Sofia Gubaidulina facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Sofia Gubaidulina
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Gubaidulina in Sortavala, 1981
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| Born | 24 October 1931 Chistopol, Tatar ASSR, Russian SFSR, USSR
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| Died | 13 March 2025 (aged 93) |
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Notable work
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Sofia Gubaidulina (born October 24, 1931 – died March 13, 2025) was a famous composer from the Soviet Union and Russia. Many big orchestras around the world asked her to write music and performed her pieces. She is known as one of the most important Russian composers from the second half of the 1900s.
Contents
About Sofia Gubaidulina
Sofia Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol, a city in what was then the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Her family had a mix of backgrounds: her father was a Volga Tatar and her mother was Russian. Her dad, Asgat Masgudovich Gubaidulin, was an engineer, and her mom, Fedosiya Fyodorovna, was a teacher.
Sofia started learning music when she was just 5 years old. She quickly became very interested in how to create music. While studying at a children's music school, she also became interested in spiritual ideas. She found these ideas in the music of famous composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.
At that time, the Soviet Union was not friendly towards religion. So, Sofia had to keep her spiritual interests a secret from her parents and other adults. These early experiences taught her that music and spiritual ideas were very similar. This is why she later tried to write music that showed and explored spiritual concepts.
Sofia Gubaidulina passed away on March 13, 2025, when she was 93 years old.
Her Musical Journey
Sofia Gubaidulina studied music composition and piano at the Kazan Conservatory. She finished her studies there in 1954. When she was first at the conservatory, modern Western music was mostly not allowed to be studied. Only a few composers, like Bartók, were exceptions.
Sometimes, school officials would even search dorm rooms for forbidden music scores, especially those by Stravinsky. But Sofia and her friends still found ways to get and study these modern Western pieces. She said, "We knew Ives, Cage, we actually knew everything on the sly."
After Kazan, she continued her studies in Moscow at the Conservatory until 1963. Her music was sometimes called "irresponsible" because she explored different ways of tuning instruments. However, a very famous composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, supported her. He told her to keep going with her unique style, even though others disagreed.
She was also allowed to use her modern style in music she wrote for documentary films. One of these was a 1963 film called On Submarine Scooters. She also wrote the music for the well-known Russian cartoon "Adventures of Mowgli", which was based on Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.
In the mid-1970s, Sofia started a group called Astreja. This group used folk instruments to improvise music. In 1979, she was among a group of composers who were criticized for writing "noisy mud instead of musical innovation."
Sofia Gubaidulina became more famous around the world in the early 1980s. This happened when violinist Gidon Kremer started playing her violin concerto Offertorium. She became internationally famous in the late 1980s.
She later wrote a piece as a tribute to the poet T. S. Eliot, using words from his poem Four Quartets. In 2000, she was asked to write a piece for a project celebrating Johann Sebastian Bach. Her piece was called the Johannes-Passion. She followed this with Johannes-Ostern in 2002. These two works together are her biggest pieces so far.
Since 1992, Sofia Gubaidulina has lived in Hamburg, Germany. She is a member of several important music academies.
Her Musical Ideas
For Sofia Gubaidulina, music was a way to escape the difficult political situation in Soviet Russia. Because of this, she connected music with human freedom and a deep spiritual feeling. She believed that people have a longing inside them to find their true selves, and she tried to capture this feeling in her music.
These spiritual ideas appear in her music in different ways. For example, in her piece "Seven Words," she wrote bowing instructions for the cello that make the player draw a cross shape. Sofia Gubaidulina was a very religious person and a member of the Russian Orthodox church.
She was also influenced by electronic music and improvisation (making music up on the spot). This led her to combine unusual instruments. She used traditional Russian folk instruments in her solo and chamber music, like the bayan (a type of accordion). She also used the koto, a Japanese instrument, in her piece In the Shadow of the Tree. In this piece, one musician plays three different kotos. Her piece The Canticle of the Sun is for cello and choir, and it uses the lowest sounds possible on the cello.
Sofia Gubaidulina loved percussion instruments. She felt that the unclear sounds of percussion connected to a mystical longing and human freedom. She explained that percussion instruments have a "cloud" of sound around them that you can't quite understand. She said, "They enter into that layer of our consciousness which is not logical, they are at the boundary between the conscious and the subconscious."
She also liked to try new ways of making sounds and combining instruments. For example, she wrote a concerto for bassoon and low strings, and a piece for organ and percussion.
Sofia Gubaidulina felt a strong connection to the composers J. S. Bach and Anton Webern. She was also influenced by thinkers like Carl Jung (who studied the human mind) and Nikolai Berdyaev (a Russian philosopher).
