as well. We are up to 1965, Gubaidulina is living in an apartment on Leninskii Prospekt in Moscow and working as a free-lance composer. As she refuses to do commissions for the Communist Party, sometimes things are very difficult financially and she largely survives on film score commissions. Her Piano Sonata was completed in 1965 and she also married Nikolai Bokov, a poet and philosopher. Let's have a listen to the sonata, the last of her works to be written, nominally, in a traditional form.

You will certainly hear some jazz influence and extended playing techniques. The second theme in the first movement, for example, has passages where the strings are played directly, not using the keyboard.

Through her husband Gubaidulina had contact with a circle of political dissidents. This was during the reactionary Brezhnev era when underground "samizdat" publications strove to communicate a sense of what was going on in the world outside the constrained world of official truth.

After the Piano Sonata she struck out on a more independent path, as she said in a 1992 interview:

Until then, I had wanted to write for the theater, to compose ballets, symphonies... But then I understood: no, absolutely not. I need to write miniatures, miniatures in a whisper. I picked instruments that have almost no sound. The harp, a quiet, gentle instrument; the string bass is purposely muted; the percussion instruments are also treated the same way, so that the score calls for very few sounds. It was from this moment that I realized that I would pay no attention at all to anybody else. I would do what I liked... That doesn't mean, of course, that afterward I only expressed myself in a whisper.

The piece she is referring to is her Five Etudes for Harp, Double Bass, and Percussion, also from 1965:

It is as if the music is for ritual dances of previously undiscovered peoples living in unexplored regions--and aesthetically, that is pretty much what it is. I hear a bit of jazz, but I also hear passages that remind me of Canarios by Gaspar Sanz, the 17th century Spanish composer for guitar. For Gubaidulina this journey was an inner one, seeking greater depth. Instead of inventing more and more novelties, she saw her role as a filter, rather than a generator.

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 4

Gubaidulina began to be recognized in music circles in the Soviet Union from the early 60s. She joined the Moscow branch of the Composer's Union, at the time a crucial step in advancement as they not only organized concerts, composer's retreats and symposia, but also controlled Soviet cultural policy in music. The Composer's Union offered a "Meet the Composer" evening in December 1962 the first part of which was devoted to the music of Sofia Gubaidulina. Along with the Chaconne we talked about in the last post, one of the works featured was her Piano Quintet (composed in 1957-58). Let's have a listen to the first movement. The performers are Kathryn Woodard, piano and Brooklyn Rider (Colin Jacobsen, violin; Johnny Gandelsman, violin; Nicholas Cords, viola; Eric Jacobsen, cello). Recorded live at the Rudder Theatre, College Station, TX, February 26, 2009.

That does not depart too far from the Shostakovich model, though the musical language is certainly different.

A year later, in early 1963, Gubaidulina's candidacy came to an end along with her state financial support. She was not attracted to many of the avenues pursued by her colleagues which included teaching or working as an editor for a state music publisher. The idea of film composition seemed more promising and her teacher Nikolai Peiko helped to open some doors for her. She also won a prize of several hundred rubles at the 1963 All-Union Competition for Young Composers that helped sustain her. The award-winning piece was an Allegro rustico for flute and piano:

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 3

Sofia Gubaidulina in 1955, student at the Moscow Conservatory

Just a very brief post today. Due to the intervention of Shostakovich, chairman of the examination committee, and the support of her composition teacher Nikolai Peiko, Gubaidulina received the highest possible mark on her final exam at the Moscow Conservatory and was granted a three-year postgraduate degree candidacy with financial support. She also had a baby with her husband Mark Liando, whom she had met in 1953. They divorced in 1964, still friends, but on different paths.

The earliest piece which Gubaidulina includes on her list of compositions is the Chaconne for piano, written in 1962. I think it is worth listening to and luckily, we have a clip with the score:

Without doing any analysis (perhaps I will delve into it at a later date) the obvious stylistic affinities are to Bach and Shostakovich (who loved to use passacaglia form in some movements). In places there is a powerful rhythmic energy. Harmonically the dissonance of the opening chords is not continued throughout, but alternates with a more crystalline transparency. I think what gives the music interest and strength is the fact that the textures are in such flux. There is a lot of variety in the piece. Gubaidulina is a very intuitive composer who avoids an excessively cerebral approach and I think this piece demonstrates that.

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 2

I know that not everyone is as fascinated with Gubaidulina's music as I am, so I promise that we will have lots of other kinds of posts. But I think, as we trace the career and compositions of Ms. Gubaidulina, there will be interesting material for almost everyone.

Right now I am reading the biography I mentioned in the last post. It is not a perfect translation from the German original--occasionally there is a puzzling phrase--but it is pretty good. Gubaidulina was deeply involved with music from very early on, so the biography does not wander far afield. Here is a photo of the composer, aged six years, already at work:

Sofia was the youngest of three sisters and at age five she and her older sister Ida both began piano lessons. Her parents, despite being very poor, managed to purchase a baby grand piano for them. At the time they lived in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan and a city of some 250,000 people. Sofia's schoolteacher mother Fedosia Fyodorovna Elkhova was ethnic Russian and Orthodox. Her father, Asgad Masgudovich Gubaidullin, a geodetic engineer, was Tatar and Muslim, though non-practicing. His father, Masgud, was an imam. The practice of any religion was severely suppressed in the Soviet Union. Incidentally the Tatars are descended from the Mongol peoples of Genghis Khan that, as the Golden Horde, spread all the way from Mongolia west to the Volga river and beyond.

Born in 1931, Sofia came along at a difficult time in the Soviet Union. It was partway through the first of Stalin's Five Year Plans which involved forced collectivization of agriculture and the persecution of the better-off peasants, the kulaks. Beginning in 1932, all religion was to be eliminated from Russian culture. Sofia had a deeply religious temperament from an early age which she realized the first time she saw an icon of Christ in the corner of a farmhouse where they stayed one summer. Her parents were horrified so from then on she kept her inner beliefs private.

Stalin's purges reached a climax in 1937. If you will recall, Shostakovich was first denounced in 1936 for his opera Lady MacBeth and only barely escaped punishment. Many of his friends were shot or sent into prison camps. Sofia's family managed to avoid any of those fates, but in 1941 came the onslaught of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and Kazan filled with refugees. Food was very scarce and many people starved. Sofia herself suffered from severe malnutrition and malaria.

This information is from Kurtz' biography of the composer.

Let's end with a composition by Gubaidulina. This is a song from the very early cycle Phacelia for soprano and orchestra written in 1956 when the composer was in her mid-20s. Blogger won't embed, so just follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_vZyWXJ_4I

Concerto for Bayan, Percussion and Orchestra

There is an old joke that says that a gentleman is someone who could play the accordion, but chooses not to. Also said of the saxophone. But it is hard to think of anyone, other than Sofia Gubaidulina, who could write a very serious piece for accordion and orchestra. The piece is called Fachwerk (which refers to the old German architectural style where the wooden frame is visible) and it is written for the bayan, the very popular Russian folk instrument, a chromatic button accordion. One of Gubaidulina's core interests is Russian folk music and its instruments.

Houses in fachwerk style are very common in eastern Germany:

I saw a lot of them when I used to visit with my ex-wife's family in Saxony. I have been reading that Gubaidulina tends to create a formal framework for her pieces using numerical proportions such as are found in the Fibonacci sequence so the title might refer to some sort of framework like that underlying the piece.

Here is the piece, written in 2009:

This piece is rather more tranquil than most of her other music.