Sofia Gubaidulina

Listening Guide. A "One-Note" Work: Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987).

This work was written in 1987 at a time when Gubaidulina (b. 1931) was becoming more well known in the West. The single-movement, 9-min String Quartet No. 2 begins by exploring a single pitch with timbral variation before expanding into restricted scalic pitch sets. (This process of differentiation is explored by Judy Lochhead in her essay inAnalytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music from 1960-2000, edited by Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft [Oxford University Press, 2016]).

Scholars often understand Gubaidulina’s music through the prism of spirituality, which she discovered early in life through Judaism (banned in the USSR at that time). String Quartet No. 2 could be heard as an expression of spiritual inner search, and is also an exemplar of compositional control and aural sensitivity to the minute details of the sound world. “One-note” works similar to this string quartet are something of a fad with contemporary composers and many works do not display nuanced aural landscaping.