Sofya Gubaydulina

Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina (Russian: Софи́я Асгáтовна Губaйду́лина, Tatar: Cyrillic София Әсгать кызы Гобәйдуллина, Latin Sofia Äsğät qızı Ğöbäydullina; born 24 October 1931) is a Tatar-Russian composer.

Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol, Soviet Union to an ethnically mixed family of a Volga Tatar father and an ethnic Russian mother. Her father, Asgat Masgudovich Gubaidulin, was an engineer and her mother, Fedosiya Fyodorovna (née Yelkhova), was a teacher. After discovering music at the age of 5, Gubaidulina immersed herself in ideas of composition. While studying at the Children’s Music School with Ruvim Poliakov, Gubaidulina discovered spiritual ideas through Judaism and found them in the works of composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Gubaidulina quickly learned to keep her spiritual interests secret from her parents and other adults since the Soviet Union was against any religious ideas. These early experiences with music and spiritual ideas led her to treat the two domains of thought as conceptually similar and explains her later striving to write music expressing and exploring spiritually based concepts. She studied composition and piano at the Kazan Conservatory, graduating in 1954. In Moscow she undertook further studies at the Conservatory with Nikolay Peyko until 1959, and then with Shebalin until 1963. She was awarded a Stalin fellowship. Her music was deemed "irresponsible" during her studies in Soviet Russia, due to its exploration of alternative tunings. She was supported, however, by Dmitri Shostakovich, who in evaluating her final examination encouraged her to continue down her path despite others calling it "mistaken". She was allowed to express her modernism in various scores she composed for documentary films, including the 1968 production, On Submarine Scooters, a 70mm film shot in the unique Kinopanorama widescreen format. She also composed the score to the well-known Russian animated picture "Adventures of Mowgli" (a rendition of Rudyard Kipling's "Jungle Book").

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