Sofia Gubaidulina Research Articles

Music, complexity, and embodiment in performance: a conversation with accordionist Andreas Borregaard

ABSTRACTAs part of the Copenhagen workshop of the Evaluating Methods of Aesthetic Inquiry Network, which took place from the 6th to 8th of April 2017, the organisers invited accordionist Andreas Borregaard to give a performance of two contemporary pieces for the accordion: De Profundis by Sofia Gubaidulina, and Sequenza XIII (chanson) by Luciano Berio. The performance was followed by a discussion on musical complexity and embodiment, chaired by Jonna Vuoskoski. The event was conceived along similar lines as the handling sessions at the Hunterian and Pitt Rivers Museums as a means of allowing the researchers involved in the network to engage with specific works of art and reflect collectively on the experience. It was also a way of continuing with the network’s commitment to furthering new thinking by fostering not only the dialogue between different academic disciplines, but also with art practitioners and performers. Finally, the performance was part of a series of discussions that took place on the first day of the Copenhagen workshop that were concerned with the notion of complexity and how it may be brought to bear on aesthetic issues. This article comprises a transcript of the post-performance discussion, as well as a response written by Roddy Hawkins.

Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No.4

This study examines Sofia Gubaidulina's exploration of traditional musical idioms in her String Quartet No.4. Together with influences of Baroque and Renaissance musical styles, the composer experiments with the accommodation of minimalist repetitive musical texture and the European tradition of ground bass, providing a different kind of musical synthesis. Gubaidulina also explores new possibilities in several musical and technical aspects. Unexpected timbres are created in the music, providing a unique sonic experience.

SOFIA GUBAIDULINA’S RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD – COMPOSITIONAL, TECHNICAL AND INTERPRETATIONAL FEATURES OF HER MUSIC

The paper presents the compositions De Profundis for solo accordion, Et Exspecto for solo accordion and In Croce for accordion and cello, by one of the today’s highly appreciated composers, Sofia Gubaidulina. De Profundis is the first work by Gubaidulina for solo accordion, composed in 1978. In this work, Gubaidulina changed the ordinary sound of the accordion that she encountered in the Russian folk music, so that the sound of the accordion acquired a brand new dimension. Et Exspecto is the composition written in 1985 and has five movements. The composer expresses herself through different techniques and effects: air release valve, fast passages, tremolos, moving and static clusters, clusters by a trembling hand with a vibrato effect, etc. In Croce is a composition written in 1979 for cello and organ dedicated to the cellist Vladimir Tonkha. Gubaidulina, together with the accordion professor and artist Elsbeth Moser, rearranged In Croce for cello and accordion in 1991. The composition rests on specific crisscrossing of melodic lines, and it creates a visual impression of a cross with the listeners.

Passion Music at the Turn of the XX and XXI Centuries, Part I: Sofia Gubaidulina and Wolfgang Rihm

JOANNA CIEŚLIK-KLAUZA, doktor nauk humanistycznych; teoretyk muzyki; absolwentka Akademii Muzycznej w Łodzi (1995); Studium Chormistrzowskiego przy Akademii Muzycznej im. F. Nowowiejskiego w Bydgoszczy (1999); Panstwowej Wyzszej Szkoly Filmowej Telewizyjnej i Teatralnej w Łodzi (2003); studiow menadzerskich na Wydziale Zarządzania Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego; adiunkt na Wydziale Instrumentalno-Pedagogicznym w Bialymstoku Uniwersytetu Muzycznego Fryderyka Chopina. Zajmuje sie teorią muzyki, a w szczegolności analizą dziela muzycznego w ujeciu interdyscyplinarnym oraz zagadnieniami dotyczącymi muzyki filmowej. Jest nauczycielem dyplomowanym przedmiotow teoretycznych w Zespole Szkol Muzycznych w Bialymstoku i Studium Wokalno-Aktorskim „Szkola Talentow” oraz zalozycielką Fundacji „Wychowanie przez sztuke”. Od 2005 roku organizuje cykl seminariow i warsztatow „Wychowanie przez sztuke”. W latach 1997-2010 związana byla z regionalnym ośrodkiem TVP S.A. (autorskie programy „Pro Musica” i „Rozmowy o muzyce”). Laureatka III Miedzynarodowego Przeglądu Filmow Turystycznych i Turystyczno-Gospodarczych TOUR-Film 2000 w Poznaniu (za film Dziewicza Biebrza). Publikowala w czasopismach (m.in. „Ruch muzyczny”, „Twoja muza”), na lamach wydawnictw uniwersyteckich: m.in. UMFC, UAM, UZ, URz, periodykow pedagogicznych oraz czasopism muzycznych.

