For Sofia Gubaidulina Fans

[Ralph]

It pays to be poor

Sofia Gubaidulina's 'music of poverty' was born of Soviet repression and censorship - and was all the richer for it. Gerard McBurney meets her
Gerard McBurney
Friday August 12, 2005

Guardian

In the early 1990s, BBC2 broadcast three groundbreaking documentaries about modern Soviet music, including a one-hour film devoted to Sofia Gubaidulina - a composer then almost completely unknown in the UK. Although that says something for mainstream arts television in those days, not everyone liked the results: one newspaper mockingly trailed the programme as "portrait of oddball Russian composer".

Things have changed since then. With the fall of the Soviet Union and a spate of large-scale commissions from orchestras in Europe, North America and Japan, Gubaidulina, now in her 70s, has become one of the most sought-after composers in the world. Success has brought modest independence and a small house outside Hamburg, where she lives quietly and simply, with close friends nearby. All she wants is to write music.

In a striking moment in that interview (shot 15 years ago in the tiny Moscow apartment where Gubaidulina spent most of her working life), she uses the word "bednost" - poverty - to describe Soviet life, looking back over the stark Stalinism of her youth to the dreariness and repression of the Brezhnev era. But she quickly clarifies: she doesn't mean material poverty, lack of food and other basic needs, but poverty of information. And then she goes further, describing such poverty as an advantage for Soviet artists of her generation, giving them an edge on their western counterparts. "If you cannot lay your hands on information - this book is forbidden for some reason, that piece of music restricted - when by some miracle you do manage to get hold of something, you throw yourselves upon it with an intensity probably not even dreamt of by the person who has everything," she says. The key word here is "intensity", the creative intensity that springs from restriction.

I first visited Gubaidulina in Moscow in the spring of 1985. My Russian was fractured, and I was a new hand at Soviet living. I made my way to the Preobrazhenskoye district in the north-east of the city. The name, taken from a local church, means "transfiguration". This is where the boy-emperor Peter the Great formed his famous toy regiments. Venturing up a leafy side street along the crumbling wall of a 19th-century cemetery and into a standard block of Soviet flats, I was nervous. One of the main reasons for being in Russia at all had been my encounter two years before with a scratchy recording of an astonishing violin concerto called Offertorium, and now I was going to meet its composer.

I was struck by Gubaidulina's bird-like shyness, by her formality and sense of ceremony. Her concern was for me, her foreign guest. How was I managing in a strange country, what had brought me here, what kind of music was I interested in? With difficulty, I prodded her to talk about herself, about her music (most of which I didn't know) and about her childhood.

Born in 1931, she grew up in Kazan, a huge city on the River Volga and the capital of the Tatar Republic. Her mother was Russian, but her Tatar father seemed the more important, if contradictory influence. A child of the revolution - Russian-speaking by choice, atheist, practical (a land surveyor), dismissive of sentimentality and tradition - he never approved of her musical ambitions or her fascination with religion. What seemed to matter most to Gubaidulina, however, was not their relationship, but his "eastern" roots: she proudly showed me a muzzy photograph on her desk of her father's father, a mullah wearing a white embroidered robe and white turban, taken around the time of the 1917 revolution.

As Gubaidulina spoke, I saw the passionate curiosity of someone driven by frustration and anger that their background, traditions and culture had been ripped away. For her it was essential to make connections with what had been lost. If there remained only tiny bits of information on which to base such connections, then so be it. Later, as I spent more time in Russia, I realised such an attitude was common to many who had grown up in this society, which denied its own past so harshly.

Suddenly, Gubaidulina made it clear my visit had ended. I was kindly but firmly shown the door. Before she shut it, she poked her head out once more to where I stood on the landing: "Goodbye! Compose well and live intensively!"

Some years ago, a London critic, Dominic Gill, made an interesting comparison between Gubaidulina's work and the principles of the great Polish theatre director, Jerzy Grotowski, Gubaidulina's near-contemporary and another child of the post-communist bloc. Grotowski wrote a famous book, a Bible of theatrical practice, entitled Towards a Poor Theatre; borrowing from this specific sense, Gill proposed that Gubaidulina writes "Poor Music". What Gill most probably had in mind was the striking "poverty" of the surface of Gubaidulina's music, the way she generates enormous energy and concentration using the frailest wisps of sound, breath-like sighs and moans, scraps of Russian Orthodox chant, gigantic but extremely simple unisons, shudders and tremblings like the merest moments of tension from a film score, the simplest common chords.

Grotowski's declaration, "Art is an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light," could describe the rhetorical trajectory of almost any of Gubaidulina's work: for example, the long chant-like coda of Offertorium, where the violin unfolds an implausibly long melody that climbs step by painful step from the earth to the sky, supported by the ever noisier chiming of bells. Or her 1979 work In Croce, a wonderfully strange and primitive piece for cello and organ where the cello winds its way up from the depths to the heights, "crossing" over the downward path of the organ in its search for light. Or one of Gubaidulina's greatest achievements: The Seven Words (1982), a chamber concerto for the exceedingly unusual combination of cello, accordion and string orchestra, which is inspired by the traditional subject of the "seven last words" of Christ and embodies the New Testament drama with almost childlike literalness, using the accordion as Christ's body (the ribcage expanding and contracting) and the solo cello as His soul, ascending to Heaven by means of crossing over the bridge of the instrument to play the normally unplayed strings on the other side. A recent piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra (to be performed in this year's Proms ) is called The Light of the End. It describes a journey from confusion and darkness - in the form of blurry clouds of orchestral colour at the beginning - to a radiant close, dominated by the piercing brightness of the clearest bell sounds.

For Gubaidulina, the summit of her life's work is her massive millennium commission, The Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ according to St John, heard at the Albert Hall in the 2002 Proms. Scored for gigantic vocal and orchestral forces, the piece, which took a full evening to perform, tells the familiar story in an unexpected way. Gubaidulina prepared the elaborate collage-like text, splicing and interweaving lines from the gospel narrative with parallel passages from the Book of Revelation (another St John) and Ezekiel.

The result is an apocalyptic vision in which, despite sumptuous musical resources used with almost cinematic grandeur, the words dominate. The music is only there to serve what the words mean and to heighten the way they sound. However imposing and colourful the accumulating thunder of voices, orchestra and organ, the score of Gubaidulina's Passion and Resurrection is still at heart the same "poor" stuff, disturbingly stripped down and made of very simple things.

· The UK premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina's Light of the End is at the Proms, Albert Hall, London SW7, on August 20. Box office: 020-7589 8212.

[springrite]

Thanks, Ralph!