Sofia Gubaidulina
Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina (Russian: Софи́я Асгáтовна Губaйду́лина ⓘ, Tatar: София Әсгать кызы Гобәйдуллина;[1] born 24 October 1931) is a Soviet-Russian composer and an established international figure. Major orchestras around the world have commissioned and performed her works.[2] She is considered one of the foremost Russian composers of the second half of the 20th century.[3]
Family[edit]
Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol, Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (now the Republic of Tatarstan), Russian SFSR, to an ethnically mixed family of a Volga Tatar father and an ethnic Russian mother. Her father, Asgat Masgudovich Gubaidulin, was an engineer and her mother, Fedosiya Fyodorovna (née Yelkhova), was a teacher. After discovering music at the age of 5, Gubaidulina immersed herself in ideas of composition. While studying at the Children’s Music School with Ruvim Poliakov, Gubaidulina discovered spiritual ideas and found them in the works of composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Gubaidulina quickly learned to keep her spiritual interests secret from her parents and other adults since the Soviet Union was against any religious ideas.[4] These early experiences with music and spiritual ideas led her to treat the two domains of thought as conceptually similar and explains her later striving to write music expressing and exploring spiritually based concepts.
Gubaidulina has married three times.[5]
Career[edit]
She studied composition and piano at the Kazan Conservatory, graduating in 1954. During her early conservatory years, Western contemporary music was banned nearly entirely from study, an unusual exception being Bartók. Raids even took place in the dormitory halls, where searches were conducted for banned scores, Stravinsky being the most infamous and sought after. Gubaidulina and her peers procured and studied modern Western scores nonetheless. "We knew Ives, Cage, we actually knew everything on the sly."[6] In Moscow she undertook further studies at the Conservatory with Nikolay Peyko until 1959, and then with Vissarion Shebalin until 1963. She was awarded a Stalin fellowship.[7] Her music was deemed "irresponsible" during her studies in Soviet Russia, due to its exploration of alternative tunings. She was supported, however, by Dmitri Shostakovich, who in evaluating her final examination encouraged her to continue down her path despite others calling it "mistaken".[8] She was allowed to express her modernism in various scores she composed for documentary films, including the 1963 production, On Submarine Scooters, a 70mm film shot in the unique Kinopanorama widescreen format. She also composed the score to the well-known Russian animated picture "Adventures of Mowgli" (an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book).
In the mid-1970s Gubaidulina founded Astreja, a folk-instrument improvisation group with fellow composers Viktor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov.[9] In 1979, she was blacklisted as one of the "Khrennikov's Seven" at the Sixth Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers for unapproved participation in some festivals of Soviet music in the West.
Gubaidulina became better known abroad during the early 1980s through Gidon Kremer's championing of her violin concerto Offertorium. "She sprang to international fame in the late 1980s".[10] She later composed an homage to T. S. Eliot, using the text from the poet's Four Quartets. In 2000, Gubaidulina, along with Tan Dun, Osvaldo Golijov, and Wolfgang Rihm, was commissioned by the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart to write a piece for the Passion 2000 project in commemoration of Johann Sebastian Bach. Her contribution was the Johannes-Passion. In 2002 she followed this by the Johannes-Ostern ("Easter according to John"), commissioned by Hannover Rundfunk. The two works together form a "diptych" on the death and resurrection of Christ, her largest work to date. Invited by Walter Fink, she was the 13th composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2003, the first female composer of the series. Her work The Light at the End preceded Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in the 2005 proms. In 2007 her second violin concerto In Tempus Praesens was performed at the Lucerne Festival by Anne-Sophie Mutter. Its creation has been depicted in Jan Schmidt-Garre's film Sophia – Biography of a Violin Concerto.
Since 1992, Gubaidulina has lived in Hamburg, Germany.[11] She is a member of the musical academies in Frankfurt, Hamburg and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
In 2001 she became honour professor of the Kazan Conservatory. In 2005 she was elected as a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[38] In 2009, she became Dr. honoris causa[39] of Yale University.
In 2011 she was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters honorary degree from the University of Chicago.[40]
On 4 October 2013, Gubaidulina became the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for the Music section of the Venice Biennale.[41]
She has won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2016) in the contemporary music category. The jury in its citation praised the "outstanding musical and personal qualities" of the Russian composer, and the "spiritual quality" of her work.[42]
On 27 February 2017, Gubaidulina was awarded an honorary doctor of music degree by the New England Conservatory, in Boston.
Her 90th birthday in October 2021 was celebrated by the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig's release of three of her pieces. She was also celebrated in a week of chamber and orchestral music. [27] In November, to mark the occasion, she was selected as Composer of the Week on the long running show of the same name on BBC Radio 3.
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