The World Mourns the Passing of Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-2025)

Music lovers around the world are mourning the passing of composer Sofia Gubaidulina who died at the age of 93 on 13 March 2025 at her home in Appen, Germany after a long illness. Born on 24 October 1931 in Chistopol in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (which is now the Republic of Tatarstan within the Russian Federation), Gubaidulina began her life’s devotion to music at the age of five. After graduating from Tatarstan’s Kazan Conservatory in 1954, she relocated to Moscow where she studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory with Nikolay Peyko, Dmitri Shostakovich’s teaching assistant, and Vissarion Shebalin. She has been active as a composer since 1963. In 1975, together with Viktor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov, she founded the ‘Astreya’ Ensemble, which specialized in improvising on rare Russian, Caucasian, Central Asian and East Asian folk and ritual instruments. These hitherto unknown sounds and timbres and ways of experiencing musical time had a profound influence on her creative work. A devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church, her music–which frequently touched on religious themes in addition to exploring electronic sounds, alternate tunings, and extended instrumental techniques–was frequently censored by Soviet authorities. In 1979, along with Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov, Alexander Knaifel, Viktor Suslin, Vyacheslav Artyomov, and Edison Denisov, she was denounced by Tikhon Khrennikov at the Sixth Congress of the Union of Russian Composers for unapproved participation in festivals of Soviet music in the West, but since the early 1980s, and especially as a result of the support and encouragement given to her by Gidon Kremer, her works have been performed widely in western countries, and together with Denisov and Alfred Schnittke, she came to be regarded as one of the leading representatives of new music in the former Soviet Union. In 1992, shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina emigrated to Germany where she remained for the rest of her life.

Gubaidulina received numerous awards and prizes for her music from all over the world, including the Rome International Composer’s Competition (1974), the Prix de Monaco (1987), the Koussevitzky International Record Award (1989 and 1994), the Premio Franco Abbiato (1991), the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis (1991), the Russian State Prize (1992), the Ludwig Spohr Prize of the City of Brunswick (1995), the Japanese Praemium Imperiale (1998), the Prize of the Léonie Sonning Music Foundation in Copenhagen (1999), the Stockholm Concert Hall Foundation’s Honorary Medal in Gold (2000), the Goethe Medal of the City of Weimar (2001), the Polar Music Prize (2002), The Great Distinguished Service Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2002), and the Living Composer Prize in the Cannes Classical Awards 2003.

Sofia Gubaidulina has also been important to the history of the International Society for Contemporary Music. On 18 April 2005, at the 2005 ISCM World Music days in Zagreb, Croatia, Germany’s That Ensemble performed an entire concert of Gubaidulina’s music at the Croatian Music Institute which featured her seminal 1978 De profundis, her 1996 song cycle Galgenlieder (setting texts by Christian Morgenstern), In croce (1979/1992) and Silenzio (1991), all of which included the bayan, a chromatic accordion developed in Russia. In 26 October 2008, at the 2008 ISCM World Music Days in Vilnius, Lithuania, her 2002 cello octet Mirage–The Dancing Sun was performed by Conjunto Ibérico in the Vilnius Town Hall. Most significantly, at the 2011 ISCM World Music Days in Zagreb, Croatia, Sofia Gubaidulina became, by a unanimous vote, the first woman ever elected as an Honorary Member of the ISCM.