Szukając tożsamości na styku kultur. "Pasja wg św. Jana" Sofii Gubajduliny

Szukając tożsamości na styku kultur. "Pasja wg św. Jana" Sofii Gubajduliny

The Parameter Complex in the Music of Sofia Gubaidulina

Although the music of Sofia Gubaidulina is well known, it has received little analytical attention. Approximately twenty-five years ago her friend and colleague Valentina Kholopova worked out a system for analyzing Gubaidulina’s music. Kholopova shows that the composer usually groups together five so-called expression parameters (EP): articulation and methods of sound production, melody, rhythm, texture, and compositional writing. Moreover, each EP has either a consonant or a dissonant function; rarely does Gubaidulina mix the two functions. These ten parameters—five EPs functioning as either dissonant or consonant expressions—form what Kholopova calls the Parameter Complex in Gubaidulina’s music. In this article I examine these topics, using Gubaidulina’s Concordanza and Ten Preludes for Solo Cello as exemplars.

BBC PROMS 2013: Matthias Pintscher and Sofia Gubaidulina

Matthias Pintscher was granted the sixth Roche Commissions award in 2012, when Sofia Gubaidulina had to withdraw at short notice. Pintscher's Roche commission, Chute d’étoiles, coincidentally received its London premiere within a few days of the UK premiere of Gubaidulina's The Rider on the White Horse. Roche deserve the thanks of the music world for their initiative, running since 2004 but hardly suffering from over-exposure. Their choice of composers has been good: Birtwistle, Benjamin, Hosokawa – and Unsuk Chin slated for 2014. The link with the Lucerne Festival and Cleveland Orchestra (which gave the world and US premieres of the Pintscher piece) is also marvellously helpful. While it's debatable whether luminaries like Sir Harrison need the exposure, the focus on the now-coming-to-major-prominence generation (Chin was born in 1961, Pintscher 10 years later) is welcome.

From Peace to Freedom: How Classical Music Became Political in the Soviet Union, 1964−1982

The article analyzes the term "freedom" as an important concept in the history of Cold War music. This contested notion existed along two major axes of the prewar era: socialism versus liberalism and social freedom versus autonomy. These neat divisions between East and West began to unravel after 1953 when the different sides started to interact and reference each other. In presenting a case study of the "Moscow Troika" (a group of composers consisting of Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, and Sofia Gubaidulina), this essay highlights the importance of communication and contact among individuals and groups in establishing notions of "freedom." Концепция "свободы" в настоящей статье рассматривается в контексте процессов в советской музыкальной среде времен холодной войны. Понятие "свободы" в политическом пространстве наделялось смыслом в рамках двух важнейших дихотомий: социализм и либерализм, социальная свобода и личная автономия. Географически эти полюса распределялись между "Востоком" и "Западом". Но с 1953 г., когда между противостоящими сторонами началось сотрудничество и вырос взаимный интерес, бинарное восприятие "свободы" усложнилось. Обращаясь к феномену "московской тройки" (группа композиторов вокруг Альфреда Шнитке, Эдисона Денисова и Софии Губайдуллиной), автор настоящей статьи вскрывает важность общения и контактов между индивидуумами и группами в определении понимания "свободы".

Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers (review)

