GUBAIDULINA: The Light of the End
Sofia Gubaidulina was born on October 24, 1931, in Chistopol in the Tatar Republic of the Soviet Union. In 1992 she resettled in Appen, a small village outside Hamburg. Gubaidulina composed The Light of the End between 2001 and 2003 on a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which premiered the work on April 17, 2003, with Kurt Masur conducting. These are the first performances by the San Francisco Symphony. The score calls for four flutes (third doubling alto flute and fourth doubling piccolo), oboe and English horn, heckelphone, two clarinets plus bass clarinet, two bassoons plus contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion divided among five players (and including vibraphone, marimba, tubular bells, mark tree, glockenspiel, crotales/antique cymbals, suspended cymbals, crash cymbals, large tam-tam, bass drum, and bell plates), harp, and strings.
“It does not matter to me whether or not I am modern,” declares Sofia Gubaidulina. “What is important is the inner truth of my music.” That conviction of a deep, underlying purpose to her art has served as Gubaidulina’s North Star through a lengthy career. By liberating herself from external preconceptions about the path a contemporary composer should follow, Gubaidulina (pronounced “goo-bye-DOO-lee-nah”) has been able to keep her own vision in steady focus. International recognition arrived belatedly, following decades of tumultuous political and social transformations, but her music is proving to exert a powerful attraction in our uncertain times. Its disinterest in being fashionable makes it, paradoxically, highly au courant.
Paradox, however, is inherent in Gubaidulina’s musical philosophy. For her, the raw, material reality of musical facts—pulses, breaths, tunings—provides a vehicle that can direct us toward the timeless transcendence of the spirit. Her skepticism regarding the value of originality (a sacrosanct tenet of modernism) has led her to evolve an authentically original voice—albeit one tinged with an archaic sense of music’s sacred function.
These contradictions helped generate that voice. It seems especially fitting that the composer grew up in the great crossroads city of Kazan, the capital of the Tatar Republic (formerly part of the Soviet Union), which is located on the Volga River, 450 miles east of Moscow. Her own ethnic background—her father was a Tatar while her mother was Russian—blends East and West.
Indeed, a number of striking polarities run through Gubaidulina’s life and art. She matured in the officially atheist culture of Communism, only to convert to the Russian Orthodox Church as an adult (formalizing a fascination with religion that dated back to her childhood). Her staunch independence from State-prescribed aesthetics goes hand in hand with an attitude of intense humility toward her mission as a composer. A profound love of specific musical icons from the past—particularly J.S. Bach and Anton Webern—informs Gubaidulina’s sensibility, yet her own music is utterly distinctive and sounds nothing like theirs. Despite the elaborate theoretical framework that lies behind the formal structures of her more recent compositions (with a basis in numerological calculations), Gubaidulina trusts heavily in her creative intuition.
She is, too, a woman composing in the midst of a male-centered pantheon. “I have no doubt that women think and feel differently than men,” says Gubaidulina, “but it is not very important whether I am a woman or a man. What matters is that I am myself and develop my own ideas strictly toward the truth.”
Gubaidulina left Kazan in 1954 to study at the Moscow Conservatory. She had been composing since childhood, and she focused on composition at the Conservatory. Government control over artistic expression remained tight in the post-Stalinist era, and her freethinking attitude would inevitably make her run afoul of officially approved standards. Yet no less a figure than Dmitri Shostakovich offered advice that she would cherish. Shostakovich, who knew something about what could happen to an artist who strayed from the party line, counseled her to have faith in her vision. "My wish for you is that you should continue on your own, incorrect path."
This path is one Gubaidulina followed intrepidly. It resulted, predictably, in her marginalization by the official Soviet channels until the relaxation that came with glasnost in the 1980s—when she was allowed her first trips to the capitalist West to attend music festivals. During her long decades living in a tiny Moscow apartment, Gubaidulina made ends meet by composing numerous film scores (an outlet to which such peers as Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt likewise turned). As it happened, this “practical” medium afforded ample leeway to experiment with unusual sonorities, with little in the way of meddling by apparatchiks.
In addition, Gubaidulina refreshed her contact with audiences—and with musical spontaneity—through the improvisatory folk trio Astraea, which she formed with colleagues in 1975. Their activities inspired playful music-making with a sonic palette extended to all manner of non-orchestral instruments drawn from folk traditions (such as the bayan or button accordion) and even toy shops.
Absorbing what intrigued her from contemporary postwar trends to which she was exposed—including serialism and electronic music—Gubaidulina slowly and patiently built an unmistakable sense of musical identity. In 1965 she cast aside her earlier compositions as juvenilia and accorded special status to her Five Etudes (scored for the unusual ensemble of harp, double bass, and percussion) as her official Opus One.
With each new work, Gubaidulina sets out to tackle new ground, addressing not only technical issues and novel approaches to instrumental sonority but their philosophical and mystical implications as well. Her conversion to Orthodox Christianity in 1970 only intensified her belief in the significance of the composer’s calling, which involves no less than to attempt “the recomposition of spiritual integrity through the composition of music.”
Yet even such ostensibly secular genres as the symphony and concerto reveal a potential to convey Gubaidulina’s mystical perspective and appeal to rich symbolism. Her 1986 work Stimmen … verstummen … (“Voices . . . fall silent . . .”) takes a characteristically novel approach to symphonic conflict, generated here from the tension between simplicity (represented by a stable chord) and increasing complexity. It was her First Violin Concerto, written for Gidon Kremer, that paved the way toward Gubaidulina’s international breakthrough in 1981. Subtitled Offertorium, this work enacts the idea of a sacrificial offering by breaking down and then reconstituting the main theme of Bach’s A Musical Offering. (Gubaidulina’s Second Violin Concerto, In tempus praesens, receives its North American premiere by Anne-Sophie Mutter in next week’s concerts.)
