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‘Hearing the Subconscious’: Interview with Sofia Gubaidulina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Vera Lukomsky
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Extract

(This is the second of two interviews Vera Lukomsky conducted with Sofia Gubaidulina while she was Annual Guest Composer during the festival of her music which took place at San Jose State University School of Music, California in April 1995. The first interview, ‘The Eucharist in my fantasy’, appeared in Tempo 206. In this second interview, recorded at Gubaidulina's hotel on 5 April 1995, she talks more about her technical procedures, especially regarding structural proportion. The interview took place in Russian and is here presented in Vera Lukomsky's English translation.)

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 209 , July 1999 , pp. 27 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

1 Gubaidulina presumably means Jung's The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature.

2 Each of the series begins from the primary number, which moves by the scale from zero to minus infinity. The first number in each of the series is a number which, if added to the primary number, gives ‘1’. The second number is a sum of the primary and first numbers, etc. In the Fibonacci series the difference between any neighbouring numbers is the least. The more we move away from the ‘ideal’ proportion of the Fibonacci series, the more distorted proportion we discover in each of the derived rows.

3 This is a musical setting to a poem by Francisco Tanzer.

4 Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev (1874–1948), Russian religious philosopher, who taught that freedom may not be determined by anybody, even God. His works were forbidden in the USSR up to the post-Soviet time. Despite the ban, Gubaidulina obtained and studied his books.

5 Gubaidulina chose the opposition of ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ temporal proportions to represent two opposed universes (harmonic Eternal World vc. disharmonic Earthly World).

6 The ‘zero’ of the ninth movement is caused by the Apocalyptic catastrophe depicted in the previous movement.

7 Earlier Gubaidulina had explained that this solo of the conductor is ‘the hieroglyph of our connection with the cosmic rhythm’. Also she mentioned that the organ's G-major triad symbolizes ‘Eternal light’ which begins to shine after the catastrophe in the cleared lucid space. (See: Valentina Kholopova, ‘Nikolai Berdiaev and Sofia Gubaidulina: in the Same Part of the Universe’; and ‘Music Will Save the World’, in Sovetskaia Muzyka, Moscow, 1991, No. 10, p. 15 Google Scholar; and 1990, No.9, p.53).