Reviewed by: Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers Péter Laki Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers. By Bálint András Varga. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011. [xiv, 333p. ISBN 9781580463799. $49.95.] Illustrations, index. Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers has been almost thirty years in the making. The author, Bálint András Varga, spent his entire career promoting the music of contemporary composers, first at Editio Musica Budapest, and later at Universal in Vienna. His work brought him into contact with many of the most prominent composers of the last half-century. Although not a trained musicologist, his devotion to music, his keen ear and intelligence, as well as his flawless command of the English language have made him one of the most sensitive and successful advocates for new music in recent times. His book-length conversations with Witold Lutosławski, Luciano Berio, Iannis Xenakis and György Kurtág (Witold Lutosławski [London: Chester Music, 1976]; Luciano Berio: Two Interviews [London: Boyars, 1985]; Conversations with Iannis Xenakis [London: Faber & Faber, 1996]; György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages [Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009]) are models of insight and empathy. The present project— putting the same three questions to as many composers as possible—has occupied him since the early 1980s, and the first version of the volume under review was published in Hungarian exactly a quarter of a century ago. At that time, 82 composers were included; in the American edition, [End Page 797] Varga eliminated 21 of these and added 4 new ones, arriving at a new total of 65. Prior to the publication of the book’s new incarnation, Varga gave his interviewees a chance to revise or update their answers, and quite a few of them availed themselves of the opportunity. The result is a fascinating panorama of many issues central to music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and a testament to the wide range of aesthetic positions held by composers today. (György Kurtág’s answers to the three questions were already included in the Kurtág interview book referenced above.) The questions have to do, respectively, with any particular pieces of music that changed the composers’ creative lives; their responsiveness to sounds of the everyday environment; and their views on personal style versus self-repetition. They are excellent questions, sufficiently focused to give the book its thematic unity, yet broad enough to allow the composers to discuss their music on their own terms. The answers vary widely not only in their content but also in their length and depth. Some composers provided very brief, one-paragraph responses while others contributed many pages. Some, with whom Varga has enjoyed a closer professional contact, are obviously more comfortable with the interviewer than others. The author describes his connections to the composers in introductory paragraphs inserted before each interview; here we may learn how the meetings came about. Varga also offers thumbnail sketches of his impressions of composers’ personalities, freely admitting if he was unable to get close to a certain composer, either personally or musically. Out of the 65 composers, 10 are from Varga’s native Hungary, and 10 from the United States; the remaining 45 represent 14 more countries. There is only one woman—Sofia Gubaidulina—among the 65. A full 40%, or 26 composers, have passed away since the interviews were made, which gives the volume a certain retrospective character. (Milton Babbitt and Emil Petrovics died since the book was published.) Chronologically, the interviewees represent the entire span of the twentieth and the early twenty-first century: the oldest composer in the volume is Wladimir Vogel, born in 1896; the youngest, Johannes Maria Staud, born in 1974. In general, Varga managed to make contact with the majority of the defining figures of Western music since 1945. As one might expect, there is a great deal of important biographical material here, and, when Varga was able to establish a personal relationship with the composers, quite a few revealing anecdotes. The composers’ philosophical and aesthetic ideas are no less interesting, but what makes the book really unique is the...

The Little Man and the Masses: The Politics of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings

The Little Man and the Masses: The Politics of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings

Gubaidulina, misunderstood

Since the early 1980s Sofia Gubaidulina has received numerous accolades, and her music has been performed and recorded worldwide. However, the critics' reaction to her works has often been resoundly negative. In particular, Western critics have been baffled by Gubaidulina?s penchant for long durations, the employment of seemingly literal musical symbolism verging on kitch and, last but not least, the composer?s religious fervour. Starting from the reviews of two ambitious events that served as introductions of Gubaidulina?s music to British audiences, I will discuss the main objections directed towards her oeuvre and demonstrate that Gubaidulina?s idiosyncratic compositional method has been misunderstood by British critics.

The Little Man and the Masses: Expression, Form and Politics in Sofia Gubaidulina’s Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings<

The Little Man and the Masses: Expression, Form and Politics in Sofia Gubaidulina’s Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings<

Towards a twenty-first century feminist politics of music

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music. By Sally Macarthur. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 210 pp. Driven by author's desire to reinvigorate feminist musicology using Deleuzian philosophical tools, this book promotes productive power of thought, or what Deleuze terms the virtual. Sally Macarthur is more interested in what women's music might become than in what it currently is, and she strives throughout to consider future open and unbounded by standards and norms of present. The current volume considers complex networks of composition, performance, consumption, academic discourse, and pedagogy that compose field of music. Though some readers may initially be perturbed to find that Macarthur leaves definition of music ambiguous, it gradually becomes clear that her decision to do so is aligned with her politicized philosophy. A definition of music would restrict possibilities of what it could become, enclosing it in repetitive patterns of past and hindering our ability to think in in-between spaces of old and new (4). Macarthur's Deleuzian theoretical model introduces productive questions that undercut hierarchical and propel explorations of music into unknown. Macarthur's multifaceted approach to music is particularly relevant to musicologists and composers working within academic institution, but it is also more generally of interest to feminists writing and teaching in humanities. Each of Macarthur's six chapters accesses themes of music and feminist musicology in different ways. Specifically, in first four chapters, she considers usefulness of empirical research in feminist scholarship, concepts of author and work implemented in musicological writing, trends in discourse and economic power structures of music marketing, and history of feminisms in musicology. In remaining two chapters, Macarthur exemplifies usefulness of Deleuzian questions and concepts developed in preceding pages, taking pieces by Sofia Gubaidulina, Elena Kats-Chernin, and Anne Boyd case studies. She also considers research undertaken by two students: Katharine Nelligan, a composer interested in electronic dance music, and Danielle Bentley, a PhD student who investigates issues surrounding music's tendency to alienate audiences. Throughout these discussions, Macarthur strives to think outside discourses she perceives hindering current musicological endeavors, and she remains overtly critical of positivism, narrative knowledge, totalizing dualities, and neoromantic conception of author. While validating her focus on future--on imminence rather than transcendence--Macarthur attempts to avoid repetitive master narratives that she views governing Western musical and in doing so challenges readers to rethink how they write about and teach music. As a vehemently political and functional book, Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music contributes to a growing body of Deleuzian writing on music and introduces feminists to a variety of tools that can help us productively engage continual becoming of music. (1) In her review of statistical data originally presented in empirical studies on state of women in music, Macarthur surmises that these positivist efforts ultimately prove what is already self-evident: Women's music barely signifies on concert platforms (30). (2) Although these studies advocate expansion of women's role in musical production by providing concise numerical information and using statistics as tools of persuasion to activate change (27), she concludes that this established research model ultimately produces thinking which forecloses thought (33). Rather than using quantitative research to illustrate negative difference between polarized categories (women/men, minority/majority, inferior/superior), Macarthur asks us to focus on ways that women's music opens up a transformative potential capable of destabilizing dominant mode of musical production. …

