Sofia Gubaidulina

Monday, June 29, 2015

Today’s installment of the series RISM A–Z takes a look at Sofia Gubaidulina, a Russian composer born in 1931. Wait, a living composer in RISM? Yes! While RISM has traditionally maintained an emphasis on music manuscripts dating from between 1600 and 1800, the unique configuration of individual national working groups means that work occasionally moves away from this time frame, for various reasons. Sometimes, the extant musical sources in a given country do not fit within the 1600-1800 framework, a chronological scope that betrays the European origins of the RISM project. Thus, the sources from South Korea date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the time when Western notation arrived in Korea. Other times, catalogers working on a certain institution decide to input the entire collection into RISM rather than leave gaps and a partially cataloged library.

The autograph manuscript of an excerpt from Gubaidulina’s Silenzio (RISM ID no. 450115543) from the 1990s, is housed at the Forschungszentrum Musik und Gender in Hanover (D-HVfmg). There are currently over 550 sources from this research center in the RISM online catalog. More about this institution will be featured in this space next month.

Joseph Stevenson writes on AllMusic.com that Silenzio was “dedicated to Elisabeth Moser, a leading classical accordion player who premiered it in Hanover, Germany in November, 1991 with violinist Katherine Rabus and cellist Christoph Marks.” A portion of the autograph manuscript is therefore back in the city where it was first heard. Below, listen to Silenzio for bayan, violin, and cello, played by the ensemble Fandango:

Image credit: Gubaidulina in 1981, by Dmitri N. Smirnov (Own work) (GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY 2.5), via Wikimedia Commons

Category: RISM A-Z