Spirituality
‘Shedding the shackles of
restraint’
In the top ranks of the new “spiritual” composers, Sofia
Gubaidalina is also one of the music makers who has flourished since the demise
of the Soviet Union. She is known for a uniquely personal musical vision
combined with an overriding spirituality, the sense that music has the power to
transform the spirit.
Gubaidalina was born in Chistopol in the Tatar Republic of the
Soviet Union in 1931. She studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory.
Her violin concerto, “Offertorium,” helped bring the
composer to international attention in the early 1980s. Her scores frequently
explore unconventional techniques of sound production, influenced by rare
Russian, Caucasian and Asian folk and ritual instruments collected by the
Astreia ensemble, of which she is cofounder.
Her compositions did not sit well with Soviet officialdom. After
her graduation from the Moscow Conservatory, the renowned composer Dmitri
Shostakovich imparted words of advice to her. “He told me ‘I want you
to continue along your mistaken path.’
“The big difference between a person in a totalitarian regime
and one in a free society is the artistic task,” Gubaidalina said.
“In a free society, one feels absolute freedom as a danger. One has to
establish one’s own personal regulation to recognize innate potential. But
in a totalitarian regime, we have the task of shedding the shackles of
restraint in order to realize that potential.”
She articulates her spiritual and artistic vision: “The whole
world is threatened by spiritual passivity, an entropy of the soul. … What
puts the brakes on that process is the human spirit, and in part, art, and that
is a matter for serious music.”
“She is one of the most extraordinary personalities of music
today,” said Reinbert De Leeuw, director of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra’s Tanglewood program. “She is a composer going her own path
and creating musical worlds that are utterly fascinating.”
Some of her popular works are: “Can You Hear Us, Luigi? Look
at the Dance a Simple Wooden Rattle is Performing for You,” “Hour of
the Soul,” “Homage to Marina Tsvetayeva” and St. Francis’
prayer, “The Canticle of the Sun.”
* * *
Peteris Vasks was born in Latvia in 1946. He attended the Riga
Music Academy. From 1963 to 1974 he was a member of various symphony and
chamber orchestras, such as the Lithuanian Philharmonic Orchestra. Latvia was
one of the first republics of the former Soviet Union to gain independence in
1991. Vasks has celebrated this freedom and commemorated his people’s
suffering in his music.
Vasks includes archaic folkloric elements of Latvian music in his
compositions. Most of his works have programmatic titles that refer to nature.
Vasks says his interest is in the relation between humans and nature, the
beauty of life and the threatening ecological and moral destruction of these
values.
Some of his most popular works include “Symphony for
Strings,” “Landscape with Birds,” “Musica Adventus”
and the “ ‘Distant Light’ Concerto for Violin and String
Orchestra.”
* * *
Born in Tbilisi in 1935, Giya Kancheli is the Republic of
Georgia’s most distinguished living composer and a leading figure in the
world of contemporary music. Kancheli’s scores are deeply spiritual,
filled with haunting aural images, varied colors and textures, sharp contrasts
and shattering climaxes. His compositions draw inspiration from Georgian
folklore.
Like the other composers from the former Soviet republics, freedom
brought growing exposure for and recognition of Kancheli’s musical voice,
leading to commissions and performances in the United States and in Western
Europe. His most popular works are “Liturgy for Viola and Orchestra
‘Mourned by the Wind,’ ” “Magnum Ignotum,” the choral
work “I Turned Away in Order Not to See,” and his opera “Music
for the Living.”
Dislocated by political and social turbulence in his homeland,
Kancheli now resides in Antwerp, Belgium.
-- Rich Heffern
National Catholic Reporter, December 13,
2002
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