The Importance of Bodily Gesture in Sofia Gubaidulina’s Music for Low Strings

The role of the body in musical performance has recently received quite a lot of study. In most cases, the gesture is seen as subservient to the sound it creates: this is also the case in linguistic studies of gesture—the gesture usually “accompanies” the speech act, placing the visual second to the aural. Instrumental music in the twentieth century has seen an increase in the importance of the body in performance. Many works incorporate (either directly or indirectly) an element of theatricality in addition to the purely sonic content. Sofia Gubaidulina is one of many composers whose music features an increased attention to the body. In some passages of her compositions, practical bodily gestures—those movements of the body that are concerned with producing sound from one’s instrument—are actually more important to the work than the resulting sounds. In this paper, I examine some of these passages with a particular focus on Gubaidulina’s writing for cello and double bass. The first part of the paper offers a brief overview of gestural studies in music and linguistics in an effort to develop some terminology for use in the analyses. The second part of the paper provides examples of gestural symbolism in a number of Gubaidulina’s works for low strings. The final part of my paper examines Gubaidulina’s silent works—those in which gestures are prescribed but no sound results—and offers some directions for further study.

Sofia Gubaidulina: A Biography. By Michael Kurtz. Trans. by Christoph K. Lohmann and ed. by Malcolm Hamrick Brown.

Sofia Gubaidulina: A Biography. By Michael Kurtz. Trans. by Christoph K. Lohmann and ed. by Malcolm Hamrick Brown.

Sofia Gubaidulina: A Biography (review)

Sofia Gubaidulina: A Biography. By Michael Kurtz. (Russian Music Studies.) First English edition, revised and expanded. Edited by Malcolm Hamrick Brown, translated by Christoph K. Lohmann. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. [xviii, 335 p. ISBN-13: 9780253349071. $39.95.] Illustrations, bibliographical references, index, list of works. Indiana University Press's Russian Music Studies series, founded by Malcolm H. Brown, continues to do an important and unique service in America by publishing translations of significant texts on Russian music, both new and old (the only contemporary equivalent is Ernst Kuhn's series Studia slavica musicologica in Germany). The English translation of Michael Kurtz's biography of Sofia Gubaidulina, originally published in German in 2001, is one of the most recent of these (Michael Kurtz, Sofia Gubaidulina: Eine Biografie [Stutt gart: Urachhaus, 2001]). This version of Kurtz's biography provides a useful, readable introduction to Gubaidulina's life, especially for those without knowledge of either Russian or German, and helps establish a good basis for future study of the composer. However, though an important-even indispensable-document for those wishing to learn more about Gubaidulina's life, times, and music, Kurtz's biography is not without its own limitations, chief among them its lack of critical engagement with of the topics he raises and his insufficient scholarly apparatus. Furthermore, Kurtz does not treat Gubaidulina's music in any detail, providing only capsule descriptions for most pieces (there are no music examples in the book save for a page from Vivente non vivente). The virtues and problems of Kurtz's biography both stem from the fact that, as he notes in the introduction, Gubaidulina authorized this biography and read the entire manuscript (p. xviii). Not surprisingly, throughout there is an absence of objective perspective on Gubaidulina. As Nigel Osborne remarked of Kurtz's earlier, generally well-received biography of Karlheinz Stockhausen, It is less a critical biography, than a partisan appraisal (Nigel Osborne, review of Michael Kurtz, Stockhausen: Eine Biographie [Kassel: Barenreiter, 1988], Tempo no. 171 [December 1989]: 38; the book was later published in English as Stock hausen: a biography, trans. Richard Toop [London: Faber, 1992]). That being said, Gubaidulina was Kurtz's primary source for the book, and her imprimatur doubtless proved crucial for facilitating the countless interviews Kurtz conducted with her family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances that form his most important layer of evidence. Kurtz tirelessly tracked down seemingly every major figure (and minor ones as well) associated with the composer, both in Russia and other republics from the former Soviet Union as well as in Europe, the United States, and Japan (as someone who has done his own share of interviewing in the former USSR, I can imagine how difficult this was logistically, financially, and intellectually). The results are invaluable for the light they shed on Gubaidulina's personality, creative process, and the compositional history and reception of specific works. Particularly illuminating are those reminiscences that reveal Gubaidulina's personal and creative determination, . . . strength, and . . . calmness in poet Gennadiy Aygi's words (p. 100; see also Mark Liando's remarks on p. 30, Valentina Kholopova's on p. 46, and Kalevi Aho's on pp. 181-82). Interesting too are details about Gubaidulina's brushes with the KGB because of her second husband Kolya (Nikolai) Bokov's samizdat activities (pp. 107-09, 62-63, 68, and 88), and her self-proclaimed Party loyalist father's poignant rejection of her music after Tikhon Khrennikov denounced it in 1979 (pp. 145-46). Most of Kurtz's interviews are cited properly (with date and interview location), yet only once in his entire endnotes (p. 296, chapter 2, note 10) does he directly refer to one of his many conversations with Gubaidulina that reportedly took place between 1990 and the present translation, although in this specific case no date is given (Kurtz discusses his interviews with Gubaidulina for the book on p. …

