Sofia Gubaidulina

Although born and educated in the U.S.S.R., Sofia Gubaidulina’s imagination ranged unfettered by any politics. Her rich, evocative soundworlds embrace music of the past—particularly Bach—and her discoveries of new timbres created by unorthodox playing techniques. Born of a Tatar father and a Russian mother in 1931, Gubaidulina grew up in Kazan, transcending her drab environment through her imagination. Her father bought her a piano, and her childhood experiments with that instrument—directly plucking its strings as well as playing at the keyboard—established a habit of finding unusual instrumental sounds. She pursued this further in 1975 with the group she cofounded: Astreja ensemble. As well as improvising on lesser-known Russian, Caucasian and Central Asian folk instruments, they invented new devices, such as friction rods (rubber balls threaded on a metal rod), which Gubaidulina used later for her String Quartet No. 4 (1993). Her outré music and refusal to ingratiate herself with officials resulted in her music being virtually banned in 1979. Fortunately, Gubaidulina had already been asked to write a violin concerto by the free-spirited Soviet violinist Gidon Kremer; Offertorium (1980, rev. 1986) was smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. to Kremer, who gave its premiere in 1981 in Vienna, which effectively launched Gubaidulina’s international reputation. She subsequently had works commissioned and championed by such musicians as Kurt Masur, Simon Rattle, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Kronos Quartet. She settled in Germany in 1992, where she died on 13 March 2025.