Sofia Gbaidurina, a composer of Tatar Russia, rebelled against Soviet doctrines with her openly religious music, and after decades of oppression, she moved west, stained with orchestra majors, died on Thursday at her home in Appen, Germany. She was 93 years old.
Carol Ann Chan of Boosie & Hawks, Gubaidurina's publisher, said the cause was cancer.
Gubaidulina (pronounced Goo-Bye-Doo-Lee-Na) wrote many works that have ingrained censorship at home and ingrained in biblical liturgical texts that have captivated Western audiences since the last decade of the Cold War. She is part of a group of important composers in the Soviet Union, including Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov.
She wanted to put her music in the service of religion in the literal sense of exploring the tension between humans and gods and repairing what she believed to be a broken bond between humans and gods. Using musical terminology, Gubaidurina often spoke about what her work brought to the “staccato of life,” a fragmented “legato, a sense of connected flow.
Soloists who performed her work, including violinists Gidon Kremer and Anne-Sofie Mutter, often spoke about the emotional strength that music requires. Conductors, including Valery Gergiev, Charles Dutoit and Kurt Masur, were strong supporters of her music.
Folk traditions also fascinated Gbaidrina, who believes Tatar's roots as a love for percussion and sparkling colors. She favored soft talk or bone-rich instruments such as the harp, 13-string Japanese, and double bass.
She gathered instruments from a variety of cultures and founded a group of performers. She later became interested in Japanese music and wrote compositions that utilized both Western and Japanese instruments.
Gubaidurina had a special affinity with Bayan, a Russian button accordion, at her folk wedding home rather than at concert halls. At the age of five, she fell into the spell of a patrol accordionist in the poor region of Kazan, the capital of the then Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Her improvisational dance to his music attracted the attention of neighbors and landed her at school for musically talented children.
A few years later, she wrote concert works including “De Profundis” and “Seven Words.” Bayan's parts range from expanding the sound palette, wheezing the rattle of death to blindly bright sound filaments. She exploited the expressive potential hidden between notebooks in the pulmonary action of the device bellows.
“Do you know why I love this monster so much?” she once asked, referring to Bayan. “Because I breathe.”
The audience replied. “De Profundis” performances often shed tears, Bayan Player Elsbeth Moser said in a 2018 interview for the obituary.
Gubaidurina turned to natural laws to establish shape in her compositions. She drew the mathematical Fibonacci series (the first two numbers are 0 and 1, and each number is the sum of the previous two) to determine the percentage of movement of the components of the work. She experimented with alternative tuning systems rooted in the natural overtone series, and considered the Western practice of splitting the octave into 12 equal steps as a violation of nature. Sometimes she had a group of instruments that had been adjusted away from the quartertone to evoke a spiritual dimension that was out of reach.
For Soviet critics, her microchromatic tuning was “irresponsible” and Astreia's improvisation was in the form of “holyganism.” Her dark sound palette and mystical breadth of music were against the coordinated optimism that Soviet officials liked. In 1979, Tikhon Krennikov, head of the powerful composers' union, blacklisted Gbaidurina.
Until the 1980s, Gubaidurina had barely witnessed her musical performances. She scored money writing for movies and comics. She was repeatedly denied permission to travel to festivals in Poland and Western.
KGB's careful eyes followed her. After her home was searched in 1974, she decided to speak with foreign visitors almost to the point of being blown away. At about the same time, she was attacked by an elevator in a Moscow building.
“He grabbed my throat and squeezed it slowly,” Gubaidurina later recalled her assailant. “My idea was a race. It's over – unfortunately, I can't write my Bassoon Concerto anymore – I'm not afraid of death, but I'm afraid of violence. Then I told him: 'Why so slowly?'” The attacker relented. At the police station, officers shrugged the attack as a “sex maniac” job.
Sofia Gbaidurina was born on October 24, 1931 in Chistopol, Tatar. Her father, Asgad Gbaidurin, was a Tatar geodetic engineer and the son of the Imam. Her mother, Fedosia Fyodorovna Elkhova, was a teacher and Russian.
At home, Sofia and her two sisters learned to play children's works on a baby grand piano, which occupies much of the family's living space. The girls also experimented with placing objects on piano strings and then drawing strange sounds. From there, in a world away from America, John Cage wrote the piano that he had written and prepared for his first sonata.
The sight of the farmer's Russian orthodox icon sparked Sofia's interest in religion, but in order to put her family at risk, she learned to internalize the spiritual side and blend it with music. Silence unfolded its own magic, particularly in research into a trip with his father, as the two passed through the forest along the stream.
Before enrolling at the Moscow Conservatory in 1954, Gubaidurina studied piano and composition at the Kazan Conservatory. Her teachers included Yuri Shaporin and Shostakovich's assistant Nikolai Peiko. In 1959, Peiko introduced the students to Shostakovic. After listening to Gubaidurina's music, Shostakovic told her: My wish for you is that you should continue on your own, in the wrong way. ”
Gubaidurina married geologist and poet Mark Leand in 1956. They worked together on the song cycle “Facelia,” and had their daughter Nadesda, who died of cancer in 2004. In the 1990s, Gbaidrina married Peter Meschhaninoff, a conductor and music theorist who passed away in 2006. She was survived by two grandchildren.
Gubaidulina's breakthrough came to a tomb beauty piece that accompanied her first violin concerto, “Offerthorium,” completed in 1980, and Bach skillfully decomposes and reconstructs “the royal themes” based on his “music offering.”
The Christian foundation of the work was the thorns on the side of Soviet censors. It didn't help that Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, who she wrote it, infuriated officials by overstaying approved trips to the West.
Eventually, her West German publisher, Sikorsky's version of Jurgen Köchel smuggled the scores, and “Offerthorium” premiered in 1981 at Wienerfestuchen in Austria. Orchestra's job, “Stimman…Versmanmen” (“Voice” became silent” diplomatic pouch.
“Offertorium” also introduced the music of many American listeners, Gubaidurina, when he programmed Kremer as a soloist in 1985.
In 1992, Gbaidulina moved to Germany and settled in the village of Appen, outside Hamburg. “John Passion for the 250th Anniversary of St. St. Bach's death,” including an invitation from Stuttgart, International Bach Academy.
That 90-minute piece is built almost entirely from minor intervals and sounds like a musical sigh. Reviewers call it “destined with claustrophobia.” Many critics also found that some of the lengths of Gbaidurina's works were over-length.
Conductor Joel Sachs, who invited him to visit New York in 1989, recalled being particularly assaulted by the 50-minute “perception”, “perception” and “perception” of the soprano, drummering a dialogue about art and creation using texts by the Austrian-born poet Francisco Tanzer. Like many of Gubaidulina's works, some of the discussion unfolds purely at the instrumental moment.
“It's really dramatic to assume that the West Cantata is,” Sachs said.
