Once upon a time I wrote an awful lot about Sofia Gubaidulina’s music. I tried very hard to put it together into a book—and I still might—but it just never quite came together in a cohesive way. I wrote about her serial music here. The next part of the chapter was on her movement away from serialism and toward more indeterminate techniques. Here is some of that writing.
Indeterminacy: From abstraction to mimesis
Not long after abandoning serialism, Gubaidulina formed the Astraea ensemble with her compatriots Victor Suslin and Viatcheslav Artyomov. The ensemble created collective improvisations on a variety of folk instruments. The group began rather informally in Artyomov’s apartment but eventually evolved into a regular engagement for its members. They concertized throughout Russia—in both concert halls and jazz clubs—and acquired numerous new and exotic instruments (Kurtz 119-123). Gubaidulina’s musical horizons were broadened considerably by her work with Astraea. Several compositions from the early and middle 1970s reflect Gubaidulina’s experiments with improvisation and folk instruments. In this section, I begin with a discussion of indeterminacy in Gubaidulina’s music. I then will examine three pieces from this time— The hour of the soul (1976), Dots, lines, and zig-zags (1976), and the concerto for bassoon and low strings (1975)—and discuss the organization of pitch in these works based on the framework outlined in the first section. I will reserve discussion of her use of folk instruments for later in the book.
In the introduction to his book, Schmelz (2009) notes a trend in Soviet art from the abstract toward the mimetic during the 1960s.[1] Abstraction was seen as a reaction to the tenets of Soviet realism, a focus on the materials of art moreso than any particular object. Mimetic music, notes Schmelz, is representational and relies on language or language-like constructs to present meaning. The language-like attributes of mimetic music makes a semiotic approach such as the one employed in this book an ideal analytical strategy. In many ways, this shift from abstract to mimetic took Gubaidulina to the aesthetic pole that was entirely opposite of serialism: she moved from total order to little or no order at all. In serial music, considerable effort goes into the precompositional process: theory often precedes practice. Kurtz mentions that the musicians of Astraea moved from indeterminate, graphic scores to performances that were completely freely improvised (120). The freedom that accompanied this type of music-making, however, caught the notice of the KGB, who allegedly appeared at several of the ensemble’s performances.
There are two main types of indeterminacy under consideration here: improvisation and chance procedures. Improvisation tends to be performer-driven, where the performer typically combines musical ideas in a spontaneous fashion. Generally, the improviser is working within some predetermined musical system (jazz harmony, or Indian ragas, for example); in some cases, such as free jazz and the improvisations of Astraea, there is no musical language that unifies the improvisation. Chance music tends to be more composer-centered. We can break chance music into two different categories: music in which the composer subjects the compositional process and/or materials to chance and music where the final form of the work is left to chance. A work such as John Cage’s Music of changes exemplifies the former category; Lutoslawski’s string quartet exemplifies the latter.
Much of the indeterminacy in Gubaidulina’s music is of this latter type. She committed the musical material to paper and entrusts its ultimate realization to the performer. As we shall see, this is typically accomplished by using a notation system that is fairly conventional and requires little additional instruction for the performers to comprehend. I would argue that chance music provides Gubaidulina with an opportunity to channel the freedom and sense of discovery that she experienced in her improvisations into her notated music. To that end, I would further claim that both types of indeterminacy arouse the same range of cultural meanings in the listener.
In order to take first steps toward an analytical framework for examining indeterminacy in Gubaidulina’s music, let us consider the four elements of any musical sound: pitch, duration, intensity (i.e., dynamics), and timbre. A composer can prescribe values for any of these parameters with varying degrees of specificity. The more specific the composer is with regard to any of these parameters, the more ontologically thick we might say the work is (Davies 1999). The less specific the composer is with regard to any of these parameters, the more ontologically thin we might say the work is. Musical works then lie on a continuum somewhere between these two poles. An example of an ontologically thick work would be a composition programmed into a computer and then recorded to tape, CD, or other media. Every parameter can be carefully controlled by the composer and will be exactly the same every time the work is performed (i.e., the tape is played). An example of an ontologically thin work would be a free improvisation.
[1] Schmelz borrows these terms from Karol Berger’s A theory of art. [CITE]