Her Musical Style
Sofia Gubaidulina was a very spiritual person. She saw "religion" as "re-ligio," which means "re-connecting" or putting life back together. She believed that music's most important job is to help us reconnect with something greater than ourselves. She found this connection through creating art.
She developed special musical symbols to show her ideas. She did this by using specific distances between notes and rhythms. She also tried to find the deep, mysterious side of sound. On a larger scale, she carefully planned the overall shape of her musical pieces.
Her music often uses unusual combinations of instruments. For example, her piece In Erwartung combines a saxophone quartet with many different percussion instruments.
In her melodies, Sofia Gubaidulina often uses short, intense groups of notes instead of long, flowing tunes. She often thought of musical space as a way to connect with God. She showed this by using very small steps between notes, like quarter tones, and sliding between notes (glissandi). This showed that there are no "steps" to reach the divine. She also used strong contrasts between chromatic (many different notes) and diatonic (notes from a scale) sounds. She saw these as symbols of darkness versus light, or human versus divine.
Another important melodic technique she used was harmonics. These are special high, clear sounds on string instruments. When talking about her piece Rejoice!, she explained that the ability to make different high sounds from the same spot on a string can feel like moving to a different level of existence. She said, "And that is joy."
In terms of harmony, her music usually does not have traditional main notes or simple chords. Instead, she uses groups of notes played close together (clusters) and patterns of intervals (distances between notes). For example, in her Cello Concerto Detto-2, she used intervals that started wide and then became narrower.
For rhythm, Sofia Gubaidulina believed that the timing of a piece should shape its overall form, not just small parts. She often used the Fibonacci sequence to create the timing for her compositions. In this sequence, each number is the sum of the two numbers before it (like 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on). She felt this pattern showed a balance in nature. She would mark the "golden ratio" points in her music with special musical events.
One of her first pieces to use this idea was Perceptions (1981). In one part, the number of quarter notes in different sections matches numbers from the Fibonacci sequence. She also used other similar number patterns, like the Lucas Series. She even called it "a game!"
A friend and colleague, Valentina Kholopova, explained Sofia's form techniques in detail. She described "expression parameters" like how notes are played (articulation), melody, rhythm, and texture. These parameters can range from smooth (consonant) to rough (dissonant). For example, a smooth articulation might be legato, and a rough one might be staccato.
Piano Music
All of Sofia Gubaidulina's piano music was written earlier in her career. It includes pieces like Chaconne (1962), Piano Sonata (1965), and Musical Toys (1968). Some of these titles show her interest in older music styles, like those from the baroque period, and the influence of J. S. Bach.
Her Piano Sonata is dedicated to a pianist named Henrietta Mirvis. This piece has three movements, like a classical sonata. It uses four main musical ideas throughout the whole piece, which she called "spring," "struggle," "consolation," and "faith."
The first movement has two main parts: a "swing" theme with a bouncy rhythm, and a chord pattern. The second movement is more calm. In the middle of this movement, the pianist can improvise within a set framework. This allows for a deeper exploration of the sounds.
The third movement feels like a release of energy that built up in the earlier parts. Sofia Gubaidulina saw the structure of the sonata as representing a cross. The first movement is like the "horizontal" line, showing human experience. The second movement is like the "vertical" line, showing a person's desire to connect with the Divine. The point where these lines meet in the music is at the end of the second movement, showing a transformation. The third movement "celebrates the newly obtained freedom of the spirit."
The Steinway grand piano she had in her home was a gift from the famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.
Awards and Recognition
Sofia Gubaidulina received many awards and honors for her music throughout her life. Some of these include:
- Prix de Monaco (1987)
- Premio Franco Abbiati (1991)
- Russian State Prize (1992)
- Praemium Imperiale in Japan (1998)
- Léonie Sonning Music Prize in Denmark (1999)
- Polar Music Prize in Sweden (2002)
- Great Distinguished Service Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2002)
- Bach Prize of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (2007)
In 2001, she became an honorary professor at the Kazan Conservatory. In 2005, she was chosen as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She also received honorary degrees from Yale University in 2009 and the University of Chicago in 2011.
In 2013, she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale for her music. In 2016, she won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the contemporary music category. The judges praised her "outstanding musical and personal qualities" and the "spiritual quality" of her work.
In 2017, she received another honorary doctor of music degree from the New England Conservatory.
Her 90th birthday in October 2021 was celebrated by the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, who released three of her pieces. She was also celebrated with a week of chamber and orchestral music. In November, she was featured as Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3.
