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New York Times
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Sofia Gubaidulina, Composer Who Provoked Soviet Censors, Dies at 93
Sofia Gubaidulina, a Tatar-Russian composer who defied Soviet dogma with her openly religious music and after decades of suppression moved to the West, where she was feted by major orchestras, died on Thursday at her home in Appen, Germany. She was 93. Carol Ann Cheung, of Boosey & Hawkes, Ms. Gubaidulina's American publisher, said the cause was cancer. Ms. Gubaidulina (pronounced goo-bye-doo-LEE-na) wrote many works steeped in biblical and liturgical texts that provoked censors at home and, beginning in the final decade of the Cold War, captivated Western audiences. She was part of a group of important composers in the Soviet Union, including Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, who found disfavor with the authorities but acclaim abroad. She explored the tension between the human and the divine, and sought to place her music in the service of religion in the literal sense of repairing what she believed to be the broken bond between man and God. Using musical terms, Ms. Gubaidulina often spoke of her work bringing legato, a sense of connected flow, into the fragmented 'staccato of life.' Soloists who performed her work, among them the violinists Gidon Kremer and Anne-Sofie Mutter, often spoke of the emotional intensity that the music required. Conductors, including Valery Gergiev, Charles Dutoit and Kurt Masur, were strong advocates for her music. Folk traditions also fascinated Ms. Gubaidulina, who credited her Tatar roots with her love for percussion and shimmering sound colors. She favored soft-spoken or tenebrous instruments including the harp, the 13-stringed Japanese koto and the double bass. She collected instruments from different cultures and founded a collective of performers, which she named Astreia, that improvised on them. Later, she developed an interest in Japanese music and wrote compositions that utilized both Western and Japanese instruments. Ms. Gubaidulina had a special affinity with the bayan, a Russian button accordion normally more at home at folk weddings than in the concert hall. As a 5-year-old, she fell under the spell of an itinerant accordionist in her impoverished neighborhood of Kazan, the capital of what was then the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Her improvised dances to his music drew the attention of a neighbor and landed her a spot in a school for musically gifted children. Years later, she wrote concert works — including 'De Profundis' and 'Seven Words' — with parts for the bayan that expanded its sound palette, ranging from wheezing death rattles to blindingly bright filaments of sound. She exploited the expressive potential hidden in between notes in the pulmonary action of the instrument's bellows. 'Do you know why I love this monster so much?' she once asked referring to the bayan. 'Because it breathes.' Audiences responded. Performances of 'De Profundis' often reduced them to tears, the bayan player Elsbeth Moser said in an interview for this obituary in 2018. Ms. Gubaidulina looked to natural laws to establish form in her compositions. She drew on the mathematical Fibonacci series (in which the first two numbers are 0 and 1 and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two) to determine the proportions of a work's component movements. She experimented with alternate tuning systems rooted in the natural overtone series and considered the Western convention of dividing an octave into 12 equal steps a violation of nature. Sometimes she had groups of instruments tuned a quarter tone apart, in order to evoke a spiritual dimension hovering just out of reach. To Soviet critics, her microchromatic tunings were 'irresponsible' and Astreia's improvisations a form of 'hooliganism.' The dark sound palette and mystical spaciousness of her music ran counter to the tuneful optimism favored by Soviet officials. In 1979, Tikhon Khrennikov, the head of the powerful Composer's Union, added Ms. Gubaidulina to a blacklist. Until the 1980s, Ms. Gubaidulina witnessed few performances of her own music. She earned money writing scores for films and cartoons. She was repeatedly denied permission to travel to festivals in Poland and in the West. The watchful eye of the K.G.B. followed her. After her home was searched in 1974, she took to speaking in a near-whisper to foreign visitors. Around the same time, she was assaulted in the elevator of her building in Moscow. 