The birth of contemporary Russia out of the spirit of Russian music

In this article, the author observes and discusses the effects of Russian history on Russian music in the second half of the XXth century. Forming part of author?s long-range persistent polemics against Russian exceptionalism and against the kind of romantic overvaluation of art, the article expresses sharp and provocative views of the main stylistic tendencies in Soviet and Russian music during and after the epoch of the Cold War, as well as after the Second Russian Revolution in 1991. Special attention is paid to the activity and works of the most prominent Russian composers of their time Andrey Volkonsky, Edison Denisov, Nikolai Keretnikov, Arvo P?rt, Elena Frisova, Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke.

Laus deo? On composers' expression of their spirituality

We might assume that composers of previous epochs were deeply religious people - but have we any proof of that? On the other hand the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise and rise of the overtly spiritual composer. Postmodern composers after Messaien seem to wear their spirituality on their sleeves. It becomes for them a readily expressed identification tag - a label, for all to see. But is it for real, and can audiences today really empathize with the spiritual in a composer's music or are they only bewitched by the seductive texture, the return of consonance, the almost-singable tune? The reputations of John Taverner, Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Part, James MacMillan et al. have been built on such as this. Where God is in the midst of such composers, what are the common threads that bind them and how do they understand the nature of their inspiration? Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Andrey Volkonsky and the Beginnings of Unofficial Music in the Soviet Union

AbstractThis article examines the compositional history and early reception of Soviet composer Andrey Volkonsky's two earliest and most important serial compositions, Musica Stricta and Suite of Mirrors (Syuita zerkal). These two works spurred on the formation of an unofficial music culture in the Soviet Union during the Thaw of the late 1950s and 1960s. Volkonsky (b. 1933) was the first and initially the most visible of a group of young Soviets known by officialdom as the “young composers” (“molodïïye kompozitorïï”). These “young composers”—among them Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, and Edison Denisov—came of age in the years following Stalin's death in 1953. Their compositions reflected their attempts to “catch up” with the Western avant-garde following decades of musical development that had been denied them under Stalin. The first “new” technique these composers adopted was serialism, and Volkonsky's early compositions illustrate the specifically Soviet approach to the method and demonstrate the meanings it held for Soviet officials and Soviet audiences. Volkonsky's early works also force a broadening of current interpretations of postwar European and American serialism. Much of the information in the article stems from personal interviews with Volkonsky and the other leading composers and performers of the Thaw, as well as archival research conducted in Russia.

London, Royal Albert Hall Proms 2002: Sofia Gubaidulina's ‘St John Passion and Resurrection’

Although Sofia Gubaidulina has been an avowedly religious composer throughout almost all her long career, her Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ according to St John, which received its UK première at the Proms on …August, is distinguished among her recent works in that it is not simply a work with a religious inspiration but an act of worship (despite the Russian Orthodox church's ban on instruments in its services).