Sofia Gubaidulina

[calimac]

I just came across the news that Sofia Gubaidulina died on Thursday, at the age of 93.

Here's the most extensive and explanatory piece about her music I've written, in a review of a San Francisco Symphony concert back in 2009:

Sofia Gubaidulina, 77 years old and the most senior of distinguished living women composers, her round face reflecting her Tatar ancestry, leaned forward in her chair and stared in an intense birdlike way at the interviewer posing wordy, vapid questions in a language the listener knows little of, then waited as the self-effacing translator (Laurel Fay, actually one of the most formidable American scholars of modern Russian music) rendered them into Russian, then replied in the same language for Fay to make English of it.

They were talking about Gubaidulina's The Light of the End, a recent orchestral composition that the SFS then performed under Kurt Masur. This is, the composer explained, a work about the conflict between the pure tones of just intonation, represented by the French horns, and the modern compromised system of equal temperament, represented by, I guess, the rest of the orchestra. The moments when the horns went on their way against other instruments produced an intense sub-intervalic dissonance very different from the boring old chromatic dissonances of your average modern composer. It had an almost spiritually cleansing effect, especially as it was used as punctuation, not a steady diet, and the whole thing was resolved into pure consonance at the conclusion, the "light of the end" of her title.

But that's Gubaidulina for you. Much of her music has a hushed, expectant quality. This piece was louder and more forceful than others of her works I know, but it played on that expectancy. And her mastery of the orchestra and capability for creating a distinctive voice were strongly evident. I "get" Gubaidulina in a sense that I don't get Carter, Dutilleux, or Kirchner (three living male composers older than she, all of whom I've suffered through in concert).

Gubaidulina expressed satisfaction that the light of her hard-won conclusion would be followed by Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, which she described as what comes afterwards when you get there.

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer]

I'd heard her name a few times, quite possibly from yourself. When I saw in the news that she'd passed, I decided to check her music out: a Viola Concerto, which, alas, did not do much for me. Has she composed something a little less (for lack of better words) abstract and angular?

[calimac]

I'm not sure if I can. Gubaidulina is a difficult composer, but a rewarding one, and I find I have better encounters with such composers in concert than on record.

But to give it a try in pieces I've heard played: Certainly the work I discussed here, The Light of the End, struck me as particularly effective. Or you could see if you can find Fairytale Poem, a piece she wrote for children's radio for the money (most Soviet composers, even more formidable ones than Gubaidulina, were forced to do that) and which is quite accessible, but which, unlike many such works by others, has the flavor of her honest music - though I wouldn't count on detecting it unless you're oriented on her work already.

[sturgeonslawyer]

Thank you. I am listening to "The Light of the End" right now. In a weird way it reminds me of Varèse, but that's a good thing, gives my braims a place to hang onto while I figure out what this music is about.