'He grabbed my throat and slowly squeezed it,' Ms. Gubaidulina later recalled of her assailant. 'My thoughts were racing: It's all over now — too bad I can't write my bassoon concerto anymore — I'm not afraid of death but of violence. Then I told him: 'Why so slowly?'' The attacker relented. At the police station, officers shrugged off the attack as the work of a 'sex maniac.' Sofia Gubaidulina was born on Oct. 24, 1931, in the Tatar city of Chistopol. Her father, Asgad Gubaidullin, was a Tatar geodetic engineer and the son of an imam. Her mother, Fedosia Fyodorovna Elkhova, a teacher, was Russian. At home, Sofia and her two sisters learned to play children's pieces on a baby grand piano that took up much of the family's living space. The girls also experimented with placing objects on the piano's strings to draw odd sounds from it, a world away from the United States, where John Cage was then writing his first sonata for prepared piano, which involved inserting an assortment of items like metal bolts and rubber erasers between the instrument's strings to alter the sound. The sight of a Russian Orthodox icon in a farmhouse had sparked Sofia's interest in religion, but in order not to endanger her family, she learned to internalize her spiritual side and blend it with music. Silence unfolded its own magic, especially on surveying trips with her father, when the two walked wordlessly along streams and through forests. Ms. Gubaidulina studied piano and composition at the Kazan Conservatory before enrolling at the Moscow Conservatory in 1954. Her teachers included Yuri Shaporin and Nikolai Peiko, an assistant of Shostakovich. In 1959, Peiko introduced his student to Shostakovich. After hearing Ms. Gubaidulina's music, Shostakovich told her: 'Don't be afraid to be yourself. My wish for you is that you should continue on your own, incorrect way.' Ms. Gubaidulina married Mark Liando, a geologist and poet, in 1956. They collaborated on a song cycle, 'Phacelia,' and had a daughter, Nadezhda, who died of cancer in 2004. The marriage ended in divorce, as did a second marriage, to the dissident poet and samizdat publisher Nikolai Bokov. In the 1990s, Ms. Gubaidulina married Pyotr Meshchaninov, a conductor and music theorist, who died in 2006. She is survived by two grandchildren. Ms. Gubaidulina's breakthrough came with her first violin concerto, 'Offertorium,' completed in 1980, a work of grave beauty that ingeniously disassembles and rebuilds the 'Royal Theme' upon which Bach based his 'Musical Offering.' The work's Christian underpinnings were a thorn in the side of Soviet censors. It didn't help that the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, for whom she had written it, incensed officials by overstaying an approved trip to the West. In the end, her West German publisher, Jürgen Köchel of Sikorski Editions, smuggled the score out and 'Offertorium' received its premiere at the Wiener Festwochen in Austria in 1981. An orchestral work, 'Stimmen … verstummen' ('Voices … fall silent') made it only to a festival in West Berlin because the West German Embassy in Moscow had sent the score out by diplomatic pouch. 'Offertorium' was also the introduction to Ms. Gubaidulina's music for many American listeners when the New York Philharmonic programmed it, with Mr. Kremer as soloist, in 1985. Around this time, she began to receive permission to travel and visited festivals in Finland and Germany. In 1992, Ms. Gubaidulina moved to Germany and settled in the village of Appen, outside of Hamburg. Commissions began to roll in, including an invitation from the International Bach Academy Stuttgart to write her own version of 'St. John Passion' for the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. That 90-minute work, almost entirely built out of the diminished minor interval, sounds like a musical sigh. A reviewer called it 'claustrophobic and doom-laden.' Many critics also found the length of some of Ms. Gubaidulina's works excessive. The conductor Joel Sachs, who invited her to visit New York in 1989, remembered being struck particularly by one of her works performed there, 'Perception,' a 50-minute piece for soprano, baritone and strings that dramatizes a dialogue about art and creation using texts by the Austrian-born poet Francisco Tanzer. As in much of Ms. Gubaidulina's work, some of the argument is played out in purely instrumental moments. 'It really is dramatic in the way we assume a Western cantata to be,' Mr. Sachs said, 'but the sounds she generates are almost more important than the actual notes.'