Memberships
Sofia Gubaidulina was a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
Works
Orchestral Music
- Fairytale Poem for orchestra (1971)
- Revue Music for symphony orchestra and jazz band (1976)
- Te Salutant, capriccio for large orchestra (1978)
- Stimmen... Verstummen... symphony in twelve movements (1986)
- Pro et Contra for large orchestra (1989)
- The Unasked Answer (Antwort ohne Frage) collage for three orchestras (1989)
- Stufen for orchestra and 7 reciters (1992)
- Figures of Time (Фигуры времени) for large orchestra (1994)
- The Rider on the White Horse for large orchestra and organ (2002)
- The Light of the End (Свет конца) for large orchestra (2003)
- Feast During a Plague for large orchestra (2006)
- Der Zorn Gottes for orchestra (2020)
Concertos (Music for Solo Instrument and Orchestra)
- Detto II for cello and ensemble (1972)
- Concerto for bassoon and low strings (1975)
- Introitus concerto for piano and chamber orchestra (1978)
- Offertorium (Жертвоприношение) concerto for violin and orchestra (1980)
- Sieben Worte for cello, bayan, and strings (1982)
- And: The Feast is in Full Procession (И: Празднество в разгаре) for cello and orchestra (1993)
- Music for Flute, Strings, and Percussion (1994)
- Impromptu for flute, violin, and strings (1996)
- Concerto for viola and orchestra (1996)
- The Canticle of the Sun of St Francis of Assisi for cello, chamber choir and percussion (1997)
- Two Paths: A Dedication to Mary and Martha for two viola solo and orchestra (1998)
- Im Schatten des Baumes (В тени под деревом) for koto, bass koto, zheng, and orchestra (1998)
- Under the Sign of Scorpio for bayan and large orchestra (2003)
- ...The Deceitful Face of Hope and Despair for flute and orchestra (2005)
- In Tempus Praesens, concerto for violin and orchestra (2007)
- Glorious Percussion, concerto for percussion and orchestra (2008)
- Fachwerk, concerto for bayan, percussion and strings (2009)
- Warum? for flute, clarinet and string orchestra (2014)
- Concerto for violin, cello and bayan (2017)
- Dialog: Ich und Du, concerto for violin and orchestra (2018)
Vocal and Choral Music
- Phacelia, vocal cycle for soprano and orchestra (1956)
- Night in Memphis, cantata for mezzo-soprano, orchestra and male choir (1968)
- Rubaijat, cantata for baryton and chamber ensemble (1969)
- Roses for soprano and piano (1972)
- Counting Rhymes for voice and piano (1973)
- Hour of the Soul for large wind orchestra and mezzo-soprano/contralto (1974)
- Laudatio Pacis, oratorio for singers, choirs and orchestra (1975)
- Perception for speaking voices and 7 string instruments (1981)
- Hommage à Marina Tsvetayeva for choir (1984)
- Letter to the Poetess Rimma Dalo for soprano and cello (1985)
- Ein Walzerpass nach Johann Strauss for soprano and octet (1987)
- Hommage à T.S. Eliot for soprano and octet (1987)
- Two Songs on German Folk Poetry for mezzo-soprano, flute, harpsichord and cello (1988)
- Jauchzt vor Gott for mixed choir and organ (1989)
- Alleluja for mixed chorus, boy soprano, organ and large orchestra (1990)
- Aus dem Stundenbuch for cello, orchestra, male choir, and a woman speaker (1991)
- Lauda for singers, narrator, mixed choir, and large orchestra (1991)
- Jetzt immer Schnee (Теперь всегда снега) for chamber ensemble and chamber choir (1993)
- Ein Engel for contralto and double bass (1994)
- Aus den Visionen der Hildegard von Bingen for contralto (1994)
- Galgenlieder à 3 fifteen pieces for mezzo-soprano, percussion, and contrabass (1996)
- Galgenlieder à 5 fourteen pieces for mezzo-soprano, flute, percussion, bayan, and contrabass (1996)
- Sonnengesang, St. Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Sun for violoncello, mixed choir and percussion (1997)
- Johannes-Passion for singers, two mixed choirs, organ, and large orchestra (2000)
- Johannes-Ostern for singers, two mixed choirs, organ, and large orchestra (2001)
- O Komm, Heiliger Geist for soprano, bass, mixed choir and orchestra (2015)
- Über Liebe und Hass for singers, two mixed choirs and orchestra (2015)
Solo Instrumental Music
- Serenade for guitar (1960)
- Chaconne for piano (1963)
- Piano Sonata (1965)
- Toccata for guitar (1969)
- Musical Toys fourteen piano pieces for children (1969)
