Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina (Russian: Софи́я Асгáтовна Губaйду́лина listenⓘ, Tatar: София Әсгать кызы Гобәйдуллина;[1] born 24 October 1931) is a Soviet-Russian composer and an established international figure.

While studying at the Children's Music School with Ruvim Poliakov, Gubaidulina discovered spiritual ideas 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 hostile to religion.

During her early conservatory years, Western contemporary music was banned almost entirely from study, an unusual exception being Bartók.

She also composed the score to the well-known Russian animated picture "Adventures of Mowgli" (an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book).

In the mid-1970s Gubaidulina founded Astreja, a folk-instrument improvisation group with fellow composers Viktor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov.

[10] In 1979, she was blacklisted as one of the "Khrennikov's Seven" at the Sixth Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers for writing “noisy mud instead of musical innovation, unconnected with real life".

In 2000, Gubaidulina, along with Tan Dun, Osvaldo Golijov, and Wolfgang Rihm, was commissioned by the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart to write a piece for the Passion 2000 project in commemoration of Johann Sebastian Bach.

[16] These abstract religious and mystical associations are realized in Gubaidulina's compositions in various ways, such as writing in bowing directions that cause the performer to draw a crucifix in the final movement of "Seven Words" for cello, bayan, and strings.

[20] In an interview with the modern British composer Ivan Moody, Gubaidulina provides an explanation for how percussion is utilized in her works to show spiritualism.

[7] Among some non-musical influences of considerable import are Carl Jung (Swiss thinker and founder of analytical psychology) and Nikolai Berdyaev (Russian religious philosopher, whose works were forbidden in the USSR, but nevertheless found and studied by the composer).

A profoundly spiritual person, Gubaidulina defines "re-ligio" as re-legato ("re-bound") or as restoration of the connection between oneself and the Absolute.

She does it through narrower means of intervallic and rhythmic relationship within the primary material of her works, by seeking to discover the depth and mysticism of the sound, as well as on a larger scale, through the carefully thought architecture of musical form.

[25] Additionally, the use of short motivic segments allows her to create a musical narrative that is seemingly open-ended and disjunct rather than smooth.

[27] Harmonically, Gubaidulina's music resists traditional tonal centers and triadic structures in favor of pitch clusters and intervallic design arising from the contrapuntal interaction between melodic voices.

As Gerard McBurney states: In conversation she is most keen to stress that she cannot accept the idea (a frequent post-serial one) of rhythm or duration as the material of a piece.

... To her, rhythm is nowadays a generating principle as, for instance, the cadence was to tonal composers of the Classical period; it therefore cannot be the surface material of a work.

... [S]he expresses her impatience with Messiaen, whose use of rhythmic modes to generate local imagery, she feels, restricts the effectiveness of rhythm as an underlying formal level of the music.

This numerical layout represents the balanced nature in her music through a sense of cell multiplication between live and non-live substances.

The golden ratio between the sections are always marked by some musical event, and the composer explores her fantasy fully in articulating this moment.

In addition to using number sequences, Kholopova describes Gubaidulina's use of "expression parameters"; these being articulation, melody, rhythm, texture, and composition.

She also cites the writings of Viktor Bobrovski on his research on macrothemes, or central ideas that may occupy larger frames of time, such as entire sections of a piece.

With this scale, pieces such as her Concordanza assume a mosaic form held together by Fibonacci-derived groupings of expression parameters, "modulating" between consonance and dissonance.

Four motives (pitch sets) are utilized throughout the entire sonata, which also constitute the cyclical elements upon which the rhetoric of the piece is constructed.

There are two elements in the primary thematic complex of the first movement: (1) a "swing" theme, characterized by syncopation and dotted rhythms and (2) a chord progression, juxtaposing minor and major seconds over an ostinato pattern in the left hand.

In the recapitulation, the chord progression of the first thematic complex is brought to the higher registers, preparing the coda based on secondary theme cantabile element, which gradually broadens.

[33] In November, to mark the occasion, she was selected as Composer of the Week on the long running show of the same name on BBC Radio 3.