The Light of the End is a recent symphonic composition that reflects many of Gubaidulina’s abiding concerns. As in so many of her works, a purely musical issue serves as the point of entry for a meditation of spiritual import that speaks to the human condition. The musical issue in question is the conflict between natural and conventional tuning.
Since the time of Bach—whose Well-Tempered Clavier codified the convention whereby the twelve tones of the chromatic scale are adjusted to form equidistant intervals—Western ears have come to accept this agreed-on “compromise” as the proper order of things. It is in fact a convention—an illusion of sorts—which is maintained in an orchestral ensemble by, if you will, a kind of trickery. The situation becomes especially obvious in the family of brass instruments, whose intrinsic “natural” sounds have to be adjusted by the player’s mouth to conform with the tempered scale of twelve tones. (Today’s ready access to world music can expose more adventurous listeners to alternate tuning systems at the flip of an iPod, but the tempered system thoroughly saturates our culture.)
We perceive deviations from conventional tuning as “out of tune,” or “untrue”; in Gubaidulina’s symbolic sense, it also registers as a kind of “pain.” “For some time,” the composer observes, “I have experienced this conflict [between natural instrumental sound and conventional tuning] as my own drama: the incompatibility, in principle, of these intrinsic qualities [of instruments] with real-life circumstances in which nature is neutralized. Sooner or later, this pain had to be manifested in some composition.” The Light of the End is that piece.
Biographer Michael Kurtz draws attention to the importance of philosophical and religious thinkers in shaping Gubaidulina’s aesthetic outlook. The writings of Nikolai Berdyaev are of particular relevance in connection with this imagery of pain as resulting from a conflict between creative vision and its material articulation. The conflict, for Berdyaev, is at heart a tragic division “between the flame of the creator’s initial vision and its ultimate rule-bound realization: every creative act aims at achieving eternity but ends in a traitorous compromise with time.”
Gubaidulina typically envisions the entirety of a composition from the start—what she calls a “vertical” perspective that can be likened to the mystic’s all-encompassing instant of time. The work of composition involves setting forth this vision as a “horizontal” succession of sounds unfolding in real time. With The Light of the End, the title itself points to the work’s final moments. The optimism suggested is, however, itself something of a deception. Indeed, the substance of the piece involves an unusually suspenseful sense of uneasy drama. As with Bach, the ultimate optimism of salvation cannot sugar-coat the pain of humanity’s fallen condition.
The familiar symphonic arc from darkness to light thus gains a new, gritty edge in Gubaidulina’s formulation. The Light of the End proceeds in a single-movement span, unpredictably deploying the resources of its enormous orchestra. The central conflicts are laid out in the first minute: a slow, close-knit chromatic cell from a lone alto flute versus a madly scurrying whirlwind in the strings, followed by the “untuned” natural pitches of the horns as they clash against woodwinds. Tension also builds in the contrast between relatively static passages and the agitated “whirlwind” music. A violent fanfare becomes prelude to the first full orchestral climax, but Gubaidulina frames this and later ensemble passages with moments of exceptional austerity. Registral extremes and striking textural combinations pull us further into the sonic abyss—this is music whose color creates an astonishing impression of space.
Midway through, a powerful timpani solo followed by a foghorn-like tuba sets the stage for the conflict at its most explicit: a duet for solo horn and cello, in which the same melody—differently tuned—generates a counterpoint of intense but strangely beautiful dissonance. An especially powerful ensemble climax builds from the mixing together of all the previous materials. Eventually the music settles into the lowest depths—cavernous, bellowing B-flats from the tuba—and from this extremity the whirlwind theme begins to lead the way out. A lengthy coda begins with pealing brass and tintinnabulations but then presses beyond the triumphal wash of sound. What follows is as marvelous in its mirage-like orchestration as it is unexpected: a solo cello rising to its upper limits against sustained glissandi in the strings and harp.
“The chromatic glissandi of the strings remove the fundamental conflict,” the composer notes. “These sounds are contained both in the natural overtone scale and in the tempered system.” The “light at the end,” meanwhile, turns out to be the ascending chromatic scale gently chimed on the crotales (antique cymbals or small, tuned disks). This is, after all, a mere clarification of the “whirlwind” music, slowed to a simple ascent. Yet in this new context after the storm, its scintillating resonance—the infinite possibilities contained within all twelve notes—acquires a startling, final simplicity as the work’s concluding gesture.
—Thomas May
Thomas May writes and lectures about music and theater. He is the author of Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader.
On Disc and In Print
On Disc: The Light of the End has yet to be released commercially, but a wide spectrum of Gubaidulina’s music is available on disc. For example: the Violin Concerto Offertorium, with soloist Gidon Kremer and Charles Dutoit conducting the Boston Symphony (Deutsche Grammophon), an album that includes Hommage à T.S. Eliot, inspired by the mystical Four Quartets | Stimmen . . .verstummen, with Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic (Chandos) | An album of pivotal small-ensemble works including In croce, Silenzio, and The Seven Last Words, this last an example of Gubaidulina’s evocative use of the bayan (Naxos) | The Johannes-Passion, with Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov Theater Orchestra and Chorus (Hänssler) | The recent violin concerto In tempus praesens, with Anne-Sophie Mutter as soloist and Gergiev conducting the London Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon). This is the work that Ms. Mutter performs at SFS concerts next week, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. | For an example of Gubaidulina’s work as a film composer, Rolan Bykov’s 1983 film The Scarecrow (Chuchelo on imdb.com) has become a cult classic.
In print: Michael Kurtz has published an authorized biography, Sofia Gubaidulina (available in English translation from Indiana University Press). It includes extensive quotes from interviews with the composer and follows her career up through the early 21st century.