- Toccata-Troncata for piano (1971)
- Ten Preludes for cello (1974)
- Invention for piano (1974)
- Hell und Dunkel for organ (1976)
- Sonatina for flute (1978)
- De Profundis for bayan (1978)
- Et Exspecto, sonata for bayan (1986)
- Ritorno perpetuo for harpsichord (1997)
- Cadenza for bayan (2003)
Chamber and Ensemble Music
- Quintet for piano, two violins, viola, and cello (1957)
- Allegro Rustico for flute and piano (1963)
- Five Etudes for harp, double bass and percussion (1965)
- Pantomime for double bass and piano (1966)
- Vivente – Non Vivente for electronics (1970)
- Concordanza for chamber ensemble (1971)
- String Quartet No. 1 (1971)
- Music for Harpsichord and Percussion Instruments (1971)
- Rumore e silenzio for percussion and harpsichord (1974)
- Quattro for two trumpets and two trombones (1974)
- Sonata for double bass and piano (1975)
- Two Ballads for two trumpets and piano (1976)
- Dots, Lines and Zigzag for bass clarinet and piano (1976)
- Trio for three trumpets (1976)
- Lied ohne Worte (Songs without words) for trumpet and piano (1977)
- On Tatar Folk Themes for domra and piano (1977)
- Duo sonata for two bassoons (1977)
- Lamento for tuba and piano (1977)
- Misterioso for 7 percussionists (1977)
- Quartet for four flutes (1977)
- Detto I, sonata for organ and percussion (1978)
- Sounds of the Forest for flute and piano (1978)
- Two Pieces for horn and piano (1979)
- In Croce for cello and organ (1979), or for bayan and cello (1991)
- Jubilatio for 4 percussionists (1979)
- Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten for flute, viola, harp and narrator (1980)
- Descensio for 3 trombones, 3 percussionists, harp, harpsichord and piano (1981)
- Rejoice!, sonata for violin and cello (1981)
- Swan, Crab and Pike, march for brass ensemble and percussion (1982)
- In the Beginning There was Rhythm for seven percussionists (1984)
- Quasi hoquetus for viola, bassoon, and piano (1984)
- String Quartet No. 2 (1987)
- String Quartet No. 3 (1987)
- String Trio (1988)
- Ein Walzerpass nach Johann Strauss for piano and string quintet (1989)
- Hörst Du uns, Luigi? Schau mal, welchen Tanz eine einfache Holzrassel für Dich vollführt for six percussionists (1991)
- Gerade und ungerade (Чет и нечет) for seven percussionists (1991)
- Silenzio for bayan, violin, and cello (1991)
- Tartarische Tanz for bayan and two contrabass (1992)
- Dancer on a Tightrope (Der Seiltänzer) for violin and string piano (1993)
- Meditation über den Bach-Choral "Vor deinen Thron tret' ich hiermit" for harpsichord, two violins, viola, cello, and contrabass (1993)
- ... Early in the Morning, Right before Waking ... for Japanese bass kotos and tenor kotos (1993)
- String Quartet No. 4 (a triple quartet for quartet, two taped quartets and ad libitum colored lights) (1993)
- In Erwartung (В ожидании) for saxophone quartet and six percussionists (1994)
- Quaternion for cello quartet (1996)
- Risonanza for three trumpets, four trombones, organ, and six strings (2001)
- Reflections on the theme B–A–C–H for string quartet (2002)
- Mirage: The Dancing Sun for eight violoncelli (2002)
- On the Edge of Abyss for seven violoncelli and two waterphones (2002)
- Verwandlung (Transformation) for trombone, saxophone quartet, cello, double bass, and tam-tam (2005)
- The Lyre of Orpheus for violin, percussion, and strings (2006)
- Ravvedimento for cello and quartet of guitars (2007)
- Sotto voce, for viola, double-bass and two guitars (2010/2013)
- Labyrinth, for 12 celli (2011)
- So sei es, for violin, double-bass, piano, and percussion (2013)
- Pilgrims for violin, double bass, piano and two percussionists (2014)
- Einfaches Gebet, Low Mass for narrator, two celli, double bass, piano and two percussionists (2016)
Film Music
Sofia Gubaidulina considered these four film scores to be her most important:
- The Circus Tent (1981)
- Veliki Samoyed (1981)
- The University Chair (1982)
- The Scarecrow (1984)
Other film works include:
- Adventures of Mowgli (1967–1971)
- The Kreutzer Sonata (1987)
- The Cat Who Walked by Herself (1988)
Images for kids
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Gubaidulina in Sortavala, 1981
See also
In Spanish: Sofiya Gubaidúlina para niños