New York Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Inside the Detail-Obsessed, Essential World of Music Editing
Editors of contemporary classical music are used to describing what they do through metaphors and comparisons. 'I suppose you could say I was like a midwife bringing musical children into the world,' said Sally Cox, a former editor at the publisher Boosey & Hawkes. 'What happens when Lady Gaga drops a record, and there are, like, 12 writers credited on it, where one guy simply massaged a synthesizer?' asked the freelance editor Ash Mistry. 'Isn't this like the same thing?' Not quite, but that's a useful starting point. Just as we can understand Lady Gaga's music as hers while acknowledging the many musical hands involved in its conception, so too can contemporary composition — at least the kind produced through major publishers — be understood as simultaneously the work of a sole composer and a product of group labor. Among those laborers — performers most visibly, but also commissioners, programmers and publishers — there are music editors, people who prepare manuscripts for performance. It's a role away from the spotlight and rarely explored. 'People don't realize or don't think about how the music gets onto their stand,' Cox said. This is true even for composers. 'When someone says, 'What does an editor do?,' we tend to say, 'We save the composer from themselves,'' said Elaine Gould, a former editor at Faber Music. 'That can sound very arrogant, but quite often a lot of them have no idea how much we do.' LIKE A PAGE-TURNER for a pianist or a sheet music librarian, music editor is the kind of job that only the idiosyncratic structures of classical music can produce. It requires an extremely high aptitude with all aspects of notated music, an understanding of the intricate layers of this literate, visual tradition — not just of notes on a page, but also of how minute cosmetic changes to their appearance might fundamentally alter how those notes sound — and a strong working knowledge of all the strands of music-making that have sought to expand, critique and dismantle notational systems over the past century. The work is extremely time-sensitive, to paces fast and slow. 'We're all familiar with the composer who, three weeks after the deadline, is madly rushing to finish the score and get the thing off, and others who are unfailingly six months ahead of schedule,' said Marc Dooley, a former head of new music at Edition Peters Group who oversaw composers as stylistically diverse as John Cage, Earle Brown and Brian Ferneyhough. Gould — the former Faber editor whose book 'Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation' is an industry staple — said that she always worked 'on the assumption that the music is going to have to be sight-read in a hurry.' There is often less rehearsal time than a composer might need, especially at orchestras, so editors must make instrumental parts that are precise, legible and unproblematic on first read, no matter how complicated the material. Editorial processes, Dooley said, are 'practically unique for each composer,' but they share a quality of trust between composer and editor. With Harrison Birtwistle, whom Cox spent much of her 47 years at Boosey editing, 'there were times when he got bored of answering questions and said, 'Oh, compose it yourself.'' (Birtwistle, who died in 2022, lives on through Cox's uncanny impersonation of his gruff Lancastrian accent.) Music editing often attracts composers — Cox studied as a composer before working at Boosey — but also those with a passion for design. Gould, who edited composers including George Benjamin, Thomas Adès and Oliver Knussen before she retired in 2022, started out in calligraphy. Most clearly, though, editorship attracts the fastidious. 'We obsess,' Mistry said, 'about paper sizes — the difference between ISOB4 and JISB4.' THE ESSENCE OF AN EDITOR'S ROLE, Gould said, is in 'scrutinizing everything.' Once a manuscript is delivered, an editor embarks on a thorough investigation of the musical notation, then returns to the composer with questions. Mistry, who works regularly with Julia Wolfe and Edmund Finnis, edited Kevin Puts's 2011 opera 'Silent Night' and estimated there were about 500 notational queries across its two acts. Editing involves separating music into its different constituent parts — rhythms, keys, chords, speeds, articulations, dynamics — analyzing them in turn, then in context, and looking out for inconsistencies of expression. One key concern is musical spelling. A C major triad can be 'spelled' different ways and sound the same: It might be a B sharp triad, for example, or a D double flat triad. But if the music is in C major, the key is C major and the music around it is related to C major, then spelling