Sofia Gubaidulina died, for whom the sound was sacred, a devotion

The composer Tartara Sofia Gubaidulina died yesterday at home, in Appen, Germany, at 93, her editorial, Boosey & Hawkes reported. It is, together with Arvo Pärt and Alfred Schnittke, the highest figure of the Russian composition; The three were students from Dmitri Shostakóvich.

He was born on October 24, 1931 in the Tartara community of Chistopol. After studying piano in Kazan, on the shores of the Volga River, he moved to Moscow to learn composition. There he met his teacher Dmitri Shostakovich, who indicated: Follow the wrong path.

The assembly of Shostakovich is a beautiful irony in recognition to the talent of his student, who wrote politonalities instead of the traditional compositions in a single hue (for example, the fifth symphony was written by Beethoven in the tone of Do Minor).

Haracled by Stalin, Sofia Gubaidulina was exiled in Germany, as also made by her companions Arvo Pärt, who settled in Berlin, and Alfred Schnittke, in Hamburg, while she settled 33 years ago in the town of Appen, near Hamburg.

He has received many international awards and have dedicated exhibitions, tributes and documentaries, where we extract his thinking:

Everyone who writes music, said the teacher, must try to give the soul of listening with strength. The art of music Expand the borders of knowledge because it allows you to approach the highest of our being. The art of music is able to play and approach the mystery and the laws of the cosmos and the world.

The sound It became something sacred to me, a devotion, a meditative attitude towards sound, until reaching transfiguration.

Defined: The art of music is consistent with the task of expanding the highest, superior dimension of life, which is above everyday life. And it is able to influence society through two paths: on the one hand, it is a consolation, a source of joy, and on the other, music can raise the human being to higher spheres, to a state of the highest soul, and open hidden doors in our soul, of which we are not aware, but to Pärt go of music we can approach and play them.

Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt and Alfred Schnittke are the three most important composers of the great continuing movement formed by the authors of the previous generation, headed by Shostakóvich and Prokofiev, who chose to stay in their homeland, which cost them an atrocious suffering, cruelly harassed by Stalin. One of the most painful chapters in history is psychological damage and the consequent physical deterioration in Shostakovich since he premiered his opera Lady Macbeth de Mtsensk And Stalin put him in the sights. The musician continued writing. In his works they appear laughing like his stalker.

While Sofia Gubaidulina’s music is hard, solid, rough, but also angelic. In his works, all of them religious, there is song of angels and sound of bells.

This was defined: I am a religious person and by religion I understand re-ligio and the religion of a link, which rescues through legato (technical term in music that indicates articulation) of life. There is no more important occupation than the recomposition of spiritual integrity through music.

In the documentary entitled A Portrait of Sofia Gubaidulina We see her walking on the snow and bathed in flakes through the streets of Moscow and then we see her in a recording studio, sitting in front of her lectern with her pärt itor herd, such as Pärt E of the orchestra that premiered and recorded several of her works, in Pärt Icular Stimmen, Versommen, Symphony (voices, silence, a symphony).

The climax of that work, explains Sofia, It is essentially silence And, indeed, we see in that documentary Gennadi Rozhdestvensky leave the baton and begin to gesture with the hands and arms geometric figures to the use of ancient Greece, in a spectacular dance. While silence sounds.

She explains: The objective of composers was to create pretty sounds. I am interested in the purity of sound. A state of ecstasy against sound exploration.

Sofia Gubaidulina, in addition, applied in its pärt ituras the essential principles that TS Eliot applied in its poetry, whose Four quartets, Define Sofia, “There are four variations in time and four variations in the no time: present, past, future and not time, linked to the four elements, to the four eras. The beauty of an immobility point within a circle in motion and its own movement. It is the point that is in the center of the cross and finally there is a point outside the circle, completely irrational, and that is the center of time: everything dies, burns in flames, is reduced to nothing and reborn.

It is a flame that purifies a state of soul, until transfiguration takes place, the resurrection of the spirit. It is when the flame and the rose are the same.

A Pärt go this Thursday, when he left the physical body, the composer Tartara Sofia Gubaidulina is forever the flame and the rose, together, in a single flame.