Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.“Again, but more legato!” is a direction that will have reddened the ears of countless young musicians. The term, which derives from the Latin word for tying or binding, is used in music to refer to the smooth style of playing that became normal in the early 19th century, in which the notes flow one into the other to form a seamless line.For the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, however, who has died aged 93, the term held another, deeper meaning, where what was bonded together was not so much individual notes but rather the body and the soul. Celebrated for her contribution to sacred music, Gubaidulina nonetheless conceived of all her music as sacred. To compose, to play music, was, for her, a religious act, as well as a mitigation against the incessant “staccato” in which she thought our disjointed lives were nowadays lived.Gubaidulina has for decades been lionised in musical circles — literally, in the case of her Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale in 2013 — but there was nothing smooth about her path to international pre-eminence. The daughter of a state-fearing atheist engineer of Tatar origins and a schoolteacher, she attributed her life-long passion for music and religion quite simply to poverty: growing up without toys or books in a small apartment in the Tatar city of Christopol, under Soviet rule. She later recalled sitting one sunny day in the yard, whose only adornment was the block’s rubbish tip, when her gaze rose to the sky from which she seemed suddenly to hear secret harmonies. This, she related in a 1990 BBC documentary, would be her real “home”. At the age of five, on a visit to the countryside, she was captivated by an icon of Christ. But seeing her parents’ terrified reaction, she realised her newfound fervour must remain secret. In the crucible of Stalinism’s forbidden private, religion, music and hope merged into a prohibited whole.The family moved to the Tatar capital, Kazan, where she studied music before studying composition at the Moscow conservatory. Her teacher Vissarion Shebalin was, along with Prokofiev and Shostakovich, singled out for censure by the politician Andrei Zhadanov. He denounced the decadent western “formalism”, whose “incorrect” methods had seeped back into Soviet music, following Stalin’s infamous 1936 outburst in the pages of Pravda against “chaos instead of music”. Yet it was precisely in this “chaotic” direction that Gubaidulina’s compositional interests lay, and Shostakovich confided to her his hope that she persevere on her “own incorrect path”.In 1973 a stranger tried to strangle her in the lift of her Moscow apartment building, an attempt her friends didn’t doubt was the KGB’s doing. She was blacklisted by the Soviet Composers’ Union in 1979, but remained in Moscow, where she welcomed the peace and quiet of the enforced stop in commissions. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union did she move in 1992 with her third husband, Pyotr Meshchaninov, to the small village of Appen, north of Hamburg, which is where she lived when she died.The religious character of Gubaidulina’s music is clear not merely from its titles (such as the concerto Offertorium, composed for the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer in 1980, one of the works that sealed her reputation in the west), but from the seemingly cosmic scale of the forces that find expression in it. Volume levels can be astonishing, and there is a clear preference for darker colours — the bassoon, double-bass, and the Bayan, a large Russian accordion, were life-long favourites. Each instrument was exploited to the full by experimental techniques and an expanded harmonic palette.Yet Gubaidulina could also call upon an extraordinary lightness of touch when appropriate. In Musical Toys, the piano is made to imitate birds, craftsmen, other instruments and even echoes.The climaxes of her works are as often as not carried out in the storm’s quiet centre. In Stimmen Verstummen, a giant 12-movement symphony composed in 1980, the crucial moment is quite silent, the conductor beating out with a series of magician-like gestures the rhythmic pattern from which the work is formed. Gradually the instruments — oboe, percussion, quietly clattering strings — rejoin, quietly articulating the same rhythm, as if just baptised in it.In Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, for solo accordion, music of extraordinary violence builds up to a silent release, in which the bellows are worked but no keys pressed: the immense musical forces seem to expire, like a body giving its breath back to the wind.