the triad in C major would probably make the most sense. In tonal music, the process of scrutinizing might be time-consuming but pretty straightforward, because it's predicated on notational conventions that have been broadly agreed upon for 500 years. But in the 20th century, there was a radical expansion of musical notation's possibilities. That developed through wildly different strands. To name just a few: a transfer of the serial traditions developed by Arnold Schoenberg into all aspects of the musical work by composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, necessitating hyper-specific notation; Gyorgy Ligeti's use of similarly specific notation to explore texture and timbre; the liberalization and critique of notation in the music of John Cage; the potential for color, graphics and other visual aspects to play a key role in scores by George Crumb. The role of the music editor, Mistry said, is to 'change the grammar but never the words.' Editors are keen to stress the differences from editors of books, who might have a much more involved role in aspects like large-scale structure and assume that grammatical details might be left to their authors or a proofreader further down the line. It's completely the opposite in music, Dooley said. 'The idea of me taking a Brian Ferneyhough score and saying, 'Hey Brian, I think your concept of the brokenness of time doesn't work' — that's ridiculous,' he added. 'That conversation wouldn't happen.' (It's important to note, however, that historically speaking, such conversations have happened. Edward Elgar, for example, reworked significant parts of famous works like the 'Enigma Variations' and 'The Dream of Gerontius' after encouragement from August Jaeger, his publisher, editor and friend.) Being a musical grammarian is an extremely subtle job, but understanding what that grammar looks like in a diffuse landscape is fiendishly complicated. One widely celebrated attempt to create a practical guide for editors, composers and performers is Gould's 'Behind Bars,' published in 2011. At over 700 pages, it's a testament to just how much the grammar of written music has diversified, especially since World War II. The level of detail is immense: Over seven chapters in the middle of the book, 'Behind Bars' consolidates the 'standard' idiomatic writing for all the instruments of the Western orchestra, featuring entries on notating speaking through an instrument, note clusters — for works after Henry Cowell that require the performer to play a piano with forearms — and how best to ask harpists to strike their instruments with their knuckles. Earlier, there are 18 pages on the various ways to beam two or more notes together. Mistry described 'Behind Bars' as 'a guiding light.' Simon Rattle, writing in the book's foreword, 'prayed that it would become a kind of Holy Writ for notation this century.' It's become something of a sacred text, to be referred back to, throughout the industry. And though in essence a practical guide rather than a rule book, it does confirm a fundamental distinction: Although the composer's job is to search, the editor's job is to consolidate, simplify and find consistency. ('The music engraver's job is to essentially be conservative,' Mistry said.) For younger composers, the book serves as a reminder that musical rules have been broken and mended many times before. 'BEHIND BARS' OPENS with a question: 'In an age where computers can do it all for us, what need is there for expertise in, or even a working knowledge of, the principles of notation?' In a tradition that has rarely changed, the advent of computerized software — Sibelius, the industry leader, began in 1993 — has fundamentally changed how music is edited. Only a handful of the composers who work with the editors in this article still submit handwritten manuscripts. Computerization had multiple effects. It automated a lot of the more laborious and error-prone aspects of the music-copying process, and handed the means of editing and presenting a score — with legible parts and a consistent house style — to composers outside the world of mainstream music publishing. Has, as Mistry contends, such softwares 'flattened the engraving landscape?' Certainly there's been a shift in the balance, from music notation as a route to expression toward a celebration of it as a visual style in itself. It's reflected in online composer culture: Of late, the X account Music Notation Is Beautiful and the YouTube channel Score Follower, for example, have gained popularity as much for their celebration of the cosmetic as the sonic. But dig a little deeper into these worlds and you see a familiar pattern of stylistic rules, broken, negotiated, then consolidated — before cycling back to the start, just as it's been for hundreds of years.
